The Feel of Time

What is “Felt” time
What do we think when we say we are “in” time? Often, when pressed, we say that time is felt as things that are past, present or future. If someone asks you about an event, your first instinct is to determine if it is in the past, present or future. Our language is predicated on “tense” wordage. That our sense of the past is what we remember. Our sense of the present is what we are experiencing and the future is what we will feel. This is a very primal way of seeing time; it requires no culture, no language or even a universe. It is the fundamental way we organize our life.
The future is man
We grant that most thinking things and even some not so thinking, have memory. Simple Pavlovian reaction or instinct shows most life has a “past”, and similarly to be classified alive it must in come way participate in a now, but it is, for the most part, man that we grant the special providence of for-sight. The ability to, not only plan, but to conserve of a present that is not “of the is-now” but “of the to-come”. Academic philosophers refer to this type of “time” as “A” series. It is the idea that time is seem only in terms of what it past, what is present and what if future. It is time as we feel it. This works for our internal conversations, but to transmit ideas of time to others we often use “measured” time.

Problems with “Felt” time

Incoherency of time
The problem with “Felt” time is two fold. First, the renowned philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart believed there an intrinsic contradiction in the idea of past present and future as terms to delineate time. The basic premise of his argument lies in the fact that all the terms can be applied to any event, thus rendering them meaningless or at least inconsistent. Any event, for example, in the present may also be said to be a past event in the future. Thus the label for this even would be a future past present event; thus the terms seem non-specific.
Relativistic nature of time
Another problem with “felt” time is the relativistic nature of it. Although many events may have a similar perspective with regards to past, present or future; this is a coincidence and not a necessity. The fact that my elderly neighbour eats dinner at 4pm. I eat at 6pm and the high school kids eat at 8pm. When I am eating, the neighbour’s dinner is in the past and the kids in the future, yet by their perspective, when neighbour eats, my dinner is in the future and yet the kid’s dinner is in a different future. Finally when the kids eat, as similar relativist effect occurs when my dinner is now past, and the neighbour’s dinner is also past but a different past than mine.
Mental convenience or irrelevant
We are left with two conclusions, first the idea of what is past or present or future depends on the observer. This idea of time is truly personal and as such looses meaning beyond the self. If we are to find a time beyond out own psychology then this concept seems to fail. Secondly, even if we somehow concede that this time may more than mental convenience, if is a term at best of negation not definition. To say something is past does nothing more than rule out it being in the others. We have shown that two events are “past” but not he same “past”, leading us to say that either the term is incoherent or irrelevant.
Either way, it seems “Felt” time is at best a mental convenience, not a thing of the universe but a construct of our minds. Perhaps is we apply a scale to time, measure it in such a way that it become common or independent of the observer. In this way perhaps we can find time.