I am Suspicious of Time

I feel suspicious about the existence of time.

One can observe time only if there is movement. Think about it, if nothing moves… You are looking out to the street and no one moves, no bird flies, no cloud changes its location, no voice travels through the air… Nothing happens, as if you are looking at a picture taken a little while ago. You keep looking at that image right in front of your eyes, nothing has changed for the last 10 minutes. If you wait 10 more days nothing will change. You can’t see time in that image. You can’t find time in a picture. Time doesn’t seem to exist when nothing moves.

Think about your thinking. It is actually brain cells communicating with each other through an electrochemical process. That is a movement between brain cells. Going back to our still street, if we are talking about complete stillness, then there shouldn’t be any brain activity, which also dictates there shouldn’t be any cell activity. That makes me think if time doesn’t exist, there wouldn’t be life.

Lets think about how we think a little bit more. Now, think about two numbers. The only thing that matters with this exercise is, you shouldn’t be thinking about anything in between picking these two numbers. Ok, you have two numbers. Think about yourself, picking the last number first, just the opposite of how it actually happened. Think about it. Does it really matter which you picked first?

Thinking is a physical activity in brain. If nothing happens between two physical activities then does the order they actually happen matter? Does it matter if I picked 5 first and then 8? It does not. If you wait long enough you will find that you remember two numbers you picked but forget the order you picked them.

We obviously order events as they impact us. If we observe three events where event A affects B which then affects C, we say A happened first. And it all happens in our brains. So it is not really what is happening around but it is what we experience in our brains. It is like seeing few shadows and guessing which object is the biggest using shadows as clue.

Think about a movie film. While watching the movie things happen in a sequence. You can tell the beginning of the movie and the end. That is because a movie is shoot in a way humans can understand. Imagine the picture frames in that movie. 24-30 of them per second. Imagine you are looking at the pictures, imagine they are in random order. Millions of images in random order that your brain can’t make any order. Imagine you are watching the movie in that seemingly random order, and movie ends. Everything happened, every word is said. Just nothing in particular order. Where is time? That man died a year before he saved the girl?

Time is maybe us ordering events. There must be a reason in all, time, after all a good tool to find the reason.