Some Thoughts of Time, Part II

This post has no real main point that I’m trying to argue but, similar to my last one, is a flow of ideas on time and identity.

In my previous post I said: “As a single event, I do not have existence; as an event, comprised of a past, I take up my identity (or even seen differently, I find myself). For there to be an “I” which looks back, there must first be that past which can be looked upon by the “I,” as the self in the present.”

The self is always present and only immediate. To be now it must have destroyed itself and yet still recognize itself as having been then, as some thing removed and distinct from what it is now. It is only through this recognition that time is possible, and it is only through time that identity is possible. Seemingly paradoxically, an “I” can only be present and yet is possible only through a succession of those presents, in other words, through time.

But isn’t this how we view time anyways, as a succession of present moments? The past is no special aspect of time, rather it is just the collection of experienced presents, which can be recollected in some fashion. Similarly, the future is just the totality of the unexperienced, and thus only perhaps possible, presents, which can be imagined in some fashion. The tenses of time are always in relation to the present.

The Relatedness of Time

In a blog post awhile back, I repeated a theory I had heard once:
“After one year of life, that past year was 1/1, or 100%, of your experience. After your twentieth year of life…, the previous year was 1/20th of your experience. So each year, since we are unable to expand our brains, causes the percentages of our brain to get reconfigured.” So the span of a day (which we calculate by the rotation of the earth), actually goes faster the older that we get, because it represents that much smaller of an experiencing than it once did. If time is only relative, then it is the case that as we get older, time gets shorter.

So I’m not only purposing the relative theory of time that says time only occurs with movement or in the relation of physical objects to one another, but also one that says that time is also related to itself; in fact, that is how it is possible. Because as mentioned two paragraphs back, the past and future are only modes of the present, modes of the “I” experiencing. And notice how I must use the in-process verb of “-ing” to express what an “I” does. When we say that “I worked yesterday”, we are saying that I was working at that given time and thus that I recall an experience of a present that is no longer be”ing” experienced.

So if time is related to itself, then every past event is defined as an experience”ing” which can now be objectified and thereby experienced anew (and yet in a new, removed way) by a new present “I”. Thus, memory is a collection of presents, which have become objects accessible to the now-present “I”.

What is odd is that an “-ing” implies a duration, a succession of experience. So as soon as we try to talk of an actual present (not just the present, as today or this year, but rather as the moment where experiencing occurs), we reduce it to such a slice of existence that it disappears altogether. So it seems that while having this notion of present is useful, when thought through, it is really an impossibility. And if I just spent this whole blog saying that all of time is in relation to our notions of the present, and the present doesn’t exist, then what is time?