Abstract
Perception is an intentional action through space in time by which the finite brain explores the infinite world. By acting, the brain thrusts its body into the future spacetime of the world while predicting the sensory consequences. Through perceiving its actions and their results, it remembers its predictions, its actions, and their consequences. To perform these operations the brain, through chaotic dynamics, constructs and uses finite perceptual matrices of spacetime and infers causation. Perceived time differs from world time in ways that are determined by the neural mechanisms of intentionality. In particular, perception of the self in action, through the mechanism of preafference, gives structure and content to the concepts of continuity, contiguity, duration, temporal order, cause, and effect. Perceptual scales are expanded beyond kinesthesia by conversion of time into space, such as by clocks and calendars. Remembered time differs from perceived time in being dependent on awareness, which makes it episodic, fragmentary, and subject to large variations in rates of time lapse in the flow of meanings. The attribution of causal agency to objects and events in the world results from anthropomorphization in accordance with the neural mechanisms of the internal perception of intentional action.
Introduction
What is time? Each of us experiences passage and change, but in a way that is unique, because we see our shared world through eyes and minds that belong to us alone. The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that we can only know our experience of the world and not the world as it is, his "Ding an sich", because, as we would now say, the world is infinitely complex, and we have finite minds. Whatever time may be, it is beyond complete comprehension but not completely beyond comprehension. It comes into our awareness in two ways: as a cycle, and as a line segment.
Circular time has no end. Yet it is finite. We are born without awareness, and we emerge into the theater of consciousness in the rhythm of seconds, hours, days, and years, each following the next and coming full circle with hourly ringing of the bell, nightly prayers, solstices, equinoxes, and one's annual birthday party. We measure the circle of time by the tick marks of actions taken and perceived in repetitive motions: listening to the heart beat, chewing, walking the dog, dancing, clapping, chanting, rowing a boat, watching the sun set, going to sleep, waking to a new day, and to a new year. Cycles are the basis for our ability to predict the future (Freeman, 1995).
The cycles seem endless, yet they are broken, and the thought that breaks them, and sets our awareness on the backward path of nostalgia, is the emergent prediction that each of us will die. Hereby with awareness comes linear time, a line segment, still finite, with a beginning in birth and an ending in death, time the juggernaut that indifferently takes from us all that we have.
Ancient theologians distinguished between worldly time, chronos, and eternal time, kairos, which was thought to crystallize during portentous events such as miracles and divine births. The secular transmogrification of kairos into infinite time came in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, when Descartes invented analytic geometry and used the relation between the real numbers to model time with discrete points on a straight line, marching by rational steps in both directions from the moving moment of now, having no ends, in defiance of God's act of creation and the expected Apocalypse that would consume the world in ice or fire. Once stated, this mathematical form of time serves as a Platonic ideal, but, in itself, it is too simple to be very interesting. Physicists suspect that the time line may actually be a curve, perhaps a circle, that it might flow, not step, that the rates might not be everywhere the same, that the time lines in the universes next door may be skew, and even that time might be a surface instead of a line. However, these cosmological possibilities are not operative on our local scale, where our universal time runs flat out like an arrow. Our finite form of time as we perceive it is continually emerging in our brains as we project our bodies into the future of the world in pursuit of our goals, and intermittently sample it in our memories through awareness.
Commonly we speak of having a sense of timing, of time's passage, as in holding our breath, dancing, speaking, and playing games on shorter time scales, or noting the passing seasons and years on longer scales. These are human scales by direct experience without the microscopes of exceedingly fast electronic and atomic clocks, or the macroscopes of radioactive decay, DNA patterns, and the astronomical red shift that we use to measure time lapses that are too fast or too slow for direct perception. Clearly our windows of perception in the spectrum of temporal rates of change are closely tied to the inertial characteristics of our bodies in motion. We use our measuring devices to convert time lapses into spatial segments in meters and graphs, in order to hold them for our leisurely perusal. An example is the use of slow motion and time-lapse cinematography to expand the range of time scales, making them accessible for perception. These techniques resemble the use of microscopes and telescopes but with a difference with respect to kinesthesia. We can adapt using a micromanipulator to move microscopic objects, and to the controls of a backhoe, crane, or aircraft that amplifies our muscle power to move macroscopic objects, but our abilities to intentionally move more slowly or rapidly in adaptation to non-human time scales are extremely limited.
