Chapter 4: Time
Read Our Reality, What an Experience (1) , What an Experience (2) and Observation and Modes prior to reading this post
Meditations on time
The meditations below will lead us to the idea that our Experience can be as much as half a second to a second or so behind the time in the world around us and that this half second is not simply a delay: that we really are half a second or so behind the times. This "backwards referral in time of the subjective present moment" is a well-known problem in neurophysiology. The phenomenon was first observed by Benjamin Libet et al in a series of papers from 1965 onward that involved direct recordings from the brains of subjects. The following text asks us to listen and observe carefully, to explore the half second time shift for ourselves.
That the subjective present moment is behind the objective present moment in time would be an inevitable consequence of the existence of time extension ( the specious present) because the half second of time-extended Experience can only be accommodated in the objective past, the future being unknown. If we can hear whole words then our subjective present moment is in the past.
Ideas of time
There are two leading ideas of time: Four Dimensionalism and Presentism.
Presentism is the claim that future and past things do not exist.
Four Dimensionalism holds that things exist at all times. It is strongly related to the theory of Relativity and, as is shown in the Appendix, Relativity can be derived from the proposal that the world is four dimensional.
In the Presentist model an instant is the smallest interval that can, in principle, be measured by any clock. All events before or after the current instant do not exist. If present objects exist but past and future objects do not exist then all the objects in the world can exist between the ticks of a clock no matter how fast the ticks occur. Given that the world can be present between any two clock ticks, no matter how rapid, the world is present for no time at all.
Being present for no time at all is a basic proposition of Presentism. All the objects in the universe contain no change while they are present. The Presentist and four dimensional models of time are discussed in more depth at the end of this chapter.
Time in Experience
Listen to a clock tick. Tick it goes at the position of the clock in Experience. Listen to an orchestra, each instrument has sounds that extend into time at their position in Experience. Every part of our Experience extends into time.
We conventionally tend to think that the time in our Experience is like a succession of movie frames:
Our actual Experience is not much like this. Turn on a radio or listen to an orchestra. We hear the firm beat at the start of a bar of music then the whole bar and then that bar is gone and another bar replaces it.
When we listen to music with a good quality stereo system or hear a live orchestra each musician has their own sound emanating at their own position. Each part of our Experience can contain extensions in time such as the bars of tunes occurring at each instrument.
Observations
Time passes in all parts of Experience.
All patches of Experience have independent arrangements in time.
The illustration of musicians on this page uses a line of notes to represent the changes over time but we have to listen to actual sounds to know what they are really like. It is useful to listen to stereo music while reading this section to get a feel for what is actually being described.
Take a moment to listen to a sound. It is out there in Experience. It is at a particular location and passes at that location. Sounds occur in space but they are arranged in time at their position in space. Experience, our model of the world around us, contains both space and time. Whether this space and time in the model is identical to the space and time of the world at large will be assumed at this stage (although we should be aware that what we call "time" in Experience might be things laid out in space or some other direction for arranging things).
When we look around things are out there, in Experience, and are seen simultaneously. Events are distributed in the space of our Experience and also simultaneous at the observation point. Each part of the space of Experience can have a series of sounds distributed in time and also be linked at a point, with time extension being created by the angular separation of events at the point. As discussed in the Appendix, Experience has a geometrical form similar to the four dimensional geometry of the world which includes time.
It is easy to fall into the trap of trying to imagine that time extension occurs like an extension in space however, the time extension "out there", in Experience, does not extend in space but extends in time.
This all sounds very complicated but is actually obvious. Listening to a bird we find that the tweeting is at the position of the bird's beak. Listening to an orchestra the sound of the violin is at the position of the violin. Many things, such as a brief succession of sounds, can be at a single position in our Experience. Many things are at the listening point in our Experience but spread out through time, out there, at their place in the space and time of our Experience. Sounds are extended in time at their position in Experience but project to the listening point which is "now".
As we discovered when exploring "Qualities", every point in our Experience can have many things that are spread out in space and time around it but also at a point.
