Time as Imaginary Phenomenon

In today’s world, we are used to many ways of measuring and counting time on a linear scale, to the point that we imagine this measurable, linear time to be a dimension of the universe, similar to those of space; we believe this linear, measurable time to be a fact of nature, demonstrated by science. But this is not a notion of time derived from our experience: processes observed by humans in nature are often cyclical, at various scales, and their definitions are largely incompatible with the mathematical modes of measure inherent to linear time, as we shall see with more examples involving humans and bananas.

The abstraction called “linear time”, useful as it may be as a convention, does not derive from our experience of observing nature, but rather from our experience of measuring certain aspects of it. Like the observation of processes, this activity of measuring them also has practical purposes (more or less precisely predicting the return of cyclical phenomena, for instance, by projecting them on a linear plane¹), but adds, to the characteristics of the human observer mentioned above, the characteristics of the instrument of measure, in defining the objects and their states which can be thus described. This rather reduces the scope of linear time to certain activities where measuring is important; and does not offer, that I can see, good reason to extrapolate its modalities to constituting a factual dimension of the universe.

Instead, after further discussion, I would like to offer some thoughts about linear time being a fiction based on an instrument of measure, and that in analyzing the more general notion of time which arises from our experiences as humans in nature, we may discover that time does not exist outside of specific processes, the most important of which, to us humans, would be our own consciousness.

1. such as the physical ones of a globe on a flat map ↩