Second Thoughts on Time

Some time after writing some first thoughts on time, I now have some more thoughts.

Before, I thought that time was something that could genuinely be experienced at different rates. So a kindergartener would find recess lasting longer than the (adult) playground attendant would, even though the clock said it was 15 minutes for both of them. The kindergartener moving constantly, and the playground attendant standing there. The kindergartener would literally experience, say, 30 minutes of recess, and the attendant only 7.5 minutes. The quantity of life lived, of existing, would be greater for the kindergartener than for the attendant. They could interact because they would be reconciled to a "master clock". Traditionally, this master clock would be physical time, and subjective time would be in some sense prone to illusion and not the bedrock reality.

In my system, I wanted to say that the master clock was God's experience of time. But then I had a hard time understanding how God could experience a 30 minute kindergartener recess with a 7.5 minute playground attendant recess at the same time, and really experience them in such a way that an event caused by a kindergartener could affect the playground attendant in a sensible way. For instance, at minute 20 of the kindergartener's recess, the attendant would already be done. So would God wait until minute 20 to convey the kindergartener's misdirected ball into the attendant's reality? This didn't sound good to me.

Now, I think that perhaps a better way to look at it is that subjective time is not a direct experience of the passage of time. We only exist in the moment, in which we have beliefs and perceptions about the past. Our ordinaristic experience is that we have a past and that time passes a certain way, but that very experience (that set of beliefs and perceptions about the time which has passed and how quickly it is passing) changes over time, and the new moments arise at a rate which is constant, fits some kind of master clock that all of us adhere to. Like with the anti-realism about matter that is necessary for consciousness monism, there must also be an anti-realism about perception of time. Our ordinaristic experience is that we experience matter, and time that varies in rate of experiencing. Material objects are perceptual objects, and subjective time is something like a perceptual object. We perceive our pasts, which are simantic words. The bedrock reality is still consciousness proceeding at a steady rate, and I would still say there is a "master clock", which is God speaking experience to all experiencing beings.