The conception of time as a line is so common that there is a word for it, "timeline" even.
He also says in the "General Remark on the System of Principles":
Conjecture: time is not limited to one dimension.
Evidence, article 1: the classical conception of eternity. To perceive an eternal now would be to perceive all of sempiternity at once. But sempiternity is only an infinite succession of finite nows (all that is the present) that together constitute an infinite line through time. Dimensional perception works like this: if your perceptual apparatus is itself n-dimensional, you can perceive n-1-dimensional space (this is the impression I get from everything I've read of the book Flatland). So a temporally two-dimensional vision would see not just points (nows) but entire lines of time. Eternal perception, then, may be considered as equivalent to temporally two-dimensional perception.
Article 2: physicists allow that time may be multidimensional. See http://physics.usc.edu/~bars/homepage/Time_gains_an_extra_dimension.pdf for a good overview of this allowance.
So is Kant right (and wrong, technically)? Is it possible to think of time as more than a line? Suppose, even, that it is more than a line. Suppose it's three-dimensional. (There is an oblique reason for me, personally, to suppose this, but for now, just grant the premise for the sake of a sorta thought experiment.) Then there are structures in existence made out of timelines (the lines of temporal awareness or of world histories, arguably), structures that look exactly like certain geometrical patterns in space would.
Here's a less-arguable-for idea (forgive that not-so-ideal turn of phrase): suppose that some of these 3D-time structures look like, say, living things. Humans, things with wings, whatever. And suppose these "move," or have their own lives, lives that involve events and, therefore, moment-to-moment transition. Then suppose that those changes in turn get reflected into another threefold isotope of space (the timeline-like order of these changes adding up to 3D structures of another order), and so on.
I came up with this notion after dealing with psychedelics both in my own life and through years of research on the Internet. I was trying to make sense of this sense of reality being "layered" or having "levels," not just levels of attention in description (levels of detail) but of substance (or something). I also was familiar with the ancient faith in "planes of existence," a faith traceable to gnostic Christianity and mystical Judaism (or Buddhism) and apparent in a game like Dungeons and Dragons or poetry like Dante's Divine Commedy. Now a plane could just as well be thought of as a dimension, wherefore a higher plane is just a higher dimension of space and time, not some domain of exotic symmetry thereto. But in D&D, for instance, the facts on different planes all appear 3-dimensionally, which accords well with the proposition of an iterated base geometry for each plane in its entirety. (In other words, a plane may be by definition a set of three dimensions of space-like realities.) And I know many reports of DMT use indicate a literal hyperspatiality to the experience, but my only comparable self-knowledge would be of the effects of salvia, and as geometrically warped as that knowledge was for me to acquire, even the "space" I broke through to was still a realm of length, width, and height, but not a fourth vector. And it's not absolutely clear to me from the reports I've read that DMT breakthroughs involve seeing angles that actually transcend 3D spatial configurations (as opposed to seeming to, as in representations of Calabi-Yau manifolds or Klein bottles).
For now, I'll leave the last word to Kant again:
Immanuel Kant said:
He also says in the "General Remark on the System of Principles":
Conjecture: time is not limited to one dimension.
Evidence, article 1: the classical conception of eternity. To perceive an eternal now would be to perceive all of sempiternity at once. But sempiternity is only an infinite succession of finite nows (all that is the present) that together constitute an infinite line through time. Dimensional perception works like this: if your perceptual apparatus is itself n-dimensional, you can perceive n-1-dimensional space (this is the impression I get from everything I've read of the book Flatland). So a temporally two-dimensional vision would see not just points (nows) but entire lines of time. Eternal perception, then, may be considered as equivalent to temporally two-dimensional perception.
Article 2: physicists allow that time may be multidimensional. See http://physics.usc.edu/~bars/homepage/Time_gains_an_extra_dimension.pdf for a good overview of this allowance.
So is Kant right (and wrong, technically)? Is it possible to think of time as more than a line? Suppose, even, that it is more than a line. Suppose it's three-dimensional. (There is an oblique reason for me, personally, to suppose this, but for now, just grant the premise for the sake of a sorta thought experiment.) Then there are structures in existence made out of timelines (the lines of temporal awareness or of world histories, arguably), structures that look exactly like certain geometrical patterns in space would.
Here's a less-arguable-for idea (forgive that not-so-ideal turn of phrase): suppose that some of these 3D-time structures look like, say, living things. Humans, things with wings, whatever. And suppose these "move," or have their own lives, lives that involve events and, therefore, moment-to-moment transition. Then suppose that those changes in turn get reflected into another threefold isotope of space (the timeline-like order of these changes adding up to 3D structures of another order), and so on.
I came up with this notion after dealing with psychedelics both in my own life and through years of research on the Internet. I was trying to make sense of this sense of reality being "layered" or having "levels," not just levels of attention in description (levels of detail) but of substance (or something). I also was familiar with the ancient faith in "planes of existence," a faith traceable to gnostic Christianity and mystical Judaism (or Buddhism) and apparent in a game like Dungeons and Dragons or poetry like Dante's Divine Commedy. Now a plane could just as well be thought of as a dimension, wherefore a higher plane is just a higher dimension of space and time, not some domain of exotic symmetry thereto. But in D&D, for instance, the facts on different planes all appear 3-dimensionally, which accords well with the proposition of an iterated base geometry for each plane in its entirety. (In other words, a plane may be by definition a set of three dimensions of space-like realities.) And I know many reports of DMT use indicate a literal hyperspatiality to the experience, but my only comparable self-knowledge would be of the effects of salvia, and as geometrically warped as that knowledge was for me to acquire, even the "space" I broke through to was still a realm of length, width, and height, but not a fourth vector. And it's not absolutely clear to me from the reports I've read that DMT breakthroughs involve seeing angles that actually transcend 3D spatial configurations (as opposed to seeming to, as in representations of Calabi-Yau manifolds or Klein bottles).
For now, I'll leave the last word to Kant again:
