by SEG

Created on: July 31, 2009   Last Updated: January 14, 2012

Is our sometimes elusive experience of Time a simple illusion as some suggest or is the subject just more complex than we might realize at first?

Because while “Time” is not something we can grasp in our hands and rotate for simple inspection, which is to say it is an abstract and intricate quality of the World around us, our awareness is itself an intricate cognitive process that requires exquisite timing to produce; this identifies Time as an imperative operational function of Human consciousness and surely no illusion.

And as the complexities of our concepts of Time have grown considerably during our thousands of years of philosophical and scientific expansions, it would be helpful to take into consideration the distinct differences between our human perceptual experiences and scientific theories when attempting to understand Time.

 
 Because the subject of “Time” in combination with “perception” is limited to our temporal experiences and excludes other scientific concepts such as space-time.   By his own explanation even the brilliant mind of Stephen Hawking (1990), the father of the ‘Arrow of Time’, cannot “visualize”, which is to say place in Human perceptual experience, theoretical space-time.

So we need to examine our perceptions (and illusions) in their proper category because our awareness, our ‘temporal experience’ is difficult enough to understand without confusing the matter with an unneeded admixture of parallel scientific theories.

And Illusions, which are defined as perceptual miss-understandings or miss-interpretations [1], can create even more confusion when dealing with the complex concept of time if we don’t understand the inherent complexity of our perceptual relationship with our environment to begin with; of the abstract intricacy between the perceiver and the perceived.  

This relationship can be viewed philosophically as a process of ‘transcendence’ [2], the World’s physical objects as they are processed and perceived in our Mind’s Abstract-forms, with a traditional conceptual division of roughly ‘Materialism’ and ‘Idealism’.

And it’s not important when exploring our ‘perceptual illusions’ whether we lean toward ‘Materialism’ [3] while defining time as indigenous to the physical World around us, or toward Albert Einstein’s philosophy of

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