People often have crazy ideas about time.

They may think time controls their lives.

Or the past determines everything that is happening to them today.

Maybe time is a dimension and people can travel to the past and change reality.

In this article, I will explain why people become confused about time.

Then I provide a simple but useful definition of what time is.

After you understand what time is, confusion will disappear and you can think logically to improve your life.

Can you put time in a bottle?

You can’t hold five minutes in your hand. You can’t put five minutes in a bottle. Nor can you send a gift of five minutes to a friend.

Five minutes doesn’t have a location, shape, or weight.

Time doesn’t have a color, taste, or sound. You can’t sense five minutes as an object.

This thing called time seems to lack physical properties.

Maybe clocks can help us feel the physical realities of time.

Does a clock show you time?

People look at clocks to see time and how it passes. So, how do you see time in a clock?

When you look at a mechanical clock, you see it’s arms move.

There are clocks that tell time by the movement of water, sand, pendulums, spinning weights, sun shadows, atomic decay, the movement of light and many more.

What you see in all these indicators of time is motion.

The original clock was the Sun moving in the sky. One complete cycle is a day. Then a day is divided into hours, minutes, and seconds.

Any motion or event can mark time. For instance, I could say, “I’ll meet you in the bar when the horse race is over.”

The motions and events of clocks are physically real. You can see, feel, and hear these movements and events.

Movement is physically real.

Time is an abstraction of movement.

You can create mental concepts about time by attaching meanings to any type of movement.

For a practical example, consider your activities between 9 AM and 10 AM. Those activities are real but those time boundaries occur only in your mind. You can’t touch or see the starting time boundary at 9 AM nor the ending boundary at 10 AM.

Mental concepts are mentally real. Your thoughts are mentally real because you can remember, recreate, and use thoughts to take complete control over the physical things in your environment.

Thoughts do have a physically real component which is the electrical and chemical actions in the brain.

But the meanings of thoughts are abstractions, simple summaries of reality.

Most people are confused about what is real and what is not real because they don’t understand that the word “real” has different meanings when used in different contexts.

According to Albert Korzybski, “The main characteristic of these terms consists of the fact that on different levels of orders of abstractions they may have different meanings, with the result that they have no general meaning; for their meanings are determined solely by the given context, which establishes the different orders of abstractions.” (2, page 14)

If time is not a physical object, then is time a dimension?

Can you travel to the past or the future?

Most people have such a strong conviction that time is physically real, they believe the past and future exist physically and you can visit and live there.

But this would have ridiculous consequences as explained next.

If you traveled back in time, you could walk, talk and do everything you could do in your original world. It must be a parallel universe.

Because you could travel back in time to any moment, there must be a parallel universe for each moment in time for the entire life of the Universe.

Since each world must be fully functional and coherent with all the others, all universes would move forward in lock-step as time passed.

Whenever a time traveler alters reality, they would create a new branch of universes. A clone of the time traveler would exist in each new branch. The number of branches and time travelers could increase geometrically.

If one person can travel back in time, then why not two, three, or thousands?

When thousands of time travelers exist in parallel universes and alter history, they would create an explosion of new universes. The number of parallel universes with time travelers would quickly approach infinity.

Then, universes would change so frequently that every universe would deteriorate into random nonsense.

Time travel is much too complex to exist and if it ever occurred, it would self destruct.

Or, do you think there is a single past, present, and future?

Does the past determine the present?

Some people believe the past, present, and future exist as one continuous reality which never changes. This concept is sometimes called the block universe theory/Eternalism, or Determinism.

To understand Determinism, imagine yourself being paralyzed but wide awake. Then as time passes, all your experiences and thoughts are force fed though your mind.

You have no free choice and no free will.

I can’t think of a more frightening nightmare.

But my purpose is not to scare you. So, let’s consider a more likely reality.

Physicists named the beginning of our Universe the Big Bang because it was extremely hot and expanding at an incredibly fast rate. There were no objects, not even atoms or subatomic particles. Even the four fundamental forces of Physics did not exist.

Also, there were no laws of Physics and all the rules were quickly changing. The Universe was forced to find its way into a future. A future that would continue for billions of years.

So the physical universe is not determined by the laws of Physics because laws didn’t exist during the Big Bang.

But how does our Universe find its way? Quantum Mechanics can provide some clues.

