Aman Shah

Create Your Own Truth

The Law of Constant Psychical Experience Of Time

I had just joined the Institute of Advanced Research. It was the autumn of July and induction was going on for the new batch. I was instead in the library, scanning the books doggedly. The library with its modest collections–just four rows of shelves in one room–still felt like the whole world was given to me at that time, for I had never seen these many books at once. I was in a bohemian trance and little did I care about induction. I scanned through all the books related to my subject (fiction and non-fiction would only come a year later to my life–a story that I spare you here in this blog), however, I did not give any book a read because there was something else in my mind: a thought, an image, voices and whispers, and a stare. Erupting from my seat, the eyes, which gazed at the yellow-wooden table, could not understand how one object was converting into another. In the state of euphoria, the outer world narrows down and the inner world holds a huge gigantic eyepiece from which whatever you see becomes an object at a single time, even time, you can dissect into nanoseconds, microseconds, and milliseconds from your phenomenal experience. You are completely free and can fight the entire world. That was how exactly I felt back then, and I can write this account because a series of euphoric moments occurred to me in past, and all, obviously related to some kind of ideas I pondered upon. Out of all I have till now, this should be the one I care about the most, though in the funniest undertone. Here it is.

Every species lives a constant life experience

By life experience, I mean the sense of time spent in this world of the average lifespan of my species. In other words, a labrador with an average lifespan of twelve years lives as much as we live in seventy years. A time dilation, so to speak, in the psychical experience of organisms and microbes. To prove this theory I went on to devise an experiment. And the guinea pig was, indeed, a housefly. How agile they are! There is something weird in smaller animals that they live tiny but fast, I observed back then. Hypothetically, a second for fly would be a month for us, after all the psychical experience is constant. To put it differently, a second for us is for a house fly, perhaps, a femtosecond. Now, the problem starts when you try to slap them away. I thought, that because there was a huge difference in how a housefly and I experience time, it must have seen my hand movements beforehand, as if predicted. I started to throw things on them at different heights and measured at what points from the height they reacted with the corresponding time taken. There was no significant difference (at that time I did not know statistical tests so I used my common sense) and I abandoned everything there and there.

For any theory to be a scientific theory, we must have tools so that we can put the theory to some vigorous test and try to refute it. But who says I am calling this a theory? It is a law. And about house fly doing John Wick–a fiction, stemming from my hysteria.

[Three months have passed since I wrote this blog. A significant change has taken place in what I think about science and scientific theory. I am not a Popperian anymore, roughly speaking.]

P.S. For any animal, if the law says that their psychical experience of time is constant, then it means they do have some form of consciousness to account for it in the first place.