Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

The construct of time feels so real. And the fact that we surround ourselves with clocks, learn how to tell time from an early age, and live our lives aligned to precise schedules just reinforces this feeling of realness, and reifies the illusion. Seems like we are in a very literal sense time keeping (or “creating” might be a better word) machines.

At some point I got fascinated by flow experiences and the loss of all sense of time. While I’ve experienced this while coding, improvising music has always been the gateway that fascinated me most. No time to keep; no measures to count; nothing but the next note. There’s something about staying continuously in contact with the present moment that makes the time construct just dissolve.

And all that’s left is this continuously unfolding moment. No time. Just now.

I remember hearing things when I was younger like “time is a construct” and not knowing wtf people meant. Flow states helped the conceptual vs. experiential versions of time make more sense, and it’s pretty fascinating to see more about the neurological basis for the experience of time. It seems to just underscore the fact that time (as we think we know it) is an experience our brain creates for us. Clearly there’s some underlying phenomena that these neurons are representing, but it blows my mind a little to ponder how much we orient our understanding of life and experience around the constructs we’ve created vs. exploring other ways to conceptualize and experience it.

It's also possible that time is real. One thing happens after/causes another. It's possible that when you are in a flow state your brain is just failing to notice the time that is objectively passing in the world around you.

I don’t question that something is happening that we experience as time. But the point was that the ways we commonly experience it tend to instill ideas about what it is that seem not very close to whatever is objectively happening.

I think the point about the flow state is that it’s one of the most reliable ways to disconnect from that common experience, and doing so regularly starts to reduce the primacy of the constructs we’ve built on top of it.

Another way to put this is that the common clock and schedule oriented notion of time is just a complex set of concepts and labels and increasingly granular slicing of ongoing experience into chunks we can use to reason more effectively about other aspects of experience.

It’s extremely useful to be able to make plans with a friend at 3PM next Thursday. 3PM next Thursday doesn’t exist.

Understanding the rate at which phenomena occur helps us develop increasingly useful and accurate world models. To understand what “rate” even means, it’s necessary to build up some concept of time.

What I’m mostly pushing against is the primacy of that construct. The pervasiveness of clocks and schedules to a point that it feels like they rule us. The past and the future tend to feel like places that exist. Time tends to feel like some kind of arrow. We’re always coming from some point in the past or going to some point in the future. A useful tool to help us make sense of our memories, and decide what to do next.

But the role of time in what actually happens at any given moment seems pretty unlike our experience of it, which seems to be something we largely manufacture to make sense of the rest of human experience.

One of the weirdest things Einstein discovered is that time is relative, but cause and effect are absolute.

For example, muons should decay before they hit the ground, but they don't due to time dilation. We see the time dilation when observing the muons, but the muons don't, so you would think that for us, the muons make it to the ground but for the muon it would decay too fast. However, the muons experience length contraction, so they do make it to the ground from their viewpoint as well.

So cause and effect is preserved, even though we would disagree with the muon on the relativistic reason why it is preserved.

Time is relative, sure, but “proper time” isn’t relative.

> For example, muons should decay before they hit the ground, but they don't due to time dilation.

Would you mind expanding on this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon#Muon_sources

Time is a dimension of space. We are falling through time just like the other 3. The only way to know you are falling is to see something that isn't. The tick of a clock draws a boundary in time just like a pen draws a line on a page.

> way to know you are falling is to see something that isn't

What would one of those things be?

Something that isn't falling with us? The night sky.

Wait how do you improvise music without counting measures? Or are you strictly solo and/or freeform?

Solo and freeform on a piano.

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