Subjective Matters

We’re taught early on, in school and culture, to think of time as a dimension — height, width, breadth, and time. The 4th dimension of time. Post-Einstein science has brought us a world view where time and space are an inherent part of the same stuff — spacetime. Move through time, move through space.

We’re excellent at moving through 3D space. Sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing ensure that we can navigate and probe 3D space as experts. Five senses, each with an easily identifiable and corresponding body part no less, all devoted to probing a 3D space. But with five senses devoted to probing spatial dimensions, have we given any thought to whether we’re equipped with at least one “sense” to probe time?

Actually, time as a concept has had a long journey in our culture. Only in the last 100 years have we put it on the same unified playing field as the other 3 dimensions we’ve become so familiar with. This unified view is actually a big deal conceptually — it means that time is less “mysterious” and more knowable than we previous thought. The fact that a unified spacetime is such a relatively new concept, coupled with the fact that we don’t have a nose-for-time sitting somewhere on our face with most of our other spatial senses, makes it difficult to start thinking about time in anywhere but academic circles.

But what if we did, now, start thinking about time differently? If physics so easily and verifiably integrates it with space, maybe we should start doing the same with our day-to-day concept of it. What if we started thinking about time as something that can be “sensed”? Sensed, probed, investigated, and explored just like the five senses do so well with the 3 spatial dimensions.

Taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight help us to operate in the physical world by simultaneously enriching and limiting our awareness of it. They enrich by adding to the information we have available to us about the physical world. They limit by being selective about just what information is available. For example, our 5 physical senses are only keyed to a small range of what we know physically exists — our eyes only detect a narrow window of actual lightwaves, our noses are certainly not as keen on the full scope of smells that a dog’s nose is, and so on.

Perhaps the experience of time is similar, and it features a corresponding sense. Just as we probe a specific spectrum of lightwaves with our eyes, what if we can probe time in an analogous way? Just as we can conceive of a larger spectrum of light, yet only naturally perceive a subset of that spectrum, perhaps we can’t ultimately sense time to the full degree that we can conceive of time, but to a degree nonetheless. As our physical senses provide information about a temporal, time based, world (first 3 dimensions). Our time sense in turn provides us with information about a non-temporal world, outside of time (4th dimension).

If we possess both temporal faculties and non-temporal faculties, why are the temporal faculties so exaggerated and obvious? Simply, we’re so excellent and conditioned to think in terms of temporal activities and physical senses, that our non-temporal "time sense" is atrophied. We’re not sure how to access it, and we’re not sure when we’re accessing it. Like other faculties, some of us are better at it than others by default.

We don’t feel “stuck” in our 3D space. We’re free to look through it, receive sounds from across the room, take its temperature, and even consume it. But we feel stuck in time, despite its unity with space. If we could collectively start thinking about our total being in terms of both types of faculties on day-to-day basis, we may be able to start exploring, considering, and hopefully experiencing this time sense as a more normal part of our experience.