many argue the true definition of time and so i'd like to hear how the people from the nexus perceive it (not sure if there is a post about it already, if so, please point me to it!)
time is/can be a socio-cultural approach to biological dynamics; one of the foundations of the civilized mind built in order to pin down existence to concept etc.

i see a lot of interesting insights about time in ancient eastern philosophy, old indigenous culture and even hyperspace itself. what is yours?

"That which turns all our tomorrows into yesterdays". Not a scientific definition by any means....

depends who's watching

I see it as a measurement of when something starts and ends. Our minds however bend time, sometimes against our will. Perceptual time is not consistent, especially on psychedelics.

I believe Perceptual time may some how be connected to what frequency we are perceiving. Or something like that.

Here's my own take, and it's rough and some things may seem rambly because Im pretty exhausted.

Time is illusory along with the rest of life. Time is great for keeping track of the day as the social beings we are.

There are only snippets of the present. Right now...and now again, now, now, and so on.

The future does not exist, the past does/did not exist either. A concept of the past and of the future exist. I know I have to wake up around 8am and then head to work at 10. But neither of those scenarios are concrete as of now. I know I've typed all of this out, so I know that the past existed in one sense. But do I? Again, all we have is those brief instances of now, and when theyre gone, theyre gone.

A train just blew its horn by my house. How do I know? Well, I heard it. But that was 10 seconds ago. It happened then, right?. 10 seconds ago doesnt exist. It existed then though, right? Well, I don't know. I think so. It's just a construct to explain and recall. But it is not real. It's real as a construct created by humans. Thats all.

I certainly want to reread this tomorrow to see how coherent it is...if tomorrow exists of course

lol ... i just drafted a confusing post that confused me further about whether the present actually exists if the past is always 'behind' and the future never arrives so i'll just sit on the fence and say time...is .....confusing....

I feel as time is infinite with no beginning or end. Its a concept by man dreamt up to keep track on a physical plain With the association of our duration on this planet.

i don't know what it "is" , but it's certainly not homogenous


Clocks don't measure time, they measure themselves

When you're not looking at a clock, where and what is time? As it exists only in the mind.

It's the fourth dimension.

I think it was tracked because humans used to observe the stars and lunar calendars were popular.. a sense of prediction.. to formulate the structure of life.. as to what was to come as there is a rhythm depending on which part of the globe the human was on.. that's why nearly every ancient structure was astrologically aligned.. proof they were aware of it and not a coincidence in my book..

Also, I've had deja vu thousands and thousands of times. It started happening so much when I was at the University, and has continued on since. I will admit, for the first thousand or so times I experienced it, I was conscious I had been in the situation and accurately remembered things as I was perceiving them, and then thought "nah, not possible, must have had misfiring synapses". There is a difference between perceiving and remembering, right? Just like you know when you're dreaming and you know when you're awake, and you know the difference, right.. or is it not until you wake up? So what if you wake up while you are dreaming? So you're wondering, am I talking about lucid dreaming or deja vu here, hehe..

The theory of relativity is great, (“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity”, {or something like that}, haha) like the Hafele–Keating experiment suggests. Einsten didn't have everything correct, but his quotes are stellar:

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." - Albert Einstein

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe , a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty...We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive." - Albert Einstein

Edit: also did not know this existed. I love how the most widely accepted human paradigm touts constants can be defined with uncertainties to model the world. Time is a constant. I mean a close approximation, in optical lattice clocks (Using ytterbium atoms, a new record for stability with a precision of 1.6 × 10-18 was published on 22 August 2013. At this stability, the two optical lattice clocks the NIST research team used would differ less than a tenth of a second over the age of the universe) but we can't quite get there.. it's like trying to squeeze everything into nothing?

Gravity is a constant too, see, this one has a BIG G and this one has a little g! Look we made the equation and.. that?... oh that, in parenthesis? oh it's called 'standard uncertainty', we just made a constant equal to an uncertainty, I'm sure you understand, it works.. It's called physics! Let's teach this to all the kids who are incarnating here and make them memorize it and repeat it back to us! Oh wait, an article came out that gravity is not the same around the globe? Well, um, we said little g is an approximation, so close enough..?

Time is like....
Whoa.....
You know?
.....
Far out

I was just recently pondering the "time" question myself a few days ago. In my wild search of answers on the internet I quickly came upon this BBC stuff Time documentary BBC youtube

It doesnt answer the question but it provides good insight of how people came up with time and how we see it. If you have 1 hour to spare its definitely worth to watch.


I dont have a detailed theory but i wouldnt say time as a whole is an ilussion. Time as we humans percieve it is trully an illusion. We are just a grain of sand in the vast universe and we live max 100 years but the cosmos is billions of years old.

To Sarek: Not sure if you were replying directly to me, but if so, I mean, it's most widely accepted what it is. It's not like it's a big secret or anything anymore Einstein already explained this in his Theory of Special Relativity. Although there are intrepid young minds that are looking to change that, but I'd say currently that's mostly how it is.

Edit: And I apologize, I re-read the attitude page about :

No preaching
If you have an opinion about something, respectfully state it, but please do not talk in absolutes about right and wrong or disrespectfully disregard other world views. No matter how convinced, nobody has a monopoly over knowing what life or the universe is all about, of knowing what happens after death or exactly what 'hyperspace' is and where the experiences come from.

And I was getting a little preachy, so thanks for prodding me.. before my first edit my answers were a little confrontational and not as respectful, so I apologize about that if you or anyone saw those as well. I will type that I reacted off that I felt the tone of your message was condescending, although you could have been satirical as well.

To dark-king, thanks man, I'm going to watch, good timing and thanks for giving me something to focus on for an hour!

Edit: And now have watched, and I think that has opened up some newer doors. Love the link, thank you so much!

time = distance/rate

so.. one could say (only partially inaccurately) that time is the measurement of dynamism (physical dynamism, not philosophical)

The dance of the eternal now

And the way we usually conceive it, mostly an illusion I'd say

When identification with a form arises in consciousness (e.g. upon waking from sleep), other forms arise as well as separate from the given form. Concurrently, the notion of 'distance' between the forms arises and the perception of 'time' needed to close that distance.

--

Ouroboros777,

No I wasn't directing that at anybody. What you wrote was interesting and certainly not preachy, no worries

I was adding the obligatory stoner mumblings to what I consider to be a very typical stoner conversation. Nothing against any of the answers here, or the topic in general. The topic just reminds me of sitting around a campfire with my high school stoner friends, trying to discuss something profound, but never getting much further than "whoa man"

This^

I found Brian greens fabric of the cosmos quite interesting http://youtu.be/yqzgYRBlslw

I'd say time is a smooth whip that forces you to always move forwards.. It keeps silently beating you, slowly tearing your back to shreds, but you don't mind beacuse you're used to it and it only slighltly hurts... And even if it did bother you, you would'n't be able to do anything about it because you simply can't look back, you can only look forwards. People think that memories allow them to look back in time but it is false, it is nothing but the mental recreation of images and emotions similar to those one has already experienced. Anyway, in the end, the pain of the whip and the fatigue of the slow but constant tread into eternity has come to a specific point. This point represents a limit, a capacity to handle the always accumulating suffering that all beings were condemned to the moment they entered the universe. This boundary, that nevertheless varies greatly from being to being, is eventually hit thus bringing all of them to their peaceful, blissful end.