Personal & Random & Science 28 Apr 2004 01:05 am
Subjective time
I'm curious about the idea of subjective time, if anyone is familiar with the concept. It's a subject that rather spans three disciplines: physics, philosophy, and psychology. The physics aspect is slightly different from the philosophical and psychological views (which isn't to say that the philosophical and psychological views on the matter are carbon copies of one another), but they're analogous.
First off, a few definitions: proper time is what we think of as chronological time imagine an atomic clock measuring time. Everything is relatively constant: one second is the same as the next. All things exists within chronological time; it governs physical age. Pretty vanilla and standard.
Subjective time, however, is quite a different animal, and a concept which I find rather intriguing. (And it's something that I used to think about when I was younger, though in not quite so well defined terms.*) I was surprised to come across this idea in my readings the other day, and it got me thinking.
The idea of subjective time has its roots as far back as Thomas Aquinas's writings in the 13th century and perhaps further, I would not be surprised if one or more of the Greek philosophers had thoughts on the matter. In any case, Aquinas's three ideas were that of tempus, aevum, and aeternitas. Tempus was defined as a change in relations between physical bodies on earth essentially what we think of as chronological time. Aevum on the other hand, was a more ethereal concept. Aquinas believed that time for "incorporeal" beings (angels or other spiritual beings) was not controlled by matter (as tempus was) but rather, aevum was measured by the change in mental states of these incorporeal beings themselves. Where tempus was the change in the physical world (seasons, the planets and stars moving through the sky, etc), aevum was the change in the states of consciousness within these incorporeal beings. Tempus *became* aevum as sentience escaped the bonds of matter.
Aquinas defined aeternitas as an experience reserved for God, and was defined as experiencing all past, present, and future tempus and aevum events simultaneously. The idea of aeternitas has roots even before Aquinas the Christian philosopher Boethius described it in his book The Consolation of Philosophy as "Eternity therefore is the complete and perfect possession of unlimited life all at once" ("Aeternitas igitur est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio…").
Anyway, I have digressed a little bit. Back to subjective time. There are a few theories of subjective time, but the one I like best is the simplest, and most interesting to me. (It should be noted that all of the various definitions that I have come across all are similar yet subtly different, having ramifications specific to the context in which "subjective time" is being defined.)
Each person thinks things at a different rate. Some people think faster than others. Why this is unimportant to the subject at hand, suffice it to say that this is so.
Suppose we have Person A and Person B. Person A thinks ten times faster than Person B. (This is extreme, I think that the bell curve on the average rate of thought is probably much narrower than 10t, but it's irrelevant for this example.) Essentially, then, Person A has experienced and thought ten times more than Person B has, and thus we can say that Person A is ten times older than Person B. From a physical standpoint, there is no physical difference between thinking ten times as much and experiencing ten times as much.
In subjective time, this means that Person A has lived ten times longer than Person B. This could be so even if Person A is younger chronologically-speaking, than Person B. One could figure out the exact difference between the two easily enough, assuming one had precise measurements of their rate of thought. Again using this example, a six year old could, in theory, be older than a fifty year old in a subjective sense.
It is this subjective age, then, that is most important measure of time from the perspective of cognitive life. Chronological age, in essence, means nothing (but we all knew that). Here then, is a way of actually quantifying this difference.
*When I was littler, I used to think that if you could think fast enough, you could essentially become unbounded by the constraints of time and reality, id est, I could somehow temporarily become someone else, and literally see things through their eyes, in a Being John Malkovich sort of way.
