40

I suppose I was one of many kids wondering whether a fly saw the world around it move in slow-motion. When you move to swat it, the fly might leisurely take its own time while your thoughts are singular and you are frozen. It flicks a large speck of dust from a wing, takes off lazily into one of the many ways to avoid collision with your hand oh look at that sweaty palm is that a whiff of apple yeah that reminds me Eric still has that bit of aged apple I need to get in on on that hell yeah apple: while your eyelash has only moved a couple of micrometers.
A fly that lived for several days in your time might have lived through quite a bit of more life, that way.

I got a lot of things wrong as a kid, but it seems reasonable that the clockwork of sensorial and cognitive processes differs significantly between species and perhaps even intraspecifically, accounting for more than the systemic shortcuts taken in instinctive response, skipping stages of contemplation. The amount of thoughts-per-second you can spend seems hazy, its quantitative unit has no clear contour. Some days feel “longer” than other days even for yourself, perhaps because your own clock was just running a bit faster.
People who are in love can experience the day either like a long fantastic book, or as a forgettable blink, depending on what the other person does or doesn’t do. Likewise, being “in the creative zone” bends time sideways into the direction where you need it and away from where you don’t want it.

Who’s to say what the limits are to stretching your own concept of time with practice, and becoming more like the fly? Could you live ten lifetimes for the price of one with careful mastery of technique? It is argued at least that meditative training makes your perception of time more accurate, stable, less fluctuate. In a science-fiction book I read on holiday, “La Horde du Contrevent”, a character is able to control this relative flow of time to an absurd degree, by manipulating the way air molecules move kinematically inside his body.

I also remember as a kid taking folks’ advice quite literally that “time moves faster as you grow old”. I knew they usually meant that the age you have determines how long a piece of time feels like; a simple observation, but what if time really did start going faster? What if your brain and senses and everything’s clock slowed down? Perhaps absolute middle-age hit you at 21 or even sooner, that way.
There are adventurous physical ideas that time itself is to be experienced logarithmically and not linearly as the universe ages.

Now that I’m older, I know even less about time than when I was a kid.
Time is plainly weird!
Did you know your head is older than your feet (by a couple of dozen picoseconds), because being higher up, it spent more time in a lower gravitational field? Nothing is ever measured accurately with time intervals, but only in spacetime intervals, mixing up space and time, and things like the aged head pop up when you nitpick about small time differences or when you need to understand how some manifestations work in physics and higher up in chemistry or in exceptional cases in biology.
A large share of the knowledge on physics is redistributed by trivia like this, and I love explaining these things myself, making some impression upon people. It can be kind of annoying for others as well though: while it’s fundamental, it’s rarely really tangible or important in daily life and its facts are often reduced to nothing more than wise cracks.
At least as far as we know, we will hardly ever be impacted by that side of the relativity of time. Well, nobody reading this knows what happens to consciousness upon death and perhaps some elements of modern physics come into play at that moment. I won’t be able to tell you but I think we will meet an age soon where the physical underpinnings of consciousness are more understood — or at least more accurately modeled — than they are currently.

More crucially than this though, is the mystery of the “arrow of time”. Why does time flow, why does it flow in its direction?
Time moves forward, everyone seems to agree, and certainly it has to be because of causality, because how else could A cause B? To age, one needs to accumulate time, right? Just as the mountain has to accumulate sediment, time is the clockwork of the universe when modelled as a computer, deciding the next state from its previous one, either in a deterministic way or in a less fateful fashion.
The further you extract yourself from your own biology in trying to define time like this though, the more muddled this gets, the less “absolute” your statements become, and the more that time becomes a concept that requires time to be described. Which is rarely a good sign, unless time is somehow an axiomatic thing. But there are reasons why time itself is a more emergent thing from lower fundamentals.
Time can be grounded a bit lower to a statistical concept called “entropy”; the degree of choices in a system that describes for instance how a cloud will eventually spread because it simply has so many more ways to spread than to form a letter or a name in the sky. Its fate is arranged by its number of possibilities, more than by any set of rules the phase changes need to follow. The way your cells age as well is only a statistical effect of a degree of freedom, we all basically melt into the universe, just as rocks and galaxies do. Very carefully engineered things that understand and counter-act the aging process, melt slower. They create a sort of new unlikeliness, a cloud that does spell a letter instead of spreading and thinning out.
“Life” can be considered as nothing more than a process that meta-engineers its own entropy and thus creates unlikely events. Your body is already capable to withstand any aging effects, and this will increase significantly with chemical or surgical longevity therapies in the coming centuries. I’m fairly sure many in my children’s generation will receive longevity therapies that make their lives much longer than ours, simply because we can still do a ton of changes there. The societal repercussions will be ambiguous but it also makes you wonder whether those lives will really be longer, if people in that age will be more human-like or fly-like in their consumption of time.

