Now, Subjectively Speaking

In 1976, rock star Steve Miller came out with a song, one of my favorites, called Fly Like an Eagle.  Throughout it he repeats the words "Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping...into the future". From the first time I heard it, it occurred to me that "time" could either be thought of as slipping into the future, the past...or neither...

If you think of the "now" as a point in time...in which all of the living reside...it does seem, in a way, that what we regard as future times are being approached by the "now". So in ol' Steve's hit record, if you replaced "time" with "the now", then his words would ring true...kind of.  Let's say it's 10:00 and I'm looking ahead to 10:05.  It does look like the present is aimed at the future and is approaching it, with the temporal distance decreasing in minutes from 5 to 4,3,2,1...and then passing through the "now" into the past.  In THIS way of looking at it, then, time seems to be moving backward, from the future into the past.  I remember many times in my life, mostly when I was young, looking ahead to future events and wondering what I and the world would be like then.  But those times would come and go, and now they are in the past. And looking at it all yet another way, since we all live in the present "now", this by definition can be neither the past nor the future...the notion of time slipping in any direction is an illusion.  Or is it?

I believe that the common confusion that arises when people think about time, especially the concepts of "past", "now", and "future", is largely due to the two often incongruent realities we live in.  Yes, we live in two realities: subjective reality and objective reality...

Subjective reality is the universe from our own personal, individual viewpoints and objective realty is the composite universe in all of its detail, without any special regard to our own individual place in it. To give a very simple example, one might subjectively look down a long, straight path and see its edges approach until they meet at the horizon while, while objectively speaking it would have been learned that, the path continues to that distance without any narrowing of those essentially parallel edges.  Infants and little children see things overwhelmingly subjectively: brain development, education and upbringing teach them to see things in a more objective light...but it can cause conflicts...

The concept of "now" has no place within objective reality, nor apparently does the "flow" of time.  Physicists have discovered that the so-called "direction" of time makes no difference in any of their formulations about the nature of reality, i.e. "objective" reality...well, that's at least what they told me on the Science Channel!  "Now" is only relevant in terms of subjective reality, which is the world as experienced from one's vantage point. "Past" and "future" likewise are subjective concepts since they are based on events happening either before or after "now", respectively. Furthermore, "now"...since it is subjective and not objective in nature...is a personal concept and isn't the same from one individual to another.  This resonates with established physics as well, as it has been demonstrated that the concept of simultaneity has no absolute meaning, at least scientifically. To think that there is a universal, same "now" would imply that everywhere at that instant a set pattern of event happens throughout the universe...but it all depends on one's perspective in determining simultaneous events...

I fear I might have completely confused you with this metaphysical rant, but these types of ideas...the nature of time and the two types of reality...thoroughly interest me.  And since the whole point of this blog is for me to write about interesting things (from my own subjective viewpoint, of course), it is what it is...