Tempus Vitae

Tempus Vitae, Latin for "Time of Life," deals with the implications of relativistic time when applied to experiential existence.

Thought Experiment

Tempus Vitae can perhaps be best understood with a thought-experiment:

Imagine that you are in a room with a machine that can perfectly freeze your body, leave it frozen for any duration of time, and then unfreeze it without any issues or complications whatsoever.

"See you soon!" a voice says as the machine turns on.

"Welcome back!" the voice says as the machine shuts off.

How much time has passed? A minute? A day? A year? A millennia!?

The machine froze you instantaneously before, and thus, all your cellular and neuronal activity ceased immediately and indefinitely until the machine unfroze you. While you were frozen, you may as well have been dead: you were wholly incapable of experiencing anything whatsoever.

In other words, from your perspective, you experienced absolutely no difference whether you were frozen a month or a millennia or a trillion years. You could not experience anything so you could not experience time or its passage.

Implications of Tempus Vitae

When you apply this same logic to your current life, you should see the major implication here.

Imagine that you're watching a movie and then suddenly and instantly you die.

In a googolplex raised to the googolplex years (which is such an unfathomably large number that if you totaled all the atoms in the entire known universe and subtracted that many years, it would still - for all intents and purposes - be the same unfathomably large number you started with) you experience something again.

Unbeknownst to you, this is your first moment of experiencing something as some alien animal on some alien world in this eternally far flung future alien universe.

Despite what can only be described as an eternity of eternities having passed, for you the transition was instantaneous. One moment you were watching a movie on Earth; the next you were feeling some first sensation from your new baby alien animal body.

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We can refer to this personal relativity as the Tempus Vitae or "Time of Life." Let's apply the logic of this Tempus Vitae to before your first experience or feeling on Earth: the instant before was either:

The last moment before you died in whatever body had previously generated your consciousness. The beginning of not just eternity, but of all eternities. This is something we do not know and can probably never know exists, but if you have faith it does, you can call it this the start of the Saecula Aeterna or "Eternal Ages."

Now, I understand you may be tempted to think option #2 isn't absurd beyond all measure - not realizing the sheer number of times you've been shocked in this life at how quickly the days have melted, months slipped by, and years faded into decades.

Recall that you do not experience time when you're not alive. You experienced absolutely nothing until the first moment anything could be experienced. From your perspective or Tempus Vitae, time only flowed when you were capable of feeling its flow.

If the entire universe could have been frozen in time for a trillion years and then unfrozen, and all other things from the Earth to your life were completely equivalent to how they have unfolded up to now, you would be here right now just as you are. From your perspective, time only occurs and passes when you can experience it.

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Here is where I will put additional examples and scenarios to help you understand what Tempus Vitae is.

Imagine there is a room that when you enter it you immediately become totally unconscious. After some time has passed, a large mechanical scoop moves your body back out of the room and you awaken instantly and with no adverse effects.

How long were you in the room?

The only thing that could possibly help you here would be if you dreamt any while you were unconscious. But assuming no dreams and no hunger or other time-based issue matters with regard to time in this room, you will have no way of knowing how long you were in there.

This is because when you aren't experiencing anything, you don't experience time.

You can apply this same logic to before you were born and what will happen after you die. It's like the room but while inside you are dead and when scooped out you are alive as something similar to how you are alive as something now.

An eternity could pass while you're in the room and yet from your perspective there isn't a single moment missing: you were only ever outside the room.

This could go on trillions upon trillion of times and yet the transition between lives would be instant and you wouldn't miss a moment.

You would be completely unaware of your infinite journey.

See Also

 ➤ Infinite Journey: 

 ➤ Wikipedia: Special relativity, Relativity of simultaneity