Time
The flow and structure of moments
7 attributes · Dimension I
Overview
Time is perhaps the most intimate of the five dimensions — the one we feel most directly, yet understand least completely. We are carried by it without consent. We remember its past and anticipate its future, but we can only act in its present. Every experience, every change, every event requires time as its medium. Without time, nothing could happen; without happening, nothing would exist in any meaningful sense.
Philosophical Significance
Philosophy has struggled with time from its very beginnings. Heraclitus saw reality as flux — "you cannot step into the same river twice" — making time the essence of existence. Parmenides and Plato inverted this: true reality is timeless and unchanging; the temporal world is a shadow of eternal forms. Augustine famously asked what time is, only to find that he knew perfectly well until he tried to explain it. Kant declared time a pure form of inner intuition — not a feature of the world itself, but the framework through which the mind organizes experience.
Scientific Perspective
Modern physics has transformed our understanding of time in two ways. Einstein's special relativity dissolved the idea of absolute simultaneity: whether two events happen "at the same time" depends on the observer's velocity. His general relativity showed that massive objects slow time — clocks run measurably faster in orbit than on the ground. Quantum mechanics has left time's status ambiguous: it appears as an external parameter in the equations, not as an observable like position or momentum. The second law of thermodynamics explains why time has a direction — entropy increases — but the fundamental equations of physics are, remarkably, time-symmetric: they work equally well run forwards or backwards.
Key Philosophical Debates
Our experience of time as passing — the sense that the present is always moving from past to future — may or may not reflect a real feature of the universe. The "block universe" interpretation of relativity holds that all times exist equally; the flow of time is an illusion generated by the observer's movement through a static four-dimensional structure. Presentism, by contrast, insists only the present is real and the past genuinely no longer exists.
Some approaches to quantum gravity suggest that time is not a fundamental feature of the universe but an emergent one — arising from more basic, timeless quantum relationships. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which attempts to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, contains no time variable at all. If this is right, our experience of temporal flow is a large-scale approximation of something that is, at bottom, timeless.
The laws of physics are almost entirely time-symmetric, yet we experience time as having a definite direction from past to future. The most widely accepted explanation ties the arrow of time to entropy: the universe started in an improbably low-entropy state, and has been moving toward higher entropy ever since. But this pushes the question back: why did the universe begin in such a special state?
Across Philosophical & Theological Traditions
Western philosophy has generally treated time as something to be transcended or explained. Plato's eternal Forms, Aristotle's unmoved mover, Augustine's eternal God who creates time along with the universe — all position timelessness as more fundamental than time. Process philosophy (Whitehead, Bergson) reverses this: becoming is more real than being, and time is not a deficient mode of eternity but the very medium of reality. Buddhist traditions analyze time into discrete momentary events (dharmas) and deny any persisting substance across moments — time is not a container but a pattern of arising and passing. The Reformed theological tradition holds that God is eternal in the sense of being outside temporal succession, while creation exists within time as God's gift — time is not a limitation but the proper mode of creaturely existence.
Attribute Definitions
Extent
Ontological Status
Grain
Freedom
Traversability
Dimensionality
Direction
Time in Dimension Pairs
Time in Dimension Triplets