How fast does time unfold?  Silly question.  It unfolds at one second per second.  The tautology makes it clear that time, itself, does not have a rate.  Rather, it is a coordinate system that allows us to label, order, and sequence events.  This way of viewing time is called the B-series, and can be contrasted with the experience of time, the A-series, which is perpetually of a present moment, separating an established past from an indefinite future.  These are radically different ways of conceptualizing time.

Now consider a person standing on the surface of the earth.  The earth is curved, of course, but the curvature is not obvious to a being as small (relative to the earth) as a human.  This is true of any smooth (differentiable) curved surface: for any such surface, there is a scale at which the curvature is negligible, and it will appear to be flat, or, to be more precise, linear.  Linear systems are easy to think about.  Linearity makes things really really simple.  If two variables are related linearly, we understand how change in one relates to change in the other.  Double the change in the first, and you double any effect it has on the second.  Non-linearity makes things less predictable, with abrupt discontinuities, with variable effect strengths, with relationships that change direction even, so that what was formerly a positive correlation becomes a negative one.  Linear relationships are nice and predictable.

Now, here is the catch.  The view of time as unfolding at one second per second is a convenient fiction that allows us to coordinate our activities with respect to one another.  We could not do without it.  But it is a fiction.  It linearizes our causal accounts, making them easier to understand, but distorting the underlying structure of events in ways that are hard to see. Furthermore, when we understand that view to be ‘real’, we have just driven a wedge between the organism and the world that will have the consequence that the organism seems to have a mental life, a separate solipsistic realm.  This insight can not be explained in a single post, but we must start somewhere.

In the spirit of radical empiricism (to which the Pharisee is very sympathetic), let us begin with experience, and let us be self-conscious in any extrapolation we care to do from the facts met in experience.  The experience of time is most assuredly not one of a steady progression at unvarying rate.  In fact, there does not seem to be any direct experience of time whatsoever.  In the A-series, it is always ‘now’. In studying “psychological time” nobody has yet managed to operationalize the notion of ‘time’ in any way that supports direct measurement, because we do not perceive time itself.  We retro-fit accounts of temporal progression based on events that occur.

Let’s do metaphysics with puppet actors, to keep things concrete.  Give us two protagonists, Twitchy and Boring, and let us have a third member of the party, Chronic, who has a stopwatch.  The three of them are having a picnic.  Chronic uses his stopwatch to define an interval of one minute.  In that time, Twitchy experiences a lot of different things.  At one second past the start, Twitchy notices an ant trail crawling up his leg, causing him to jump up and swat the ground, his foot, and his leg.  He then rolls up his trouser leg with a sense of urgency, and finds that the ants have only gotten as far as his ankle.  Relieved, he brushes off all the ants on him, and moves to a safer spot, under a tree, where he sits down gingerly and is immediately distracted by spotting a pair of copulating praying mantises.  Fascinated, he is drawn into the life-or-death struggle conducted in plain view.  By the time a minute has gone by, Twitchy’s autobiography just grew by a couple of paragraphs.

Boring, on the other hand, is looking forward to this evening, when he will be attending a function in his honour.  He pays no attention to Twitch’s animation.  In fact, he is merely tolerating the picnic, which seems to him to be a protracted affair.  After a minute has elapsed, Boring’s autobiography has not grown substantially, as very little occurred to give character to the fabric of his experience.

How might we approach the task of providing causal accounts of the experience of each of these two subjects?  The details of the specific events occurring are not relevant here, just their relation to time, and the manner in which this affects the casual stories we spin.  Twitchy experienced many events.  With a pompous dash of arbitrariness, let us zoom in on one of the many events experienced inside the minute, say the relocation from one spot to the other to avoid the ants.  There is nothing in Twitchy’s early childhood that is of relevance here.  Any causes we might seek are close to the event.  Relevant factors include ants and trees, and any notional causal story we might tell would occupy only a few seconds of time, as measured by Chronic.  For Boring, we must pull back, because the only event of relevance to his experience during our chosen minute does not occur until that evening, when he gets to attend the dinner in his honour.  Thus a rather different time frame seems appropriate for incorporating the experience during that minute into a meaningful account.

For meaning is not measured at one second per second.  Meaning arises at a variety of timescales.  The clock is not a good guide.  A starker example is provided by contrasting a biography and an auto-biography of a 17 year cicada.  This animal spends about 16 and a half years underground as a larva, waiting, and waiting.   Then, in its final year, it emerges, molts one final time, and then, in a period of just a few weeks, mates, gives birth (if female), and dies.  To a conscientious biographer who records events using a standard time scale, this is a remarkably uneven progression.  Half-way through the clock-timed life of the cicada, almost nothing has happened.  If the cicada, in its dying moments, were to write its autobiography, though, we might expect a warping of the time scale, such that the long event-less waiting is compressed, and those final riotous few days spent molting, fornicating, breeding, feeding, and then dying, would expand to fill most of the volume.

The consensus-based account of the world we strive towards squeezes the experiential lives of each of us into a common temporal frame.  This necessarily does violence to the meaningful structure of things, warping some, stretching others.  When we then try to provide simplistic efficient causal accounts of our actions and of events as experienced, we are forced to project beyond this artificial fabric we take as an unproblematic ground, marshaling causes that are nowhere to be seen, for we just hid them.