by SEG

Created on: July 19, 2008   Last Updated: January 02, 2011

  All of our concepts and experiences in life, including time, are relative and yet still ‘real’.

 And while space-time banishes temporal time from its formulas, such theoretical circumstances do not banish the reality of time from our experiences because the space-time of physics and our proper earth-time of experiences are not mutually exclusive- both are real.

Yet there is still a lot of confusion about ‘time’ today and this misunderstanding can be traced back to the early nineteenth century and Einstein’s Theories of Relativity.

In 1922, French newspaper headlines fairly shouted out “Time does not exist, says Einstein”.  (Thibault Damour, 2006)

But Einstein did not say time ‘does not exist’ ; roughly speaking what he said was that we cannot ascribe an ‘objective time’ to the physical universe, that there is no ‘absolute time’ in the Newtonian sense, which up to then had been the accepted view.

Einstein’s full thoughts about time can be seen in a response he made regarding an eminent philosophers’ confusion about those changing notions of time when he did say:

“… the philosopher’s time, I believe, is both a psychological time and a physical time; on the other hand physical time could derive from the time of consciousness” (Thibault Damour, 2006)

In understanding time consider this: while there is no scientific ‘universal’ or ‘objective time’ that is absolutely ‘real’ and applicable in all places of the universe simultaneously, time is still ‘real’ and indispensable because our awareness cannot functionally arise and proceed without our ‘psychological time’ to begin with: our consciousness is dependent upon time.

Psychological time is produced initially by our sensory receptive fields where the intensities, locations and durations of stimuli from our environment are encoded into charged pulses; streaming toward the brain at speeds that can reach hundreds of miles per hour, 11,000,000 bits of pulsing, electrically charged sensory data flood into our central nervous system every second producing the framework of our awareness of reality.

This data is not a ‘stream’ of uninterrupted information like a video or a direct ‘window’ into reality, but is parallel processed in the brain.   Different objects of a visual scene and different aspects

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