A Sense of Time

"To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans, the instant of actuality must seem far less brief. The rule of instinct is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with circuits that close and open unselectively. In this duration choice is so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future describes a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system of human experience." - George Kubler (1962)

This statement opened me up to a lot of thought about the ways in which we perceive time. I don't wish to compare the nature of animal experience to human experience because I do believe that animals too make informed choices that we cannot detect. But I do know that the common human experience is pretty much how Kubler describes it - the line of time is constantly dotted with choices and thus we divide a continuum into so-called instants. This idea of dividing time into an infinite number of instants seems problematic to me. Because then, we depend on certain measures by which we define our own experience of these instants. There is an argument i came across:


1. What we see, we see as the present.
2. We see motion.
3. Motion occurs over an interval.

Hence, What we see as present occurs over an interval.


So then, what is the present? It seems to be more than just an instant (because 'instant' is not a quantifiable term), it is experienced at varying lengths in different situations by different entities.
Yet we seek to define the idea of a past "present" by trapping it into the space between choice and action..

Is this a western philosophy of time? Why do I find it logical yet problematic all the same?

These are some of the questions that are emerging out of Kubler's essay and are feeding into my project inquiry. More soon!