Rough Beast: Consider Time

Time counts off the indefinite, continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. Time is a measuring system that allows us to 'lay a ruler' against the sequence, duration and intervals between events. Events and objects have temporal positions with respect to a transitory present that changes or 'marches through time' such that future evvents present and past events recede into the past. Note that we cannot separate the time from our notions of space. I can picture an elephant of any size or color but I cannot imagine an elephant the takes up no space - even a pink elephant in 'the minds eye' seems to take up space in the furniture of the mind. How do we talk about time without invoking our intuitions about space?

What exactly do we mean when we talk about time in conversation? Does an intuitive notion of time presume a fixed flow rate of 'time stuff' that serves to keep lunch time prior to dinner but after we wake up in the morning? In a car accident my sense of time slows - does time change or do I change? Is time just what keeps everything from happening all at once? Is space just keeps everything from being in the same place.

All these questions bear down on a bald proposition - we don't know what time is exactly but we know time when we live it. From this I claim that time measured in a laboratory with precision is not a different kind of time than the "we'll get together next week" kind of time but is, in fact, the same kind of time with more a highly accurate and precise kind of boundaries. In other words, the definition of time above does not adequately comprehend the conceptual semantics of the personal, subjective reports of time in the language of thought.

Broadly speaking, English treats time as three distinct (and possibly overlapping) arenas of time. The first is the present time. But the present moment or instant is not an instantaneous 'time bookmark' lasting 1/1000000 of a second - a measurement that can not be taken without invoking the notion of time itself as a yard stick. "Time is a series of short duration stretches of a meta-time or the time in which time itself exists" - that is, Time is measured over time

Which puts us back to the beginning. A solution in mentalese, the language of thought, was provided by William James, the 19th century father of psychology. James considered a moving window of time from the inertial framework of an observer (this was before Special Relativity was adduced in 1905). In this schematic of 'thought time' James called the present instantiation of usable time the specious present. After some experiments on a sample of people using the tools of psychology the duration of a specious present was defined as roughly three seconds. From this, our bodies sweep past a series of three second intervals from birth to death. Whatever we think we know about time we must adjust to a notion that life arrives at us in chucks and our behavior or response to this arrives at an observer in the same series of chucks. Note that the 3 second span of the specious present is an average. Cognitive neuroscience has mapped the fine grain nature of our mental processes down to the firing of neuron action potentials at a timescale measured in milliseconds. The duration of each specious moment is better described as the time it takes to complete a movement; the time it takes to swing a 9 iron, the time it takes to sneeze and wipe your nose on your sleeve, the time it takes a ball thrown from deep left field to reach the cut-off man. These are our heterogeneous collections of specious moments, the entire set of all specious presents.

The second cognitive notion of time - the time base in our consciousness - rests on tense and the hidden sibling of tense called aspect. Aspect is the notion that some spoken reports about time have fixed duration while some events are continuous. Sam won the 100 meter dash has an implicit duration. A race starts and ends and is not a continueing process. Joe is lost in thought. The process of thinking is open ended since no one just stops thinking after a while. i

In this construction our mentalese divides time into the three domains of past, present and future. The past is broadly a range of time from the present that stretches back to the beginning of the universe (which 'starts the clock' on time at the Big Bang 13.72 BYA). Similarly the future is an interval from the 'next specious present' to 'the heat death of the universe' [end note 3.1416]. But we are not always simply announcing "Here am I" or "I am leaving" using the present tense - we habitually invoke a moving frame of reference that itself (apart from any action verb tense) resets the actual specious present (the three seconds it takes to read this sentence) with a 'remembered' past specious present or an 'imagined' future specious present.

