Wednesday, April 15, 2026

The three times in human aging

In human aging we can distinguish three 'times'. Physical time, biological time and intrinsic, lived time (ontochronology).  The biological time can be written as a smooth function $b(t)$ of physical time. Ontochronology - which is in a sense the real age for a human being - is measured by the length of the graph $b(t)$ starting from the moment of birth $(t_0, b(t_0))$. Thus

$o(t) = \int_{t_0}^t\sqrt{1 + b'(t)^2} dt$

If we consider the total chronological time of a person's life as fixed, then corresponding to this constraint there can be great variability in the corresponding smooth graph for $b(t)$ (subject to further biological constraints). For instance $b(t)$ may for a significant portion of physical time lie beneath the diagonal $\Delta(t) = t$ and thus that person will have in total a longer youth determined by periods in which their biological age is less than their chronological age. There is a certain similarity between these considerations and the measurement of time in special relativity.

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