Observation
Events being arranged "out there" but also linked at a spatial and temporal point is a fundamental property of our Experience.
The observation that each small area in our Experience can contain many things extended in time is important because it confirms that there are at least four independent directions for arranging events.
Two types of "time"?
The observation point is a geometrical phenomenon that marks the place in Experience where events are simultaneous. This is apparent from the way we see spatially extended objects, such as this page, as blocks of colour with all the parts of the block being at the same time. The occurrence of simultaneity is highly suggestive of the involvement of time in the geometry of Experience. If we conjecture that time is the fourth dimension that creates the geometry that allows the observation point this time may not be the same as the apparent time extension of events in the view.
The time extension of a word, at the position of the word in Experience, is arranged in a different direction from any time dimension that might create the observation point. The time extension "out there" is like time in that it contains a succession of events but may not be the same as the time that is a fourth dimension that bridges space. Events "out there" in Experience are arranged along a time-like direction and this is not necessarily time, it may just correlate with time.
Another interpretation is given towards the end of this chapter. It is possible that events are loaded into each instance of “me”. See below.
Events have a direction from past to future
Our sense of the unfolding of time has a direction, we always feel as if we are listening into the future. Take the word "hello", we always hear it as if from the perspective of the "h" occurring first and the "ello" sounds extended into the future.
Were we to have events in our Experience arranged so that they receded into the past the word "hello" would begin at the "o" and, from the perspective of the moment when the "o" happens, the word would be "olleh", extending back in time.
Our Experience contains objects that extend into the apparent future for half a second to a second. If our Experience is actually extended in time then we do indeed have events stretching into the future in Experience. However, the future in our Experience extends no further than the present of the world outside our Experience. What we consider to be the present instant is in the past of the objective world outside our model of it, as was mentioned in the introductory "Meditations on Time" above.
To recap, sounds usually emanate from definite positions in our Experience such as a creaking door or clicking clock, and extend briefly into the apparent future at those positions.
Observation
Events in Experience are arranged in time and extend from the past to the future.
If things in our observation can be laid out in time in a similar way to how they are laid out in space then time exists like space as a direction for arranging events. Both space and time are defined by existing arrangements of things.
Before going any further we need a word for a time extended content in our Experience. We need a term that applies to a sound that extends in time, to a bar of a tune or the time extended motion of an arm etc. We shall call these time extended forms "splashes". When I have a sound in my Experience it is like a splash of events stretching into the future. The splashes are sequences across what we call time at the position in Experience of the violin, guitar, mouth, arm etc. that makes the sound or other sensation.
How are sounds ordered in Experience?
How exactly are sounds ordered in our Experience? To maintain their immediate ordering the notes played on a violin would need to stretch into the future. Hearing sounds laid out into the future leaves the listening point well in the past of the latest sound (perhaps half a second or more).
Imagine a word such as "got". We hear the whole word starting at the g and ending at the t. Although the word passes with time we never hear the word as "got" then "ot" then "t". We hear the whole word across time then it is gone. The listening point never gets to the t and the word never becomes "tog" such as it might if we heard it backwards in time. It is also as if we seem to jump from one word or bar of music to the next.
The sudden replacement of one sound splash by another is most obvious when we hear speech. Each word splashes into Experience and is replaced by the next.
Our Experience is loaded in "packets" or "buckets". Visual flashes have very short packets and can have a short extension in time. We cannot have a faster rate of seeing flashes than we can create packets and this is the origin of "flicker fusion" - where rapidly repeating flashes of light appear to become continuous. Each visual packet forms a splash.
Visual splashes should not be confused with other phenomena such as the persistence of vision. If we stretch out an arm and move a finger rapidly against a white background several effects can be seen as we focus on the background. Have a go, stare at a white wall with one eye and move your finger rapidly across your field of view. Most obviously you will see the vague form of the pink finger persisting along the path of the movement and a faint, dark afterimage following it. Persistence is a failure to replace the image of the finger with the background colour and the afterimage is an adjustment of the brain to the passing of stimulation. Both persistence and afterimages are the extension of the leading image of the finger in space, not in time. Neither persistence nor afterimages are signs of time extension in the leading image of the finger although each of the phenomena are extended in time themselves.