"Sally will have written the letter to the Baron by the time her flight leaves on Sunday." No native English speaker needs to draw a time line to intuit a predictable shared contextual framework. We have experienced some version of this kind of statement and can easily mint new constructions without effort. The frame of reference is next Sunday, the specious present - the real, actual 'now' - is bounded by the specious moment that the sentence was uttered up until Sally writes the letter to the Baron but before her plane takes off on Sunday. Note that verb tense is one of the last hurdles for new English speakers from infants to adults. In fact, it is an enduring cultural conceit that the cognitive machinery that produces such utterances is itself a marker of status. "Uncle Bo took him and learned him how to play the geetar." will only get you a date if you work at Walmart with other people challenged by our shared notion of time, tense and the mental framework that supports cognition [end note 6.626]

A philosopher in itself

Lastly, apart from a monkey's view of time embodied in our biology, does my mind restrict my mental model to the most useful or pragmatic notion of time as a thing in itself? Why do I think of time like I do and am I really thinking about time as time really, truly is? Frankly, no one really knows and it is not for lack of trying. The difficulty is as much in the language we use to exchange information about ordering of events (including thoughts and actions), the duration of events (i.e. the causal network of effects or results) as a deep problem with what kind of time actually, really, understandably unfolds or unrolls throughout our lives. Truly, the language of thought which supports our notion of time can reward the thinker of these thoughts with ice cream on a hot day or hot soup in the cold but keeps us from torturing ourselves with hot soup in the summer. Within the framework of contextual semantics - our subjective reports to others about what will happen next. We have not simply stumbled upon a 'time toolbox' that manipulates time in the mind. Our intuitions is that we can stand outside of time (I can remember events in the past in a relative 'time framework' that supports a 'tenseless time' that we can manipulate to orient us in space-time. I can effortlessly place myself in that restaurant in Paris where I was served a most excellent duck. The mental tableau includes the interior space, the arrangement of tables, chairs, patrons and waiters. The waiter walks from the kitchen to my table (of the mind) in a fixed interval of time (in the mind). I will pick up the bananas on my way home from the cleaners. That is my focused intent but I never forget this kind of time has not happened yet.

Lastly, note that all of these mental gymnastics take place in a series of brain states of a specific duration and in a specific order. The material world has generated time flowing from the past and into the future. But is all time everywhere flowing in the direction of increasing entropy. This is Hawking's arrow of time spelled out in A Brief History of Time. You have finished this post, did you enjoy the time you spent? Can you enjoy this experience 'endlessly' in future moments? Time will tell.

end note [3.1416]
[sic] Past models of a universe that expands until all waves (bosons) and particles (fermions) reach a state of maximum entropy from which no work energy can be extracted is flawed. At some point in this old model the entire universe is cold and dead. Steven Hawking has upended this notion with a more recent vintage of a model which includes spontaneous generation of particle-antiparticle in the vacuum of space (Hawking Radiation). But I like the phrase 'until the heat death of the universe' and you will pry this phrase from my cold, dead mouth.[end note 6.626]

end note [4.669]
There is not a subconscious mind. What there is - cognition emerging from computational machines that embody Bayes Neural Networks processing - is ALL there is. What 'rises to consciousness' is the rare event that invokes speech or propels us on another trajectory when we are in the presence of others. My consciousness needs your consciousness to push off against. This is the Theory of Minds; I have a mind and I provisionally grant that you have a mind like mine until proven otherwise. This finding from evolutionary psychology universally corrodes our folk psychology regarding free will. My will is a provisional will allowed by interaction with other minds. Free will cannot hold itself up with a sky-hook and there is no crane which can prop up free will.
Imagine I am standing next to I-35 at rush hour and I need something on the other side of the highway. Is it my 'free' will (the output of my free will machine) to chose to cross now, wait until later to cross or to walk to an overpass now so that I can cross safely later (a future or anticipated specious present)? According to Hume, none of these choices - choices worked out with inductive reasoning - make any sense at all. What if a gang of thugs with pipes and knives comes up behind me as I wait to cross? According to Hume and Bayes, my fate is sealed since I have no 'free' choices. I can only react based upon Bayesian Inference - Hume run on a computer.

end note [6.626]
I use the mantissa of physical constants (pi, Planck's Constant, Feigenbaum Constant) for footnotes and end notes. I don' have a good reason, it just seemed like it is time to bring this up.