Reframing Temporal Navigation: Toward an Experiential Ontology of Time

I've been thinking about how the metaphors we use to describe time shape the way we experience it. Most dominant conceptions of time - especially in Western discourse - are cardinal. They rely on spatial metaphors: forward/backward, up/down, north/south, east/west. These binaries dominate everything from physics to theology: time "moves forward," people "look ahead" to the future or "dwell on" the past, we imagine heaven "above" and hell "below." Even phrases like "going through a hard time" rely on a sense of traversal across a directional axis.

This framing of time as a directional path-linear, progress-oriented, and always centered on a moving self - feels increasingly incompatible with how I actually experience time. It's mechanistic. Machine time is measured, precise, discrete - ticked off in moments. Human time is felt. It is smeared, experiential, affective. There is no ticking second in the chest, only breath and memory and decay. We're not clocks.

Even physics - the place we often look to for objective models of time - doesn't really support a linear view when you look close enough. The thermodynamic arrow of time, often cited as the "direction" of time, is statistical, not strictly deterministic. It's an emergent property of large-scale systems, not a fundamental law. At the quantum level, time is symmetric. The equations work just as well in either direction. Our perception of time’s directionality, its asymmetry, may simply be a byproduct of our own entropic nature - a side effect of memory, of information loss, of consciousness trying to hold a pattern against chaos.

So what if we start from a different model? One more aligned with this probabilistic, organic, entropic experience?

I'm starting to consider the idea of time as experiential rather than cardinal. Not in the sense of recurring cycles or clocks turning, but in a deeper, more existential way - where movement through time is not a straight line or a one-way road but a kind of spinning, a turning-in-place, a folding, a dilation or contraction. Something experiential rather than directional.

Biologically, infants and children experience time differently from adults, different animals 'experience' time at different rates, our memories affect our perception of time more than our experience of it.

This model opens up more space for fluidity, for non-linear remembering, for the intuitive weight of moments rather than their sequence. It acknowledges that even "now" is not immediate - there's always some latency, some organic delay. Every perception is already a memory. Every "present" is assembled from what the body, the mind, and the nervous system can hold in tension with what is expected.

Reframing this on a personal organic scale to an experimental rather than linear model feels more aligned with the probabilistic nature of thermodynamic entropic systems; individual organic 'past' and 'future' are both equally artificially constructed projections outside the immediate moment, and even the 'immediate moment' has a bound of necessarily organic delay.

In this experiential view, past and future are not destinations or paths - not directions - but momentary orientations of attention. Like the turn of a head, or the shift of gravity inside a spinning body. Each turn is contingent, responsive, recursive.

quelly was thinking
        

auctan is thinking
        

eou will be thinking