Hacker News Reader

Comment by sctb | Hacker News Reader

You could certainly argue that we do not. Perceptions are not instantaneous, and if they can be said to "take time" then they cannot have time as their object of perception directly. And even if they "take time", perceptions are ending simultaneously as they are beginning. Being aware of the passage of time does not require perception, as anyone can report when they have an understanding of how long they slept as soon as they wake. Not sure how all that relates to bees, though.

Anyway, no abstract musing about time is complete without a word from Dōgen: "You may suppose that time is only passing away, and not understand that time never arrives."

View on HN

We seem to perceive time indirectly. Examples of how include our feelings, seeing changes in environment with temporal associations, and even counting the seconds that we generate. We are perceiving the passage of time in these cases as observed change in the perceptible state of the universe.

If time itself is change, then we are directly observing it. If time is something else, and it causes change, then we can’t observe it but can observe the effects. We’ll probably perceive it similarly either way.

> We seem to perceive time indirectly

From all indications, time is an emergent property of causality. And we directly perceive causality.

This is totally anecdotal, but I suspect this is a skill that varies across the population. A buddy in high school was uncannily accurate when guessing the time without access to a watch or clock. His error bar would increase with the amount of time past between "experiments", but was never more than ~5 minutes out, at a three or four hour interval. Inside an hour he was always +/- 1 minute. He thought it was unremarkable, and that we were weirdos for always quizzing him about the time.

Feinman writes somewhere about training himself to accurately perceive a minute, with some success.

I'm curious whether there are any human studies about this.

I wonder if that idea is compatible with something like caesium standard time. Is causality at work in the frequency of atomic resonance? (Separately, I would be inclined to disagree that we directly perceive causality.)

If like to hear the argument then since it’s trivial to know how much time has passed if you sit down and wait. You know the difference between 1 min and 10 min and 30 min and 60 min.

And on high doses of certain psychedelics you can experience what it’s like to lose that.

You bring up people knowing how much time passed while they slept but I don’t think that’s true. Without cues like lighting and restfulness I don’t think we do know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com