Auditory perception has a similar phenomenon to visual perception in which separate clicks fuse into tones if the clicks are presented sufficiently rapidly. This auditory fusion suggests that, like visual data, sounds occur in short packets. In the case of sound the packets are joined to form a much longer splash. Vision does not seem to link the packets into longer units.
Are we are at least half a second in the past?
The present moment in our Experience is always slightly behind the present moment on clocks outside Experience because it takes time for the electrical signals from our eyes and ears to be combined into visual and auditory images. What we view is slightly in the past because it is delayed in getting from its source to us. However, it was suggested above that what we consider to be "now" can be a half second or more behind the events at our senses. This would be a very long time for a simple transmission delay. There is another possibility, our observation point could truly be half a second or more in the past relative to events that are occurring outside our Experience, in the objective present.
Although our Experience definitely has transmission delays is there any evidence that it is truly in the past compared with external clocks and not just delayed?
We can observe how our Experience is in the past by looking at the beta illusion. In the beta illusion flashing images or lights are joined together by continuous motion:
If two lights are near each other and flashed in succession it appears as if there is one light that is moving back and forth. Cover the right or left side of the image above to discover that the central part of the motion of the blue dot does not contain a moving dot. The moving dot is largely in Experience and not in the world outside our body.
If the flashing lights are two different colours the single, illusory light, appears to have a wash of changing colour at near the midpoint of the flashing bars.
Colour change happens while the bar is in apparent motion (Vertically cover parts of the moving images above to see that nothing is actually moving. The movement that we are seeing is in Experience. Some people only see two bars of different colours.)
This shows that the final colour was available to the brain before the transition in colour was seen at the midpoint. The colour change is "interpolated" - positioned between two known points in both space and time.
It has now been confirmed that the brain models the motion in the beta illusion (see below) and this is powerful, additional evidence that our Experience is a model of the world in our brains.
We can see from the graphic above that our Experience is seriously delayed compared with the world outside our bodies. The model of motion cannot begin to be built until the second flash is received. In the case of a half second interval between flashes our Experience could be delayed by over a half a second. This appears to be a deliberate delay to allow any consequences of the first flash to be registered plus a relatively short transmission delay after the second flash. Once there is a long enough sample of events the brain then models these in space and time.
Observation
The content of our Experience is as much as half a second late.
Of course, as discussed below, we can have reflex responses to events at intervals of less than half a second. However, our brains seem to wait for as much as half a second before computing the model of the world that becomes our Experience.
The beta illusion occurs even when the flashes or images are not repeated. The illusion below needs a bit of work. Move the mouse cursor slowly over the white space below until it is labelled “one shot beta”. Click on the left mouse button.
An image of a falling dot will appear in a fresh browser window. If your browser will not display it right click to save the graphics file to view with a graphics viewer or use another browser.
This suggests that a quarter to half second delay for vision to enter Experience is normal.
The illusions above suggest that there is a delay of about a quarter to a half second before the brain can make a full model of events. However, this might be a simple delay, albeit a long delay. It does not necessarily mean that the subjective present of Experience is at an earlier time than the objective world, but it does mean that the subjective present contains data that is seriously delayed and the fact that we see a motion of the dot strongly suggests a real extension in time.
The beta illusion invokes other qualities apart from simple visual events. It also involves a sense of motion that extends in time for half a second or so. We might expect that our subjective present is aligned with the beginning of the longest time extension associated with the beta illusion. If this were the case the subjective present could be a real half a second behind the objective present.
To determine how far the subjective present can be behind the objective present what is needed is an example of modelling by the brain that involves events in Experience such as sounds which have a longer time extension than visual events.
Consider the filling in of missing sounds in the sound clip of phonemic restoration below.
Sound clip
Firstly notice that the S sound in legiSlatures is accurately interpolated into the word. This accurate interpolation suggests the following sequence of events occurred: most of the word without the s was received, the s was inserted and then the word was submitted to Experience.
