Blake

crocodile deathroll, while you make a good point on the importance that determining the passage of time plays in human life, this brain function is not a sense like the conventional five senses. The first link you posted (i.e., Warren H Meck) doesn't support this assertion, and the second (Damaging our sense of time) uses "sense" colloquially, not in a strict biological sense corresponding to taste, sight, touch, smell & hearing. The senses convey (relatively) raw information to the brain for processing; our time-sense emerges during such processing, as opposed to specifically designed nerves feeding "time-data" to the brain.

On the other hand, there *are* forgotten internal "sixth" senses: proprioception is my favorite. Not as sexy as a "time-sense," but almost as debilitating to lose; as usual, it's Oliver Sacks who has a story about a woman who lost her sense of proprioception & was barely able to move: she was constantly losing track of where she had "left" her limbs.

Blake

Indifference

I'm relatively inexperienced in the subject, but I did read one book on relativity and quantum mechanics and am reminded of an interesting notion...

Even if you were not moving chronologically through time, you would still feel like you were. Let's say, for argument sake, that we're all just jumping from one point in our lives to a differnt one in no particular order. Each time you... land, if you will... you still have all the memories, thoughts, emotions, and outside stimuli going through your head at that point the same as if you WERE going chronologically. So, no matter where you land, you have a sense of fluid motion. If you land in the past, you don't retain your knowledge of future events so you are not aware of this shifting.

granted... this is a fairly outlandish theory. I just thought it was interesting. I appologize if this comment is out of place or if i'm out of my league.

barbelle

It's fascinating how time is so universal: it encompasses every aspect of our lives; yet it is so nebulous when one tries to look at it directly. I have been thinking about relativity, myself (though I have only the most casual grasp on the subject) and observing that my mind can only understand time as a linear progression... I wonder if (and when) science moves humanity to greater levels of understanding, if we will be encultured with a different sense of time. Isn't it funny to tap on the glass ceiling, if you will, and wonder? At the present, we can only perceive time as linear because we have no other model.

Or do we? Any one out there with the knowledge about relativity to give us some ideas?

crocodile deathroll

All senses are internal if we like to be pedantic
And these five "conventional" sense are not as conventional as you think
Just take our sense if sight, or sense of sight is no more that a technicolor version of our sense of space, which is strictly internal. A person you for example is born blind would have no sense of sight, but he would have an internal "sense of space" even if that happened to be nothing but darkness, and it is only the internal processing in the occipital lobe in the brain that give us our sense of sight. So the sense of sight is as much as internal sense as our sense of time, and is only an attribute of a sense of space.

Bats in a strict biological sense have another attribute to a sense of space which is echo-location. Other animals such a rattlesnakes have heat sensors. Through million of years of evolution we can enhance this sense of space and give rise to new attributes with sound waves like with echo-location, visible light with sight, and infrared light like on a rattlesnake's heat sensor.


Limb neglect is a very interesting point and if you for instance had stubbed your toe, then is it your toe that feels the pain or is it your mind? A person is afflicted limb neglect may disassociate his mind from a leg/arm that has a perfectly intact peripheral nervous system and would even go so far as to believe that that limb belongs to somebody else. Oliver Sacks also quoted a case about person afflicted with this limb neglect condition who believed that his own arm belonged to his mother. Touch his "mother's arm" sic and he will not feel it even though his peripheral nervous system is perfectly healthy, which proves that even our sense of touch is just as internal as our sense of time.
I can only feel it if you "think" you can feel it.

barbelle

I think the dicotomy between the 'traditional' five senses, and these other senses that we're talking about, hinges largely upon the source of the stimuli. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch serve to inform us of our external envirnoment, in one way or another. The other senses rely information within ourselves as an organism (proprioception) or deal with abstract concepts (time, observed and measured in intervals) which is, again, an internally based observation.

you think?

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that we should consider the source of the stimuli when defining a sense. It's the ambiguity of 'time' that makes the sense of it difficult to define.

crocodile deathroll

[When you first become conscious at about 14 weeks into gestation there is none of those five peripheral senses; and without the external environmental stimuli to inform us who or what or where we are, we just fall back on a primordial internal sense of space and time. So I think it is the other way around, our peripheral senses hinges off this primordial sense of time.

If I were to play even to shortest piece of music, it hinges on an interval of time to hold any meaningful information. You can hardly imagine a tune that only lasts ten milliseconds, then remember and hum it back in minds. A gun shot maybe, but a gun shot exists in our minds in the background of some preexisting silence, which is again in the context of some time frame.

With sight we also have a sense of motion, again that hinges on time even if that visual image is stationary like a still photograph as it has to be stationary for a certain period of time for you to realize that is in fact stationary and for it to register any retrievable information into your memory , you need a perception of time.

crocodile deathroll

Ierrellus

If time is the sixth sense, then motion is the seventh. There is no change without motion. There is no motion without duration (time). These qualia are established from atomic reactions to genetic action potential.

Ierrellus

[ April 25, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

99Percent

I don't know how but I think the sense of time is interrelated with consciousness. The more conscious you are the slower time seems to go by.

Gurdur

Just to add a couple of comments:

There are several different time-keepers and time-sensors (actually light-sensors that respond to fluctuations, as in daily or seasonal) in the human body.

As for the comments started by Bill the Cat and Barbelle about the fragility of human self-consciousness and consciousness:

<a href="http://www.mathom.com/Religion2/Origins_Of_Religion_02_01_Basic_concepts_1.htm" target="_blank">Yes, very much so.</a>

[ April 25, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

phaedrus

Try to get your hands on this book... "End of Time" by Julian Barbour. Makes an interesting read....

Here is an interview with the chap at Edge...

<a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/barbour/barbour_index.html" target="_blank">THE END OF TIME - A Talk With Julian Barbour</a>

Isnt time an invention of humankind??