5 ms·
We seem to perceive time indirectly. Examples of how include our feelings, seeing changes in environment with temporal associations, and even counting the secon
by nickpsecurity 3y ago
We seem to perceive time indirectly. Examples of how include our feelings, seeing changes in environment with temporal associations, and even counting the seconds that we generate. We are perceiving the passage of time in these cases as observed change in the perceptible state of the universe.
If time itself is change, then we are directly observing it. If time is something else, and it causes change, then we can’t observe it but can observe the effects. We’ll probably perceive it similarly either way.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> We seem to perceive time indirectly From all indications, time is an emergent property of causality. And we directly perceive causality.
- eszed 3y agoThis is totally anecdotal, but I suspect this is a skill that varies across the population. A buddy in high school was uncannily accurate when guessing the time without access to a watch or clock. His error bar would increase with the amount of time past between "experiments", but was never more than ~5 minutes out, at a three or four hour interval. Inside an hour he was always +/- 1 minute. He thought it was unremarkable, and that we were weirdos for always quizzing him about the time. Feinman writes somewhere about training himself to accurately perceive a minute, with some success. I'm curious whether there are any human studies about this.
- sctb 3y agoI wonder if that idea is compatible with something like caesium standard time. Is causality at work in the frequency of atomic resonance? (Separately, I would be inclined to disagree that we directly perceive causality.)