Secondly notice how the cough cannot be accurately positioned in time against the word legislatures.
The interpolation of the "s" sound needs most of the word to be received because the word could be "legitimate" "legible" etc. at the instant of the missing "s". This means that the sound waves that are the source of the word "legislatures" have ended when we start to hear the word in our Experience so this Experience is perhaps half a second late compared with the sound waves that correlate with it.
Having replaced the cough in the clip with an "s", the brain must deal with where to put the cough. I hear the cough at roughly the position in time of the "gisla" part of legislatures but cannot pin down its temporal position more precisely. The cough sounds like it is at a slightly different position in space from the word, perhaps due to a second person, even though we know it replaces the "s" in the sound wave data. There is an uncertainty in placing the cough relative to the word "legislatures" of about half a second; as we might expect if sounds happen in splashes that are half a second to one second long.
We hear the parts of the word "legislatures" extended in time. The "isla" part of legislatures is a single splash lasting about half a second.
If the "s" is part of a splash that extends through time and occurs half a second from the end of that splash then it is not just delayed but genuinely a half second or so earlier than the end of the splash (ie: a half second before the "a", in our Experience).
Moving objects in Experience, such as the forms of animals or trees waving in the wind are separate splashes and correspond to the "sprites" used in computer graphics programming. When a moving object is followed with our eyes it becomes a separate entity with a high definition compared with the background view. The object of our gaze has its own time extension.
Splashes
Splashes are fully created before they are submitted to Experience.
Our Experience is at least half a second in time behind the objective present.
It is tempting to seize on the inaccuracies of subjective perception and declare that they prove that we only "believe" that events are occurring through time. However, listening to the sound clip above or seeing a bird fly past, cawing in the wind, it stretches the definition of "belief" to argue that we only believe these things are happening in our Experience even while it is evident that they are currently happening in our Experience.
If Experience does not really exist why make a model that is almost a second late for us to experience it? The best test of whether the brain goes to the trouble of representing illusory motion is now to actually look at the brain. In the past 15 years MRI scanners have advanced to the state where even small areas of cortical activation can be visualised. The beta illusion (Muckli et al 2005, Larsen et al 2006) is indeed accompanied by the filling in of brain activity to represent the "illusory" motion. Do we really only "believe" that Experience exists? If this were the case then why does the brain bother to model "illusory" motion?
(It is interesting that the moving dots in the image above start flickering if you focus away from them; if the dots are at the periphery of vision the movement is not modelled).
The three Times
Our Experience is at least half a second behind the time in the world around us. If a clock ticks twice a second then the moment we hear the clock tick the actual clock is already starting the next tick. What we might experience as the present moment is distinctly in the past relative to the actual clock. However, we hear the whole tick of the clock extended in time, out there at the position of the clock in our Experience (in our brain). More than a simple delay is occurring. Our listening point is truly behind the time of the objective world.
It seems there are three present moments. There is the objective present moment as measured by clocks in the world, the present moment of the start of a clock tick in our Experience and the present moment of our observation point.
If objects extended in time exist in our Experience then this would also apply to the brain. What being in the past by, say, half a second means is that some of our Experience resides in the past part of our brain. There are not just delays on the route from sensation to Experience, our Experience is also at an earlier time than our surroundings. Such a time difference between the "now" of our observation and the "now" of the world outside our bodies is inevitable if time exists and experience is extended in time.
How can I be half a second behind the times?
Given that our Experience contains events that are at least half a second behind the actual present moment how can we affect events? Suppose we are playing football, if we aim a kick at the ball half a second late it means missing the ball. We manage to play sports etc. because when we acquire skills we transfer the control of the skill to automatic parts of the brain that have shorter delays. This makes our Experience an observer of our body's skilled actions rather than the performer.
Experience is the end point of the processes that create it. Experience exists and it is in flux. Why is this done? Why is there an observation that is an end point that is at least half a second late relative to the world outside our bodies?
