#fibonacci clock

A short Philosophy of Time

I have often pondered over the nature of time. To many of us, time is everything. We live in a society regimented by time, construct our lives around time, and constantly think about the past and the future.

However, is there really such a thing as time? Or is it purely a human concept?

This is a fascinating question to address, because naturally, you’d say of course time exists. But then there’s a different view to have on time, the view of it as purely a measurement to construct meaning from. For example, without time nobody could ever be the fastest runner at the Olympics, and we would have great difficulty getting to work...on time.

When we look outside of the human realm into nature, we realise that animals do not obey time like we do. Instead, they are guided by their natural biological rhythms, called Circadian Rhythms. As humans, we call these our biological ‘clocks’, they are the monitors that regulate our lives at the sub-conscious level. Yet these are not clocks, they are rhythms, because nature works with cycles, not time.

When we look inside the human realm into our own window of perception, what do we see? We see the present only, because we only ever exist in the present moment. We have memories that we call the past and plans that we call the future, but these are merely constructs in our mind. In reality, they are reflections on previous ‘present moments’ and conceptualisations of the next ‘present moments’.

For us, time truly exists because we are a conceptual species, which loves organisation, observation, and measurement. The construct of time is a beautiful thing. We can measure so much because of it. But at the end of the day, time could merely be a by product of our own conscious reality, and not a definitive manifestation in the outside world.