Yet another time about time … Part I: An essay on the phenomenology of physical time

Abstract

This paper presents yet another personal reflection on one the most important concepts in both science and the humanities: time. This elusive notion has been not only bothering philosophers since Plato and Aristotle. It goes throughout human history embracing all analytical and creative (anthropocentric) disciplines. Time has been a central theme in physical and life sciences, philosophy, psychology, music, art and many more. This theme is known with a vast body of knowledge across different theories and categories. What has been explored concerns its nature (rational, irrational, arational), appearances/qualia, degrees, dimensions and scales of conceptualization (internal, external, fractal, discrete, continuous, mechanical, quantum, local, global, etc.). Of particular interest have been parameters of time such as duration ranges, resolutions, modes (present, now, past, future), varieties of tenses (e.g. present perfect, present progressive, etc.) and some intuitive, but also fancy phenomenological characteristics such as "arrow", "stream", "texture", "width", "depth", "density", even "scent". Perhaps the most distinct characteristic of this fundamental concept is the absolute time constituting the flow of consciousness according to Husserl, the reflection of pure (human) nature without having the distinction between exo and endo. This essay is a personal reflection upon time in modern physics and phenomenological philosophy.Keywords: space, time, consciousness, physics, mathematics, philosophy, phenomenology. ___________________________________________________________________ PrologueSpace and time are particularly modalities of human consciousness. Whereas space can be realized through our eyes and limbs, time remains elusive to our minds and still bothers philosophers since antiquity (Dyke & Bardon, 2013). In the beginning of the 20 th century science made a crucial switchover. Time was spatialized 1 . Until then the world was threedimensional. With the Special Relativity Theory (Einstein, 1905;Minkowski, 1909) the concept of time became the fourth dimension 2 and an integral element of the new physical worldview. It caused confusion among many of Einstein's contemporaries, and not only with its relativistic dilation in the well-known equation with the speed of light ť = t (1-(v/c) 2 ) ½ .1 It could be argued that time was spatialized earlier. Though time and space were separate for Newton (something that Einstein challenged), the clock time he assumed was laid out like space and was devoid of the dynamism of Bergsonian durée, (Bergson, 1912;Čapek, 1961). 2 It was Laplace who treated time as just another dimension equivalent to space, and thereby paved the way for the development of relativity theory as it came to be understood (but not as Čapek, following Bergson, understood it).This notion of relativistic time appeared wrong and unnatural, not without good reason, since:• Time is ineffable, eluding science and mathematics: it can only be grasped through intuition and shown indirectly and partia...

Conciliating neuroscience and phenomenology via category theory

“…Simeonov (2015) writes: "... first is the question of how experiences at large could already be latent in time experiences of the individual. Once this has been clarified, the next step should be to identify the nature of an agency for the succeeding abstraction along Mach's line.…”

Integral Biomathics reloaded: 2015

“…"Time is obviously a phenomenon at the interface between (human) mind and the physical world." (Simeonov, 2015). Therefore this is going to be another key theme for the Integral Biomathics programme in future.…”

“…They are phenomenology-based (e.g. Simeonov, 2015;Matsuno, 2015;Hipólito, 2015;Ehresmann & Gomez-Ramirez, 2015;Goranson et al, 2015) and bio/cyber-semiotics-based (Kull, 2015;Brier;Nakajima, 2015).…”

The flow of time in cardiopulmonary bypass

“…This letter to editor presents yet another personal reflection on one of the most important concepts in both science and the humanities: time. 1 The title is inspired by an experiment of Galileo Galilei (1638), entitled the flow of time, where the flow of a conduit is used for time measurement. Time is a dimension of physics related to the essence and existence of everything around us; the complexity of the concept has always been the subject of philosophical and scientific studies and reflections.…”