your estimate of how much time has passed in the past day or year for example
the actual amount of experiences that happened in the past day or year
I think those three are distinct things (even though they correlate). For example the feeling of the passage of time can be drastically altered with psychedelics—it’s possible to feel that time is not passing at all. (Here is a nice video which lists spooky time-effects and speculates how are they produced). But even though that moment may feel like eternity, it’s not that there’s actually an infinite amount of experience happening.
As for the estimate of the time passed, as you and other commenters noted, it looks to be based on how much memories you have from some time period. So someone with dementia would probably estimate that much less time has passed recently, even if a lot of experiences actually happened.
It’s nice to have good memories, but I think what ultimately matters are the actual experiences and their valence and intensity (even if you forget them later).
Still, the things you list sound cool, so thanks for reminding me to do them :)
We can separate 3 things:
the feeling of how fast time is passing now
your estimate of how much time has passed in the past day or year for example
the actual amount of experiences that happened in the past day or year
I think those three are distinct things (even though they correlate). For example the feeling of the passage of time can be drastically altered with psychedelics—it’s possible to feel that time is not passing at all. (Here is a nice video which lists spooky time-effects and speculates how are they produced). But even though that moment may feel like eternity, it’s not that there’s actually an infinite amount of experience happening.
As for the estimate of the time passed, as you and other commenters noted, it looks to be based on how much memories you have from some time period. So someone with dementia would probably estimate that much less time has passed recently, even if a lot of experiences actually happened.
It’s nice to have good memories, but I think what ultimately matters are the actual experiences and their valence and intensity (even if you forget them later).
Still, the things you list sound cool, so thanks for reminding me to do them :)