The same statistical process happens for any internal mechanisms that count your perception of time, that decide your thoughts-per-second and make you create memories of the past and feel that the next second is as long as the previous one. The fundamental clock behind this is a statistical one, particles of energy moving through some constraints like tubes. Perhaps it will be possible to also engineer a faster clock and make you experience the world more fly-like, although it seems more difficult than simply extending the aging process.

With all of this, it’s difficult to define entropy without using the concept of time, and thus to extract a more fundamental underlying process that has time emerge from it. Quantum physical models might offer a deeper perspective by formulating entropy as the numeric process of a gradual entangling of the universe’s particles, until they all freeze up, and its sort of statistical battery is used up. I like this thought because it also deals with discrete systems, with integer counts, numbered things, and would allow some aspects of number theory to be the driver of some emerged forces and constants in the universe. But it’s not guaranteed to be a very productive way at looking at time.
Time may also simply be emergent from a geometrical fact about the world, which in itself may have emerged from stability and anthropic arguments — meaning that things are constructed in exactly the way they are because us humans need to somehow end up in them since we are currently observing and describing things. Although this circular reasoning may disappoint you, it’s quite a seductive logic with more profundity than it seems.

The arrow of time might one day be seen as an emergent artefact of your biology and not as just an absolute thing. Time may not really exist as a line that separates the determined past from an indeterminate future, maybe it just exists to us that way because our biology navigates through reality in a certain way. We are currently not capable of this abstraction, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever be. Perhaps the creation of an alien life-form through deep artificial intelligence might one day solve this dilemma, but this also seems unlikely to me. It’s an intriguing thought, to consider that maybe everything that will happen has already happened, that there is no “already”, and that you are just biologically tacked onto a sort of artificial clock. It also seems like a much nicer way to experience things.

We know how to manipulate the flow of time and surf the spacetime manifold: move quick enough, close to the speed of light, and the passage of time will be slower for people outside the moving frame. Or watch Interstellar where the same happens for high gravitational fields. As a more drastic effect, alien species might be moving through spacetime right now in ways that causes their time to be significantly dilated compared to ours, so they get more done in the age span of their surroundings. This could make them experience everything much more fly-like than we do; which is also an interesting solution to some paradoxes involving the absence of alien life.

But what about the direction of time? Is it possible to go backwards? To decide the current based on the future?
Manipulating causality itself, the order of events, seems to be carefully forbidden by the universe’s laws, or at least by the ones we’re able to perceive through our own biology and the instruments that we built and use on top of it. But much like the hidden lines in a 3d drawing, retrocausality (the past being affected by the future) is an important mechanism in quantum mechanical models and it would be interesting if biology is partially affected by retro causal behaviour which would mean aspects of our cell dynamics, and thus of biological evolution, even of consciousness are precognisant of the future. Several biological processes such as photosynthesis have an uncanny and unexplained efficiency that might be point at an emergence of retrocausal behaviour, of “the past being affected by the future” — although take some care with those thoughts — it seems unlikely that the microscopic ranges at which retrocausality emerges in a particle model can emerge macroscopically. I have always suspected this matter isn’t entirely settled though.

Either way, I’m 40 years old. In this frame of time, I’ve been very lucky to be born in a comfortable place, to be physically healthy, mentally just unhealthy enough, and to have met the right people in life. People I care for, or that have cared for me in some capacity. Insanely, there are even even two people I have co-created, and in some way have given new pathways of time.
I feel thankful for the time I’ve gotten with all people, and I apologise for anyone whose time I’ve ever stolen vainly. I’ll give it right back to ya, one of these days, hehe —no.
I guess a symbiotic relationship with the people around you happens when you consider yourself as a passenger on their lives as much as them as a passenger on yours.

I feel now more than ever that there is no end score, no final treasure, there is no end boss to beat, and that ultimately we are lonely heroes in the woods, armed with not much to speak for, and more often inexperienced than experienced at anything. Perhaps this will change, perhaps I will attach my life to a new mission and become highly specific at one thing, I don’t know.
The spark of life is the treasure to hold on to, as long as it lasts.
I don’t know how life will look like in the future, it sometimes looks very bleak and uncontrolled, highly dependent on other actors, many of which who are bad and distraught, and highly dependent on past actions.
Sometimes life seems so good though, that it’s hard to believe it’s left up to its own devices.

A curious coincidence in biology is that most animals have the same order of magnitude in the amount of heartbeats in their average life span; it’s in the range of a billion. About three billion, give or take, for humans.
It would be very unwise to spend each of those beats wisely. I certainly won’t. Yet I will think of the fly and try to maximise my experiences at least a little.

Cheers to time, I think life is much better with it than without!