Why brain processes bring together data to make the observation that is our Experience seems to be a mystery. Even if the data in Experience were to lead to an output as an action or a further thought there seems to be no reason why the data should become Experience, after all, we can play football as a skilled activity without using the data currently in Experience to control our actions. It is likely that the creation of Experience itself is the principle objective of the body's actions and the brain's activity rather than controlling a ball on a football field.
Our bodies are there to create us rather than to perform actions. The actions are required to keep our bodies living so they can perform this task. That anyone would believe this were not the case shows how far modern humans have become footballers or workers rather than people.
The splashes of sound in our Experience arrive as fully formed patterns in time. This is possible because the "now" of our observation point can be half a second or more behind the inputs to our senses.
How is a sound in Experience created? It could be laid out part by part over half a second and then connected to the present of the listening point or all at once as a four dimensional structure that extends from the listening point to the place and time of the sound in Experience. Either of these would seem the same in our observation.
The contents of Experience are laid out around the observation point. Just look around you. It is the angular separation of the contents at a point that creates the space of Experience and means the contents are simultaneously present at the observation point and also spread out in space and time out there in Experience.
Are events fixed in time?
If the objective present is in the future why can't we change the future by changing our minds? It might seem like a paradox but the future events that are in our Experience have already happened because our observation point is at least half a second behind the events at our sense organs. However, events that are generated by the brain without external input may not be so heavily constrained, as will be discussed later.
Two ideas of the arrangement of events
There are several possibilities for how events might be arranged in Experience. The two most likely are that the observation point is moving continuously into the future or that it moves in discrete steps of about half a second each.
Both of these ideas must be adjusted to explain how overlapping splashes of events can have different durations and start and end at different times.
The difference in time extension between auditory and visual observations would mean that time extended visual events at the end of an auditory splash would not enter Experience until the word is almost over. Can there be two observation points at different times?
It doesn't feel like there are two observation points. It feels like there is only one observation point with splashes being updated at different rates.
The illustration of a trombone playing "wah" shows how the sound is present in Experience as a single time-extended entity but the time extension of the slide in visual experience is scarcely noticeable as the slide moves during the "wah". The past position of the visual slide is gone within a tenth of a second. The motion of the slide is only present in Experience for a short time but the whole "wah" sound is there throughout its occurrence.
Comparing the time extensions of auditory and visual events is very difficult. The image below is a fairly random succession of coloured squares presented for a quarter of a second each. Try saying the word "tat" while looking at the image:
I cannot reliably tell which colour occurs at the beginning of the word or at its end.
With practice I can make a succession of "t" sounds that synchronise with the colour changes. I can also arrange to say a short word such as "tat" when a particular colour appears and can then, with a little practice, vaguely identify the colour that coincides with the end of the word but then I am only attending to the ending.
What I cannot do is match the whole time extension of the "tat" to the colours that lie along it in time. The alignment of sound sequences with visual sequences over periods of less than a second is unreliable at best. Also notice that if we look for a particular colour, such as light green, it seems to persist longer than it would normally. Our subjective estimates of the relative timing of short events are highly variable.
The time extensions of auditory events are less than a second and usually around 0.5 seconds. When comparing these with visual events that objectively occur more rapidly it is quite possible that only a single visual event is in Experience during the auditory event despite it being objectively possible that five visual events could occur in this time. The time extensions of visual and auditory events only crudely overlap at best.
Synchronisation of events in time
Sequences of gentle sounds that are at different positions are very difficult or even impossible to compare. A gentle note on a flute at one place may occur in Experience slightly later or earlier than an objectively simultaneous note on a guitar elsewhere in the room. Drum beats and loud sounds provide a reference point from which other musical sounds gain their location in time.
In the case of music there is almost always a dominant splash of sound in our Experience and the other splashes of sound elsewhere in the space of our Experience tend to start their time extension at the start of the time extension of this dominant sound. It is the genius of music to have formalised this feature of Experience into the structure of notes in a bar. If there is no dominant sound our attention moves from place to place, alighting on the sounds at different places and failing to synchronise them perfectly.
