Time Flow

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Dinesh ^club

Imagine yourself looking at a cascading waterfall or listening to the song of skylark. Physical time is flowing linearly forward, with no letup in the relentless passage from instant to instant. The stimuli that are reaching your sense organs are always changing. Many a new stimulus is over just as soon as it arrives.

But this is not how you experience as at the level of sensation. Rather, the present moment, the “now” of sensation, has a paradoxical dimension of temporal depth. Each instance of sensation is still there for you for the a brief period after you create it, as if it happens for longer than it happens. Thus successive instances are co-present in consciousness. But this is not because the old is lasting into the time territory of the new; it is because each new instance lives on for a little while in its own time. You have co-presence of sensations without simultaneity.

This paradoxical status of time in the experience of sensation has been remarked on since the dawn of philosophy. Aristotle, in his book “Of the Senses” struggled -- as we still do -- to describe it. Here is a modern commentary on what Aristotle meant to say: “The undivided ‘now’ of sensation must rest upon a duration with which it does not altogether coincide; the present moment must concela, within itself, the passing of another, immeasurable by its own standard…. It is another time; to the degree to which time cannot admit of varieties of itself, it may well be something other than any time at all” ~Page 60

4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

4 years ago.

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