Comprehending Time

by CS Wagner

Comprehending time is difficult for humans because our minds are not designed to do so. In fact, it wasn't very many generations ago that humans were unable to comprehend the past and the future. It is actually easy to pinpoint when that simple comprehension developed - when humans began to speak. Language is designed to place ideas, actions, and commands in time. Without a comprehension of time, everything is in the present. If you want something, you take it. If you don't want something, you throw it away. If you want someone to do something, you force them to do it. Time has given us the need to explain that some things happened in the past and other things are planned for the future.

The human understanding of time was very simple for many generations. Then, the theory of relativity messed everything up. It turns out that time is just a dimension. What is a dimension? Width, depth, and height are the three dimensions we are used to. Each dimension is linear. You can move side to side in the width dimension. You can move forward and back in the depth dimension. You can move up and down in the height dimension. Time is the same. You can theoretically move into the future and into the past in the time dimension. However, humans are stuck moving into the future at a rather constant rate.

With an understanding that time is most likely linear (like the other dimensions we know), you can model time easily. Just draw a straight line on a sheet of paper. One end is the beginning of time. The other end is the end of time. We are somewhere on that line, moving toward the end of time. It is very easy to comprehend at this point. It gets much harder as we try to model what we look like on that line.

Things look different when you look at them through different dimensions. Imagine a cylinder (go get a toilet paper tube if it is too hard to imagine). In three dimensions, it is a tube. Look at directly from the side and close one eye (removing the dimension of depth). You can get it lined up just right so that it looks like a rectangle and not a tube. If you look at it from one end with one eye closed, it looks like a circle. By removing just one dimension, the shape of the cylinder changes easily from a rectangle to a circle. If this is too hard to comprehend, as it is for most people, work on it some more. Look at other things with one eye closed and see how appear to change shape as you rotate them. Simple objects work best because it is easier to trick your brain into seeing simple shapes.

Now, reverse it. Imagine that you live in a two-dimensional world. There is some object that you see every day that changes shape from a circle to a rectangle. Nobody ever questions why it does this. It is just a circlish-rectangly thing. Unless you were magically given the ability to see things in a third dimension, you would never know it was actually a three-dimensional cylinder. Look around your room and imagine seeing everything you have in a two dimensional world.

OK. I know what you are asking right about now... What does this have to do with time? We view the world in three dimensions. Time is a fourth dimension. What do we look like in four dimensions? I don't know. It is like asking the two-dimensional man what the circle/rectangle thing looks like in three dimensions. We can only make guesses at it based on seeing how three-dimensional shapes are represented in two dimensions. Of course, those guesses could be completely wrong.

I feel that we exist in the fourth dimension as either a distinct being or as a long stringy sort of thing. Either one works fine. There is no reason to assume one is better than the other. I just usually explain the distinct being one first because it is easier to comprehend.

As a distinct being in time, you are like a car driving down the highway. You exist in one point in time. That point you exist in keeps traveling from the past to the future. This is easy to see, but there are some side-effects to this that you may not want to think about.

Using the "car on the highway" example is fine if you don't mind imagining every person on Earth to be at the same point on the highway. It must have a hell of a lot of lanes. Regardless, everyone you know is traveling at pretty much the same speed, in the same direction, from the same point in time. So, what is out there in front of us in the future? What is behind us in the past? We have no contact with what is in front of us. We have no contact with those currently in the past.

Keep in mind that our recordings of the past are just recordings in the present of events in the past. In our highway view, that event happened miles back. It is like taking a photo of someone else in the car. A few miles later, that photo shows what it looked like, but the person is with you in the present. Recordings of events do not create the past. They simply represent the past as we know it.

So, we move on to time travel. Imagine you are in the big bottleneck of cars traveling along at mile 90. There is a big SUV right next to you.

You suddenly shoot back to mile 20. You look next to you. Do you see the SUV at mile 20? No. Of course not. It is at mile 90, probably near mile 91 by now. You see whatever traffic there is at mile 20 while everything you used to know is at mile 90. There is no reason to assume you'll even see cars. There may be a motorcycle marathon back there that you will jump into. It is important to note that the cars at the location you call the present do not have much affect on whatever exists at other points along the highway.

This allows for the multiple timeline perspective without having multiple lines of time. Each group of cars traveling along the highway is in a different, unrelated timeline.

That, as I stated earlier, is just one view. Another view is that we are line strings stretched along time from the point we were born to the point that we die. This is harder to comprehend because it is hard to relate our complete existence through time to just our current existence in this point in time. However, I have a little real-world model for this too.

Have you ever seen those holiday cookies that come in a long roll? The center of the roll has a pattern (a star, pumpkin, or bunny) that goes all the way through the roll from one end to the other. You cut the roll into thin slices and bake them. Then, each cookie has that pattern cooked into the middle of it. But, if you look closely, you'll see that the cookies are not all identical. The little pattern in the cookie changes slightly from one cookie to the next. Actually, it was a slight change in the long roll that you didn't notice until you cut it into slices.

We may exist as a long cookie roll. Every moment of the present is a slice of our roll. We look similar from one moment to the next because the slices are a continuation of the entire roll.

However, it is easy to have a variation in the pattern change and change so that one end of the roll is completely different than the beginning of the roll. Imagine a cookie roll that has a Christmas tree on one end and Santa on the other. Through the roll, the pattern morphs from one pattern to the other. If you cut it into slices and looked at each one in order, you would see the slow morph. In the same manner, we only see ourselves as a morphing from the immediate past to the immediate future.

In this view of time, time travel is very hard to imagine. How does your long cookie roll stop existing at one point in time and start up again at another point? What if there is already a cookie roll where you try to reappear? What if you accidentally form yourself into a loop? Seeing the physical entities in this model is hard, but the events are easier because it is easy to imagine the changes in each slice are just events that happen in the present. In a sense, we are just the sum of the events that morph us from our start to our end.

There is one more thing to think about in this model: predestination. If we only see ourselves as the morph between the immediate past and immediate future, then there is no reason to assume that someone who can see time from start to end cannot see us from where we start to where we end. It is the same as being able to view an entire cookie roll. That means that the cookie roll that defines us exists from start to end while we only know the present and past. The future exists, but we just can't see it.

Don't confuse predestination with a lack of choice. If you are predestined to do something, it simply means that you will choose to do it. You still have to make the choice. If you choose to do nothing because you think it is all predestined, you made the choice to do nothing. Just look at the future the same way you look at the past. You were free to make all kinds of choices in the past. However, you can easily remember all the choices you made. You are free to make all kinds of choices in the future. If you could see the future, you'd know what choices you are going to make.

As such, the future is like the past just as the road behind you is similar to the road in front of you. It isn't identical, but it is similar. So, if you comprehend the past, you should be able to comprehend the future.