Time and Moment

“Karl Ernts von Baer has made it clear that times is the product of a subject. Time as a succession of moments varies from one Umwelt to another, according to the number of moments experienced by different subjects within the same span of time. A moment is the smallest individual time vessel, for it is the expression of an individual elementary sensation, the so-called moment sign. As already stated, the duration of a human moment amounts to 1/18 of a second. Furthermore, the moment is identical for all sense modalities, since all sensations are accompanied by the same moment sign” (Instinctive Behavior 29).

            Time is something that has always been somewhat malleable to me. When I look back on the past ten years or even the past week I do not get a clear picture of the flow of time. It stops and starts, there are places missing, some events are incomplete or made-up. This is not a product of an injury or some lack, but rather a reflection of the way I look at my world. The disjointedness of time in my Umwelt is the result of the way in which I inhabit my consciousness. As all time is subjective, individuals move through time in their own unique ways.

            

             I am most interested in looking at the way in which the perception of time is shifted through the lens of the individual’s moment. We have all experienced the class that never seemed to end, or the celebration that seemed to go by in an instant, the removal of time from the moment. Karl Ernts von Baer attempts to explain this sensation with the concept of the moment sign, which says, “a moment is the smallest time vessel,” and that time in the Umwelt is the number of moments experienced within a time span. By this the more moments, the sensations of experience that pass through the Umwelt, in a given time frame the longer time seems to be. This concept removes time from its linear track and places it instead into the hands of the individual. Time as a boundless, individually malleable form is something that acts to create the uniqueness of the human experience.

            

              If we all perceived time in the same way, besides never being late, I believe that people would generally lose part of what it is to be an individual. Our private perceptions of time bind us to our physical world and to our physical existence through the workings of our physiology, mental processes, and experience of the moment. If we were to lose the individual ability to form time around the events that take place in our lives those events would lose meaning, thus robbing us of beneficial experience.

           

            Can time be removed from the human experience? Is the experience of time paramount to the perception of movement? Can the moment be removed from time?