Time Granularity, part 1
Thinking about intervals that are too long, too short, or "just right"
Our relevance and effectiveness depend on the granularity of time being considered. For intervals that are too large or too small, we don’t matter.
Large time
When we look at the very large picture and consider cosmological time, any individual is utterly irrelevant. No human can realistically think that they will affect the universe in any significant way. Consider the complete destruction of the solar system, which is substantially larger than even the biggest problems that are typically thought of as “big problems.” Even this event would be unnoticeable at the scale of the universe.
All human evolution and culture, every achievement that we celebrate and failure that we bemoan, is completely insignificant at the scale of the universe: a tiny blip of electromagnetic disturbance, no more. Being conscious of this big picture is not a path to effectiveness – it’s more likely to convince us of the futility of any effort. In the movie Annie Hall, the young Alvy Singer is a child who’s depressed because “the universe is expanding.” It’s funny because it’s true but irrelevant to anything in his life (although we also see that his life includes many other plausible reasons for depression).
Even if we don’t go all the way up to the cosmic scale, in the big picture each of us is irrelevant. There are a few people who think that we are on the verge of technology-based immortality; however, for most of us the grim truth is that our own personal death is a certainty. And not only is our death a certainty, but our eventual irrelevance seems certain as well: based on our own experience, we can recognize that death combined with the passage of a few decades tends to erase the evidence of existence.
While there are a tiny number of “historically significant” individuals remembered long after their deaths, most of us have at best a fuzzy notion of even our own ancestors older than our grandparents. We can be grateful to them for preceding us and in some sense enabling us, but it’s hard to see any meaningful impact they have had except for their role in bringing us to life. And in most cases it seems hard to see any connection between anything they might have wanted or done and what it is that we each choose to do. If we take our experiences looking backward into the past, and instead use that same perspective to look forward into the future, it seems likely that we will have as miniscule and undetectable an influence on our descendants as the effect our ancestors have had on us.
Small time
Now consider the opposite end of the time scale: when we look at the very small picture and consider instant-to-instant choices, we still see that the vast majority of the time there is absolutely nothing happening. If we take a person who we judge to be highly effective, and another person who we judge to be highly ineffective, and we sample 100 random individual one-second intervals out of both their work days, the chances are pretty high that we won’t see anything to explain the difference in effectiveness. It’s very likely that every single sample will represent some kind of activity, but the decision that led to that activity probably won’t be represented in the samples. The vast majority of one’s time is not spent in making decisions. Being conscious of individual seconds is not a path to greater effectiveness – rather, it’s more likely to be a path to distractedness. The problem of irrelevancy is even more severe if we consider times that are shorter than a second.
So, if we consider time at the cosmic scale, our decisions are irrelevant. If we consider time at the split-second scale, our decisions are irrelevant. Despite both the big-picture reality and the small-picture reality, we tend to act as though our choices and actions are very important.
And they are important, in the sense that our string of past choices is what has led us to where we are now. If we made wise choices, we are likely to find that our current situation is one that we like and find comfortable; if we made unwise choices, we are likely to find that our current situation is one that we dislike or find uncomfortable.
Just right
There is a sensible granularity of time at which our decision making is relevant. We get ourselves into trouble if we try to apply human decision-making and choice at time scales that are too big or too small. So far, this is common sense. We might all nod and say, that seems reasonable. But what if we had to explain sensible decision-making to a Martian, who didn’t already know what constituted a “reasonable” granularity of time: what would we say to them? And is the answer simply an empirical measured number, based on observing many people, or is it derived from first principles about time and/or human mental processes?
One argument might be that we focus and operate at scales of size and time that make sense for us as human beings. There is a little bit of circularity threatening here, because if we ask what causes those scales to “make sense for us” we might well find that they are comfortable scales at which to focus and operate. But we can talk usefully in terms of the psychophysics of what we can perceive, and the human factors aspects of what we can affect.
We have a small number of senses with well-understood capabilities and limits, and those determine the candidate set of perceptions on which we might act; correspondingly, we have a small number of ways to affect the world via our actions, and those determine the candidate set of actions we might take in response to those perceptions. Although psychophysics and human factors may not do much to help us understand the choices we actually make, we can use them to distinguish the realm of feasible from infeasible. That explicit distinction might seem unnecessary for us, since we have developed our own mental models of what we can & can’t do; but it’s useful to be able to draw the boundary between feasible and infeasible if we’re explaining this topic to a Martian.
Models with and without death
What else affects the granularity at which time matters to us? As small children, we have no understanding of death, or the future generally. We learn by trial and error that there is a kind of small-scale causality that matters to us – we learn the difference between our bodies and the outside world, we learn various kinds of physical gratification, and we develop a model for other minds that allows us to interact socially. We might well refer to that model as the “child’s model” of the world. This child’s model of the world is the default one and is probably the mental model that most people use most of the time – even when they are adults. It is simple, largely effective, and does not bring in any of the challenges associated with thinking about death.
However, it is advantageous to be able to think at larger scales, in both space and time. The hazard is that such larger-scale thinking also exposes the thinker to issues of death that can otherwise be swept under the rug. A small-scale thinker can either be in complete denial – effectively seeing themselves as immortal – or can be aware of the inevitability of death but see it as being so far away in terms of their mental time scale that they might as well be immortal.
In contrast, the formulation of genuinely long-term personal plans (extending for a decade or more) requires an honest assessment of life expectancy and the finite span of time remaining. At some point we realize that we cannot read every book we would want to read; we cannot pursue every career we would like to pursue; we cannot be forever preparing for an endless future. Instead, we must acknowledge that a time will come when we cannot have any further influence on earthly affairs, and consider both what we want to be our legacy at that point and how we will achieve that.
Life after death
Some respond to the loss of the childhood quasi-immortal model by substituting a religious “life after death” equivalent. Within this view, there is an acknowledgement that time is limited and that our choices in the near term are important – since we will not have an infinite amount of time to find the right path, or to fix our mistakes. But within the “life after death” view, the motivating drive is quite different from what motivates us if we are aware of our mortality. Rather than facing oblivion and the extinction of our consciousness, we see ourselves as eternal beings.
While some might find this approach comforting, I find it rather silly. It already feels so extraordinary to be a conscious being experiencing the universe, attempting to comprehend the vastness that renders each of us so insignificant, and yet acknowledging the paradox that here we are, we endure, we live. There is something magnificently weird about the situation that is spoiled by the various efforts to soften the blow – to tell us some version of how we are important, immortal, embraced by the universe. I find it much more convincing that the universe is utterly indifferent to my existence or nonexistence – and yet, here I am!
In the second part, I consider how consciousness affects the way our experience changes at different time granularities.
[Note: I ran across the text for this essay when reorganizing my laptop. Judging from the markings, I cut it from an early (2014) draft of my book Bits to Bitcoin, when it had the title Names and Steps: A Guided Tour of a Computational Zoo. I have lightly edited and restructured the text, but the bulk of it is unchanged from that old draft.]