The time extension of sound has a similar extent to the time extension of bodily motion (each splash is about 0.5 sec long). When we dance our time extended bodily position synchronises with the time extension of the music which makes swaying or foot tapping in time to music entirely natural. Compared with sounds the time extension of our visual image is extremely short (perhaps a tenth of a second or less) so vision does not blend well with sound and bodily motion.
How sounds are affected by apparent distance away
The observation point seems as if it is at the centre of a hollow sphere of events, the events being on the inside surface with no events between the observation point and that surface. This allows the click of a clock to extend the same amount of time whether it is apparently distant or near to us. Were a distant clock really distant in Experience the clock would appear to go faster if it were further away because the time between ticks would subtend a smaller angle at the listening point.
The distance of a sound from our bodies is marked by cues such as its intensity and the size of its source in Experience and the duration of the sound by its angular extent in time at the observation point. All splashes of events begin at the same distance in space and time from the observation point.
Moving in time
What do we mean when we say we are moving through time? As McTaggart discovered, you cannot both be moving through time and also be "in" time. To move through time whatever it is that moves cannot be part of the fixed events that lie along the time axis.
The feeling of moving in time is due to a continuous comparison of one splash with the next in such a way that they overlap each other. Splashes at different positions in Experience overlap each other at different times so there is a continuous motion into the future.
We, the observer, feel that we are constant and the splashes of events are impressions on this constant structure. Time passes for us. Our intuition is of being a structure that moves in time. To move in time the structure must be outside time. Furthermore, if time exists, there must be an infinity of these structures all moving forward in time. Why does the structure slide? The sliding consists of events replacingevents. It is a succession of connections.
Our intuition of viewing from a point may answer the problem of how we can have moving in time in our Experience. Our observation point can simultaneously host a succession of events because the succession of events make angles through time at the observation point. However, although this permits a brief period of time to be in our experience there is no reason for the observation point to move. The observation point might connect to events spread over a half second of time but could be eternally fixed. We could be stuck in a bubble of events a half second or so long.
The idea that we are not moving in time is feasible because we only have a half second or so of obvious events in Experience. What we regard as "now" is actually a little bubble of events that extend for a half second or so. We were each a similar bubble five years ago. If time exists then there is a "me" five years ago who also exists.
That there are multiple "me"s, each with a bubble of around a second of time as their Experience who stretch back to my birth is possible but disturbing.
Sleep and unconsciousness
How do we know we are the same person when we awake as when we fell asleep? If we get a bang on the head and become unconscious for a few seconds or minutes what happens to us when there is nothing? Sleep and unconsciousness add weight to the idea that we exist in bubbles. Our memories connect the bubbles. The only content of my Experience that might be a window on to the past is my memories but these could be recreated specially for review rather than providing any direct link back in time.
But could we possibly move in time?
Despite the possibility that we are eternally fixed in bubbles at a particular moment our deep intuition is that we are truly moving into the future. If we are to have any effect on the future something would need to actually move in time.
The existence of time means that there is a "me" at every moment. The existence of time also means that if one of these "mes" moves into the future then all of the "mes" will be moving. This means that movement in time would require the "mes" to form a complete space-time, a Subjective Space Time, that moves relative to the space-time that contains the events in our bodies and the rest of the world (Objective Space Time). Like two loosely connected universes sliding over each other along the time axis.
Now, stop here and take a deep breath. What follows is a “rabbit hole” of speculation based on the two propositions that time exists and we move in time. It is interesting but see the note at the end.
If only one "me" were moving then all other times except the current time in the Objective Space Time would have no "me" in them. So, if time exists AND I can move in time there would need to be an entire space-time of "mes" (a Subjective Space Time) that is moving past the Objective Space-Time. This would allow "mes" to be current wherever my body and brain are in Objective ST.
The Subjective ST would need to contain something or be something that stayed to host the passing patterns. Perhaps space-time itself has a material reality and is not just a way of accounting for arrangements of things.
