The Value of Time

Theories of welfare typically say that how well one’s life goes depends upon the value of certain things – sensory pleasure, happiness, desire-satisfaction, achieved aims, etc. – and how much one has of them. For many of these things, quantity comes partially in the form of duration – the longer one experiences a pleasure, or happiness, or the longer one has desires that are fulfilled, the better.

If we treat duration straightforwardly in terms of the amount of time that one satisfies a certain property – being happy, or having desires satisfied – then we will get an interesting and perhaps awkward result.

It is conceptually possible that we might be able to speed up our lives. Suppose that before birth, God took you aside and explained that you had a choice between two universes in which to be born. Your life would go exactly the same in the two, except in one universe, everything would happen a trillion times as fast. You wouldn’t be able to detect this difference, because your mental faculties themselves would happen a trillion times as fast, but if you were born into this universe, you would live a full life (you’d get married, have a long and significant career, etc.) in a fraction of a second.

On the straightforward way of understanding value and duration, your life would be much much worse in this world. You would have all of the same positive experiences, but those positive experiences would last a fraction of a second.

Is this right? I admit my intuitions are divided. On the one hand, the two lives are indistinguishable from the inside. While things that we’re not aware of can make our life worse, it is somewhat unintuitive that undetectable differences of duration should matter. If everything were doubled in length of time, it wouldn’t improve our lives, would it? So how could contraction make our lives worse?

If we were gripped by this intuition, we might try to quantize mental experiences, and count quanta rather than trying to measure raw duration. It is an open question whether or not it is possible to quantize mental states. It is tempting to think about experiences as amorphous and divisible: a state of happiness is always divisible into smaller states of happiness. If time itself is quantized, then of course states of happiness are at some level too, but the quanta of time won’t allow us to say that two indistinguishable lives led at different paces have the same quanta of experiences. For this, we must find some way of quantizing mental states that allow us to say that the full and contracted lives involve the same number of mental quanta.

There are, surely, complex processes underlying the happiness in the brain, but experiences don’t seem to be built out of self-contained wholes. I don’t think that it would be surprising to find out that this assumption is false – to find an adequate way of quantizing mental states -- but there is no prima facie guarantee that it is.

On the other hand, a life that is over in the blink of an eye seems to be bad. If you’re given the choice between being tortured for an hour or tortured for a second -- but have your mental processes so that it seems like an hour, would it be unreasonable to opt for the latter to get it over quicker? You might think that it doesn’t matter how many quanta you experience, if you move past them in a heartbeat.

I wonder whether my intuitions are being driven by different metaphysical conceptions of time. On one conception, time moves from past to future, and it might make sense to want to get past pain quicker, or stay with pleasure longer, quantal differences be damned. On another conception, time doesn’t really change any more than location does. Events in the past and events in the future are like things at different places. They are equally real, and any appearance to the contrary is a matter of perspective. If this is the case, it is perhaps more plausible that the contracted life is no worse. Each quantum continues to be equally real from the perspective of the future, and so, a shorter duration doesn’t diminish its value.