Folks,
Joseph wrote: Two aspects of the exchange between Koichiro and Loet merit attention: 1) Loet said that his point of replacing “why” with “what” did not seem necessary to him. In my mind, however, when Koichiro refers to “what is communicated by what”, he is insisting on not losing the qualitative components of the information involved. Let me make my points a little bit clearer. 1. Being empirical is not necessarily rational (e.g., Galilei’s empirical inertia v.s. Aristotle’s rational telos). 2. Linear progression of time, say time (t+1) following time t, is already a consequence of synchronization among the clocks available to us. A point of clarification is that synchronization in the making as a necessary condition for a meaningful integration into whatever context is not sure about whether it could also proceed upon a linear progression of time. Suppose everybody asks the nearest neighbor “what time do you have?”. The outcome might be somewhere in between the two extremes of a successful synchronization in the end among all of them on one hand and a total mess on the other. 3. Linguistic or theoretical access to synchronization in the making would be hard to imagine when it is prohibited to refer to time as a comprehensible analytical tool in advance. This does not however mean the end of the whole issue. Empirical access to synchronization in the making is totally different. Cyanobacteria as the first photosynthetic bacteria appeared on Earth could have been quite successful in synchronizing their circadian clocks among them without asking the help of our languages. 4. Addressing the theoretical question of what kinds of material means are employed for the job of synchronization and why, goes far beyond our present rational comprehension. Although the cyanobacterial circadian clocks employ three different kinds of protein called KaiA, B and C for the job, we cannot say for sure at this moment why these particular proteins would come to be focused upon. This has been an irrevocable empirical fact. 5. Neuronal dynamics is full of synchronization in the making by means of exchanging an extremely wide variety of chemical messengers, including for instance acetylcholine, available empirically. 6. Even if we take a pause for a while for addressing the grandiose why-questions, there may still remain some room for tailoring time for a comprehensible analytical tool. Time is further qualified in terms of its tense. There remains a likelihood of addressing how the actual dynamics would proceed through the interplay between the different tenses, especially between the present progressive and the present perfect tense. 7. Put it bluntly, information synthesizes the flow of time from scratch. Cheers, Koichiro
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