Notice that if I am "Me2" I will always be "Me2", my bubble of events is at a constant position in Subjective Spacetime but it is continually being loaded with new events from Objective Spacetime. This would explain the intuition of the Presentist who feels that they are a constant with events changing on them. Notice also that this model requires that at some stage between conception and birth there would be the continuous generation of observers.
To recap, one of our deepest intuitions about the world is that we are moving into the future. Arrangements of events in time and space cannot move in time so something outside of time is required to account for our intuition. Furthermore there would need to be an entire set of "Mes" moving outside objective time so that each moment in the world outside my Experience contained a "Me". Without this postulated motion in time every moment of observation would be fixed in its own eternal bubble.
Note: If we could observe other “Mes” or formulate a prediction from the speculation above it would move from speculation to respectable theory.
The timing of time
Why doesn't our Experience happen very slowly or be completed in a flash? The space of our Experience provides a clue to this timing of time because it is arranged as a sphere of events around a point. Events in the space of Experience occupy angles that are projected from the observation point and the angular displacement cannot exceed 360 degrees. We can observe the relative spatial extent of objects by the proportion of the sphere around us that they occupy. In the same way as space is arranged around a viewing point time may similarly be arranged around the listening/observation point.
This arrangement of events around an observation point also seems to apply to events of a long duration. When we are forty years old time passes much faster than when we were ten. When we are eighty time goes twice as fast as when we were forty. This sense of time illustrates how we have a lifetime and pack ever more events into it. When we are ten another year is a tenth of a lifetime long but when we are forty it is a fortieth of a lifetime so a year seems four times faster when we are forty than when we are ten. A lifetime is the curve of time extension around our observation point that corresponds to the quality that seems to be time extended as long as our total Experience.
How this might be done is obscure, perhaps we maintain models of our lifetime and compare these with models of the duration of recent events or perhaps we do indeed have access to a crude model of our entire lifetime. If the models are shorter than our lifetime then this would make each bubble longer.
A second passing in one type of quality can be compared with a second passing in another quality. The way that the different time extensions of the contents of Experience are contained within each other, such as a crow's wings flapping twice during a single caw, explains why there is a rate of time passing as "seconds per second".
However, none of this explains how the observation point might move.
Continuity and Consciousness
It is because we have Experience with events arranged in time that the relationships of events are there as well as the events themselves. This immediacy of events and relations is what is intuitively meant by the word "consciousness". Being conscious requires being extended in time and being extended in time is much of the nature of consciousness. That the splashes in Experience change at intervals and that a feeling containing a "changing splash" is also present constitute consciousness. What we consider to be our conscious being is a unique path through the bubbles of Experience.
Next: Chapter 5: Other Contents of Experience
The following addendum is a philosophical reflection on the two theories of time. It can be skipped if your interest is solely in what observably happens.
More about Presentism
Without extra hypotheses Presentism is rather sterile. At each instant there is no way to observe the current pattern of the world because it is frozen. Even records of events cannot be observed now. Any Presentist observer would need to possess special properties due to added hypotheses. Presentism might possibly be extended by proposing that change occurs as “steps” or that objects persist for a tiny period of time (although then we are assuming that time exists). The “steps” argument might seem attractive in the context of quantum theory but it is important to note that QM deals in underlying continuous distributions so that there would effectively be a hidden (unobserved) equivalent of a time dimension containing all the possible intermediate possibilities of a “step” (also see footnote at the end of this section).
The biggest problem for Presentism is the proposal that all events in the universe are simultaneous. Presentism involves the idea that if the universe could be filled with extremely accurate clocks with (nearly) infinitely fast, regular processes these would always read the same number of counts everywhere. This has been shown to be untrue both experimentally (see for instance Hafele-Keating Experiment) and theoretically (Relativity). When highly accurate clocks travel at different velocities they read slightly different times. Whether or not we are convinced by Relativity the fact is that highly accurate clocks do not stay synchronised if we move them. All events in the universe are not simultaneous. Your “objective present instant” minutely differs from mine the moment we move.
