Existence of Time for a Banana

Process of the banana: growth and decay.

I don’t know that a banana has consciousness. I only know that there is a substance, a particular arrangement of molecules, which I recognize as yellow and phallic in shape, and call “banana” (in English, and some other languages).

This banana exists as a process of growth and decay. The object “banana” and the states which compose its existence in time are defined by a human observer; nonetheless, there is good reason to believe that unobserved bananas behave similarly in the wild: they grow, usually on a banana tree, ripen, are eaten and/or decay.

Without needing to assign consciousness to our banana, we can say that it exists as a process, a succession of ordered states, from which we may derive a notion of “banana time”, or “time for the banana”, bounded by its lifecycle and related to other bananas, to the longer cycle of the banana tree, and related natural cycles as we are able to observe.

This does not mean “time to the banana”: just for fun adopting a banana’s point of view, time may not appear in itself. There is a continuous process, ever present, of being something that changes. To conceive some sort of time, one needs memory, to compare one’s present state with a former one, and skills of comparison and calculation, to judge let’s say by the cycles of sunlight how one’s changes are proceeding. In my short time as a banana, I have not felt the need for such complicated matters, rather enjoying the sunlight from my elevated position on a tree, the tightness of my skin on my growing, fleshy bulge.

Interaction with human processes

A banana can enter the processes of one or more human beings, based on interactions that these intend to have with it. Humans cultivate bananas, grow them to sell them to be transported and eaten or transformed in banana-derived products that are then eaten or otherwise consumed. The banana becomes situated in a time defined by these processes, which are human activities, bounded by their own characteristics, external to the banana itself.

It so happens that human activities tend to exist at a scale which is compatible with the lifecycle of bananas: “human time” and “banana time” can easily be correlated, even giving the impression that they both exist within a larger time which is just “time”. We shall keep this question aside for now.

Interaction with bacteria

Typical bacteria have a lifespan of 12 minutes, which, among many possible fates, they very well may spend entirely on the peel of a banana. Imagining one such bacterium (singular), existing as its own process, its own succession of ordered states from which we derive a notion of “bacterium time”, it may not relate to the banana¹ as partaking in time. The “banana for the bacterium” entity is likely to seem eternal, fixed and unchanging, a monolithic background to all relevant activity.

Although it may be more relevant to consider bacteria at the scale of a “colony”, which is a visible mass of them grown from a single cell. The time scale of a colony would be more compatible with that of a banana, and its processes potentially more relevant.

Having quickly reached a limit in my ability to think about bacteria, let me reveal my hand: I meant to consider an object, existing in relation to a banana, whose time-defining process would be so short (in banana time) that it would make the banana seem “eternal”, a bit like the universe seemed to humans before we started finding ways to measure it.

For a process A (lifecycle of a banana) to be relevant to a process B (lifecycle of a bacterium), there would need to be a change of states in process A (from A1 to A2, or A23.5 to A23.6) that would somehow impact a change of states in process B. For instance: the young banana having ripened, a new nutrient becomes available to the bacterium (the definition of states depends on the observer: here, a change in the banana that is relevant to the bacterium).

If all of process B happens within a state of process A which cannot be distinguished by B from another state of process A, then with regard to process B, A is not a process but a constant. If for the bacterium, within its lifecycle, the banana does not change, then it does not exist in time: it is eternal in bacterium time.

Interaction with quasar

• For an entity situated 30 billion light-years from Earth, consisting as far as we can tell in a mass equivalent to billions of our Sun, and which, as it keeps increasing at a rate far surpassing the scale of our solar system (“swallowing” thousands of suns every second), emits a rather powerful electromagnetic radiation, our little banana may barely register as existing. Even if we consider the banana to be included, as the tiniest of minuscule fractions, in the mass and energy interactions of that entity with its surroundings, I am willing to hypothesize that the time processes relevant to the banana, any and all of them, are not relevant to the quasar. No change that happens in a time relevant to the banana (its own process or those others in which it is involved) seems likely to impact a change of states in the quasar.
  • Granted, a quasar is not directly observable by humans, and is “perceived” only through very specific measurements and calculations, which lay far beyond the scope of this train of thought (and of my own knowledge). A sun may have sufficed, as a projection of an object, existing as its own process, to which banana time would not be relevant.
    • Relevance similarly defined as a change of states in one process impacting a change of state in another process.
• A banana would seem eternal to the bacterium, inexistent in time to the quasar (a bit like a speck of dust is not a moment in time to us).
  • Derived from a daydream, this discourse on banana time intended to show, from the point of view of time as processes, how the process of one object (banana!) could be insignificant to the processes of other objects: unrelatable for reasons of scale, excessively small or large in comparison. This would mean that these objects do not, cannot exist in time together. What time is to each of them is not mutually compatible.
• This would restrict time to being an emergent phenomenon for internal observers, absent for (hypothetical) external observers.
  • Yet my argument is itself limited by the choice of “extremely small” and “extremely large” comparison points: in doing so, I adopted a [“time is space” metaphor] in order to visualize the incompatibility of internal notions of time based on processes. This may be helpful as a transitory, intellectual tool, but:
    • it also restricts drastically the types of incompatibility that may be imagined (besides scale, there could be many ways for two objects of being irrelevant to each other’s processes?),
    • and uses a visual, thereby implicitly linear, continuum in which these processes “exist”, and possess “scale” relative to each other. This presupposes (unsurprisingly, since I am a human with certain inherited thinking habits) the notion of a linear time as “a factual dimension of the universe” which I was precisely attempting to avoid by focusing on processes and how time “arises” from them.
      • (and introduces a distinction between “eternal” for “irrelevant by larger size” and “inexistent” for “irrelevant by smaller size” which may not matter: we could say that anything irrelevant to a process is “outside of time” for this process, regardless of how it is irrelevant; for instance if you ask what my time was at the last New York City marathon, which I didn’t run)
  • Nonetheless, parts of these speculative examples may begin to suggest — and my failure to escape traditional projections indicate continued difficulties — what is this idea of time as an abstraction of observed processes, and what it implies if we can consolidate it.
• You may now eat the banana.

1. in whichever way it relates to the banana, about which I don’t know much: bacteria, despite being made of only once cell, display an impressively vast range of behaviors ↩