Time: a perceptual illusion

Credit: Mohamed Mahmoud Hassan.
The past ...
Our perception of time is one of the great testimonies to our faulty sensations and imperfect perception of reality. We all have this perception that we live in the present; that we are aware of what goes on around us, as it happens, in real time. But if you think about it, is this truly the case? Let's start with the easy one. Suppose you're watching a live show on TV. It takes a second or slightly less for the microwave radiation used to transmit the signal to the satellite and resend it to your receiving dish. Then it takes a fraction of a second, albeit very short, for the signal to get converted to an electrical signal that travels down the cables, gets reproduced into a visual signal on your TV screen. So technically, you are watching what DID happen a few seconds in the recording studio, not what is happening at the moment. Look up into the heavens on a clear night sky and open your mouth in awe, for what you're seeing are the stars and galaxies as they were millions, if not billions of years ago. Some of them will have already died by now, but you still see their past!

The present ...
But it goes beyond that. We all know that light has a speed. It takes light sometime to bounce off the objects and to get to your retina. Further, it takes time for the hyper-polarization and depolarization cascade to occur in your retina and the signal to be transmitted along the optic nerve. Even more incredible is the fact that it takes time to decode that signal in your brain before it springs up into your perception. In essence, we are all living in the past. We have no percept of the present what-so-ever! Even as I type these words, I am well aware that my brain has sent the signal to my muscles and my fingers have already pressed the keyboard buttons before I perceived the event.

The future ...
OK what about the future, well surely we can predict that, can we? In a sense and on the gross scale, yes. We can use the laws of physics and extrapolate what happened to what should happen. But even then, we get disappointed. After all, in systems where lots of interactions are present, the tiny fluctuations can affect the whole set of resulting events. This is called the butterfly effect. The name was originally derived from a postulate that a butterfly's wing may cause tiny fluctuations in the air that may be enough (as they propagate and get magnified) to affect the path of a tornado. This makes us require ever-increasing sensitivity in weather prediction apparatuses and makes prediction of the future very difficult.

So there we are, living in the past, not knowing the present and not able to predict the future! Feeling strange? Well, you should because this is going one step further. What is the past? There are various ways of looking at the direction of time. The psychological arrow (how we perceive time) is in the same direction as the thermodynamic arrow. Meaning, we realize time is passing because of an increase in the entropy (degree of disorder) within the universe. After all, when you watch a movie and see broken legs moving on their own and forming a chair you know this is moving backwards because the disorder is decreasing. But let's face it, we know that's not such a good indicator of time don't we? We know time is relative, and that it's a mere 4th dimension!!

So what is time after all? And do we have any percept of time or are we simply living in the pseudo-reality that out brains synthesize in order to cope with the world we live in? I'll let you pander on this one for a while...

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