Time and States of Matter

January 8, 2025

I lie on my back with my hands on my ribs, my fingers fall into the spaces between each bone. I am aware that I am there, resting in this posture. Although my eyes are closed, I see the organization of my body in this form of repose. The aspect of my consciousness that comprehends the present moment composes this mental image. I feel that this cognitive process, which allows me to experience phenomena like now and here, also governs my sense of touch. It allows me to feel my hands touch my ribs and my ribs touch my hands; to experience the presence of myself as solid. I begin to consider this notion: the scale at which we are able to experience time is part of the perceptual apparatus that organizes the universe for us into solid forms.

I come to this consideration because, at this moment of hands and ribs touching, another aspect of my consciousness has also become active. This aspect of my consciousness can sense my hands and my ribs not as organic solids, but as collections of atoms temporarily flocking together on their immeasurable journey through the universe.

It is important to state that this experience of my quantum body is not an emptiness. I do not feel my hands and ribs are absent. In this transformed state, they still occupy the same amount of space to my perception as they would for someone who were to enter the room and observe me lying there on the floor, but in this experience, they are without surface, wholly permeable. My body feels as equally sensible as the space around me. I feel body and space are composed of the same material, but I do not succumb to space nor become indistinguishable from it. Even now, I can perceive my hand distinctly organized because I can feel the influence of its particular atoms moving, just as I can feel the atoms of my ribs move in their own directions, and the atoms of space in theirs. It is only the experience of solidity that has lapsed, not coherence. Is there any movement that can be measured without a concept of time? I do not think so, but I also think there can exist multiple rates of experiencing time. The length of a human life is so short, it compresses the universe and binds it into surfaces, it creates solids. The particulate nature of reality comes to be experienced as bone and flesh.

I offer the possibility that our perceptual faculties’ orientation to time shapes the form we call body. We humans can measure time far greater than a human lifespan, but we do not regularly experience time on that scale. We know that the atoms that comprise us have existed far longer than the time in which they have been organized as bodily forms and we know that they have a perceptible state on their own, although it typically requires high-powered scientific equipment to glimpse the dance of atoms. But perhaps it is not beyond the pale of our cognition to slip into a different rate of experiencing time, for some boundary within perception to momentarily yield, which allowed me these moments to observe my hands and my ribs as pure matter on the move.