Quantum Mechanics says that in every moment of time an infinite number of events happen that are nearly impossible. The article, "Quantum Tunnelling," explains one example. While physicists can calculate the probability of tunnelling, they have no way of knowing exactly when tunnelling will happen.

Another example of things being probable but not predictable is that all subatomic particles can act as waves and when they do, they do not have an exact position but can be anywhere in a probability distribution. (Video about the wave function of objects)

Therefore, the Quantum universe is a cloud of possibilities.

And since the Quantum world has a significant influence on everything, then our Universe was not determined in the past, is not determined now, and is not determined in the future.

But can we know something about the present moment?

Does the present moment exist?

People like to talk about “The present moment.” But I have never found a clear definition of what that is. Most people assume they know what the words mean and that everyone else has exactly the same understanding.

Or they make up a circular definition such as the present is between the past and the future.

How can we understand what the present moment is?

By analyzing it in terms of motion, which is the physical basis of time.

You can see, feel, and hear motion.

In fact, sensing requires motions. Light waves move so we can see. Sound waves move so we can hear. Gases move so we can sense fragrances. Objects move so we can feel force.

Our nervous systems require motion. Chemicals and electrical signals move in our sensory organs and neurons to send data to the brain. Then the brain uses the motion of chemicals and electrical signals to analyze the sensory information.

For you to be conscious and in the present moment, numerous streams of chemicals and electrical signals must merge together. But these low level physical steams can not produce consciousness. Consciousness is a flow of changes on a much higher level of aggregation, summations and derivatives of the low level physical flows.

Consciousness is a continuous flow of changes. Even though you can refer to the present moment or imagine there is such a thing, what you experience is continuous change.

Constant change is all that there is. Nothing else exists.

Furthermore, if all motion slowed down to a stop, everything would collapse into a Black Hole and cease to exist.

The phrase “continuous motions” does not exactly capture the dynamics of reality. You can read the article "The problems with symbolic representations," to find out why words will never accurately describe what is happening.

But at least the words “continuous motion” refer to something physically real and so are closer to reality than mental concepts such as the words “present moment” and “time”.

“May you experience the continuous change of yourself and your environment.”

So, should you never use the concept called time?

How to think logically about time

Time is a measurement of motion. This measurement is done in the minds of humans.

That is why you can’t hold five minutes in your hand, or put five minutes in a bottle.

Humans create mental interpretations about the physical universe. These mental models are abstractions with an accuracy somewhere between zero and one hundred percent. The usefulness of an abstraction depends on its accuracy.

Our ability to create time in our minds makes humans superior to animals. Modeling how our world changes over time is one of our most useful mental tools.

But using models of time can become so automatic that we often forget they are not real. Then we extend the model too far and create crazy ideas like those mentioned in the sections above.

To detect and eliminate crazy concepts about time, you need to be aware of your level of abstraction of reality.

Why you need awareness of abstraction

When humans believe their mental models of time are real physical things, they create crazy concepts such as time travel.

To avoid these problems, Albert Korzybski said you need to be aware of the level of abstraction you are using. In his book, “Science and Sanity,” he explained that the lowest level of abstraction of a real thing is to point to it.

We must show with our hand, by pointing our finger to the object, and by being silent outwardly as well as inwardly, which silence we may indicate by closing our lips with the other hand (2, page 416).

What you see, hear, and feel is an abstraction because you can not sense accurately what is happening around you.

You can point to motion such as the hands of a clock. So motion is the lowest level of abstraction.

Then you can make mental models of motion and call them time. These are higher levels of abstraction.

The concept of the present moment is a higher level of abstraction.

Now for your next step.

Go from crazy to constructive thinking about time

Now you know that time is an mental abstraction of motion.

Time is not a physical reality like objects and motions.

But, now that you know what time is, you can use this mental model appropriately.

You can avoid confusing your levels of abstraction.

You can make long-term plans and consciously manage your plans as flexible but powerful ideas.

You can become an expert at planning and achieving your goals because you understand that these mental constructs are totally under your control.

Now you can achieve your goals faster and easier.

References and Notes

Writing of this article would not be possible without the information in the following publications and others from these authors.

1. HALL, L. MICHAEL. (2018). EXECUTIVE THINKING: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials. Clifton, Co., Neuro-Semantic Publications.

2. Korzybski, Alfred. (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 5th ed., Fort Worth, Tx., Institute of General Semantics, 1994.