Is time a figment of our imaginations?

[C C]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026...aginations

EXCERPT: . . . Time is elusive in other ways, too. We have no sensory organs for detecting it, nor any dedicated brain areas for tracking it. Our experience of time can vary hugely: minutes drag if we’re bored or uncomfortable; hours race if we’re excited or having fun; we can easily be fooled about how much time has elapsed. And in certain circumstances, our sense of time can even go in circles, break apart or stop altogether.

Take Lara, who suffers from a condition called akinetopsia, in which events no longer progress smoothly but in sudden jumps. When she pours tea, the liquid appears as a frozen column in the air, before suddenly overflowing the cup. One man with psychosis described repeatedly reliving the same half hour. In one classic study of the psychedelic drug mescaline, an intoxicated volunteer ate a spoonful of soup before glancing away from his plate and back down: “It had been in front of me for hundreds of years.”

Rather than being mere mistakes or distortions, these effects reflect something deeper: the role we all play in creating our own time. Because even cosmologists, measuring the universe, don’t find any moving river of time: most believe there’s no physical flow of events beyond our perception, no moment of “happening” or “becoming” in which the future slips into the past. Quantum physicists come up empty-handed, too. The famous double slit experiment shows that a physicist’s choice of how to measure a photon influences what they observe: whether it travels through one slit, like a particle; or through both, like a wave. But there’s a lesser known variant of this experiment, in which the physicist doesn’t decide what measurement they’ll make until the last possible moment.

In this case, their choice, at the point of measurement, apparently influences not just the current status of the particle they find, but the journey it has already completed: even “past” events are unfolding as we look. As the novelist William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

Time, then, is less a universal truth than a feature of how we interact with the world. This insight is reflected in the way some indigenous communities experience time... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The brain itself is the sensory organ for detecting time or the appearance of it. Via antecedent information being stored in memory, it compares that with new information and discerns a difference between the two (interpreting that as change). Each of those cognitive distinctions is an island unto itself, only presenting itself as real. Granted, though, the narrative part of consciousness isn't usually paying attention to each automatic discernment of difference and so the assessment of "temporal passage" can subjectively seem to vary.

One thing about akinetopsia is that it illustrates how -- even if there was an objective flow, where time is speciously treated as if a substance flowing through a structure -- we would not be experiencing that mind-independent rate but instead the brain's retarded representations. There are subatomic events measured in zeptoseconds and "smaller" time units that the brain's milliseconds in duration snapshots of consciousness would extend over and not capture (even if they could peer down unaided to that substrate).

[Magical Realist]

I agree we have a subjective sense of time. It's like the little movie in our brains going on and running everything onward from one thing to the next. But I also believe there is a metaphysical and fundamental flow of everything too--in reality itself. We can't even conceive of the universe without it. Even saying time is all inside our brains already assumes the brain existing in a physical world where time rules all its processes and functions. We can't even conceive of the universe without it. Of events that are occurring. Of cause and effect. Of mathematical and logical sequences. Of the meaning-generating flux of language and thought. I even venture that this cosmic current underlies consciousness itself. Is not experience a kind of happening, only from the perspective of a human being? Are not qualia and sensations changing and fluid metamorphises, never frozen at any instant? We are a microcosm of the vast macrocosm of transpiring events and endless becoming. We experience our subjective past thru our memories but there is also the objective past. We project imaginatively into our subjective future but there is also the objective future. Is not our own subjective present now just a subset of the universal simultaneity and concurrence of all objective events?

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
― Lao Tzu

[Zinjanthropos]

Time is similar to wetness and water. Water being a wetness agent but not wet in itself. Like wetness, time is not a component or property of space but rather an interaction. Time sticks to objects with mass but is not necessarily ‘time’ itself. I just made that up and thought it sounded good à

Experiments show that hydrophobic objects move faster through water than those that experience wetness. Why cant you apply the same principle to massless particles moving thru space? They move faster than those with mass. The mass particles get the experience of being 'timed' from the interaction with space.