Time, memory and consciousness.

We start another year; my 67th in this particular incarnation. A good time to ponder once more upon the nature of time.

There can be no time without memory. 

And there can be no memory without consciousness. 

And so, without consciousness, without the conscious observer, we cannot have time – we can only have a block universe, where all time is equally real, past, present and future, simultaneously. Spacetime without consciousness shrinks from four dimensions down to three.

The need for an observer to consciously experience the passage of time is like the conundrum about a tree falling in a forest with no one there to hear it - does it make a sound? The answer is, of course, no – because the experience of sound requires an ear to collect the vibrations of air, a brain to process the signals sent to it, and consciousness to be aware of this sound.

And so without conscious observers around to subjectively experience time, everything is happening simultaneously, from Big Bang to the heat death of the Universe and all points in between. Consider this – it takes eight minutes for a photon to travel from the Sun to the Earth. And yet, from the perspective of the photon, travelling at the speed of light as it does, that journey is instantaneous. As is a journey of 13.8 billion light years. It is instantaneous from the photon's point of view.

Your perception of time is subjective; deeply subjective. Consider this - we all notice that time seems to rush past faster the older we get. For a two-year-old, a year represents 50% of their entire life's experience. Yet for a 50 year-old, it is only 2%. I pondered upon this and drew the following graph (below), which shows that the subjective acceleration of the passage of time slows right down once a child hits adolescence, and then the year-to-year difference becomes marginal. As a 66-year-old, one year represents 1.5% of my total life experience; yet by the time I reach the age of 74 it falls away to 1.4%. Hardly any difference... and yet... and yet... 

So, looking forward into the near-term future; no more than one year at a time. The future seems to be a lot further away than the past, which rushes into to the far distance like a point in the rear view mirror. Spring typically switches on in mid-April, that's three and half months away, as distant as mid-September, which I now struggle to recall, it's so long gone. The events become less important than the flavour of being there – the qualia. It will be those that define our consciousness's attachment to a time and a place in time. And just two weeks ago, I was ill with Covid. That now seems a long time ago. The bad things that happen to us, we tend to stuff away into the past.

The sensuous joys of summer (here, here, here, here and here) feel so far away, yet they will come and go. All good things come to an end – autumn brings duller, shorter days, and an intensive work schedule in the run-up to Christmas. The mill-wheel turns, life goes on, we live, we learn, we remember, those memories embed, they abide, they imbue our consciousness, individually and collectively.

This time last year:
Hottest New Year's Day in Warsaw ever 

This time two years ago
"Communication/this is the gift you must not lose"

This time three years ago:
Wealth and inequality - an introduction

This time five years ago:
Gratitude for a peaceful 2018

This time seven years ago:
Fighting laziness - a perennial resolution

This time seven years ago:
A Year of Round Anniversaries

This time eight years ago:
Walking on frozen water
[Daytime high, 1 January 2016 was -6C]

This time nine years ago:
Fireworks herald 2015 in Jeziorki

This time ten years ago
Jeziorki welcomes 2014

This time 11 years ago:
LOT's second Dreamliner over Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
New Year's coal train 

This time 15 years ago:
Welcome to 2009!

This time 16 years ago:
Happy 2008!