The problem of simultaneity means that if an instant is less than a picosecond long and the atoms and molecules of a body are in motion the various parts of the body will disappear because what is "present" for each part varies with velocity (This is a part of the Lorentz Transformation that has been verified by experiment See Appendix).
Although most considerations of time focus on how change occurs and how time passes, the real mystery for us is how things can be observed simultaneously. In a Four Dimensional model things might become connected through a point and hence immediately simultaneous.
This brief discussion shows that ideas of time are complex so we should have an open mind and not dismiss observations because they contradict our prejudices. What is time actually like for us? Do things seem to be arranged in a four dimensional geometry or is Experience more like instantaneous transmissions of data? Perhaps we should look.
Note: The reason that time is the poor relation in Quantum Physics is that all of the textbooks contain the conclusion by Pauli that time is a parameter and not an operator. However, Pauli’s conclusion is for a special case, in the real world time is an operator like space (See for instance, Galapon 2002).
Time passing
How do you have the passing of time? Do events wash over you or do you move through events? How do the two theories of time - Presentism and Four Dimensionalism - compare when they are used to describe our experience of time passing?
Suppose Presentism is true and time does not exist as a physical way of arranging events. In Presentism only the instant exists and the world is three dimensional. Change might happen as objects adopt new positions in tiny, instant steps. Knowing that we are moving in time would be knowing change. How might we observe continuous motion? Suppose something changes position. In this hypothetical instantaneous world only the present position of the object is in our experience. The previous position of the object would be entirely gone and there would be no indication that motion had happened. This might be overcome by storing previous positions of the object, but would this be like our experience?
Comparing positions by storing a record of the previous position of an object does not give continuous movement in our observation: it does no more than provide an object and a copy of an object.
Sounds are even more problematical for a 3D world than seeing movement. A varying tone is a continuous comparison of sounds over time. Hearing sound as a pattern in space at an instant is not possible because sounds occur over time. That is the nature of sounds. A sound might be a succession of 3D objects occupying an interval of time but at any instant during the interval there is no sound. If our observation were nothing but instantaneous, present events then no sound would ever be experienced.
An alternative to 3D observation is to accept that time is a real direction for arranging events. This has its own problems because nothing that is in time can move through time. The illustration below shows the path of a blue bead in space but the blue bead has copies of itself at every moment in time. A copy of the bead 3 seconds ago does not move in either time or space, it remains where it occurs. The “movement” of the bead is a four dimensional object.
If time exists then one way that an observer can move from one time to the next is to be outside of the time occupied by events. The observer will then have time as a splashing of events that are extended in time onto itself.
Notice that either of the 3D and 4D models of time passing could work if the observer is extended in time (ie: the observer is four dimensional). In both cases the observer would be a four dimensional entity that can host events that are extended in time yet present at a four dimensional point (see Appendix). Given that a four dimensional world is the current understanding of physics the idea that both the observer and events are four dimensional is preferred. However, we should not entirely discount the possibility that the observer is four dimensional and events outside of observation are three dimensional.
The purpose of the discussion above was to create a model of what time passing is like. What it is like for us. Unfortunately we cannot be clear about time by using graphs on a two dimensional surface. To be clear we need to meditate on music or the feel of our breath in our nose etc. Notice that change can occur at a single, constant place in our Experience. It is not laid out in 3D but is laid out through time. Events splash into our observation and we cannot be sure whether this observation is moving through events or events are moving past our observation.
The model that I prefer is of an observer that is fixed in their own space-time with a bubble of events that are extended in time for about 0.5 to 1 second. The events in the world move past the observer so that the future is continually becoming the current moment. (See footnote)
Footnote
The idea that the observer is outside of the time occupied by events has severe physical restrictions.
The first restriction is that observation cannot make changes to observed events without violating the conservation of energy law unless these changes are very small (within the energy limits of the Uncertainty Principle).
The second restriction is that, if the observer has their own, separate, space and time it must be fixed in this space and time. (The observer has the same limitations on moving in time in its own space-time as an object in the space-time of events).