Time is an intellectual concept that enables humans to compare sequences and events. Time is said to be eternal. It is said that it has neither a beginning nor an end. Yet men are able to measure it as years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. They have also given meanings to the words – past, present and future. True, time has a meaning. It moves. What was yesterday is not today. What is today will not be tomorrow. Yesterday is gone. Today is and tomorrow is yet to come. Yet time is said to have no holiday. It exists always.
It is an important concept to understand and comprehend but yet very difficult to explain. Among various fields and disciplines it holds a different understanding in different ways. According to view of mathematicians time is speed divided by distance, a concept which rationally proves what time is and makes it a unit of measure. But important to distinguish between the existence of a physical – mathematical term of time and the existence of a consciousness term of time within each human being is an unorthodox view to look at what time really is.
Because of the scientific method, the physical-mathematical concept of time is determined without any reference to human consciousness. A universal determination of time must therefore include an experiencing individual, the perspective of a first person, and that of others as well. Contrary to the scientific concept of time, a lifetime is an existential dimension. Through the consciousness of time, a correlation can be found to ones own behavior, goals, motivations, and consequences. Past and future are equally judged.
Goals can be set, accountability of possible consequences can be taken, and guilt can be restored. Within the field of cognitive science, one wants to know what are the neural mechanisms that account not only for our experience of time’s flow, but also for our ability to place events into the proper time order. We have immediate experiences of a difference between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. Those differences are interpreted by us as evidence that the world we are experiencing is changing through time.
Our ability to imagine other times is definitely a necessary ingredient in our having consciousness. Therefore time is the essence of one’s life time experience or a measure of one’s life in a sequence of events. A unit in one’s life where perception, observer, assessment, consciousness and judgment are important elements in all definitions and descriptions of time. Time is an irrational concept perceived by our state of consciousness. Many philosophers don’t even agree with the concept of time. As they say what the mind experiences when it is awake is said to be perceived time.
But time for a layman to understand is the ticking of a clock, the whine of an alarm, the calendar on the wall. And since we all agree about how those things work, time can seem as solid as a rock. It is the perception of a continuation of events and how one uses up his/her hours of productivity. It is a very broad definition and something that has eluded all scientists and scholars to completely define. Time is the perception of what we experience in our lifetime through a series of events and it influences our knowledge and everything around us in every way.
It is very elusive to define time as everyone perceives it in a different way but somehow everyone shares the same idea of what it actually is. In a nutshell , consider that in physics, motion alters time; in psychology, different stimuli alter our perception of time; and in philosophy, there’s disagreement on whether time is even real but in terms of our inner lives, no time exists except for what is happening in the present moment and that is what time really is.
