Dear Koichiro, 

I return to your pertinent summary of May 10 that led me to an unexpected 
conclusion, half of which you may like and half you may not like. I apologize 
in advance for the latter.

I feel that in point 3. of your note you describe a key to time but you do not 
use it! 

1. Cyanobacteria, and in my view all living and non-living systems, do not 
exist in an external, background time, they synthesize or "unroll" it as they 
develop, of course independently of language.  The absence of a background 
space-time has also been proposed by Carlo Rovelli, among other cosmologists. 

2. Synchronization, as I read your subsequent points 4. and 5., simply comes 
out of the biochemistry, although no one is claiming, least of all I, that we 
can know from basic principles why specific proteins do what they do.

3. Thus the difficulties you point to in your 2. could be just a consequence of 
starting with the concept of time, defined as something that can progress 
linearly, as an analytical tool.

4. In your points 6. and 7., you return to a concept of time that seems at 
first to have been reified, separated from the real entities with which it is 
associated, and made the product of a synthesis by information. The objective, 
as you have written well earlier, is to better understand the interplay of what 
we call the tenses in language.

5. In my view, however, phenomenological time is the consequence of the 
interplay between real, physical entities. But then our views could be 
reconciled if we could agree that, as I now propose, we consider information as 
one of the energetic aspects of the existence of humans and other complex 
systems! Time as the consequence of "synthesis by information" converges 
towards, in this interpretation, time as the consequence of  "synthesis by 
(real) systems"!

How is that for using time as a synthetic construction rather than as an 
analytical tool?!

Best wishes,

Joseph

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Koichiro Matsuno 
To: joe.bren...@bluewin.ch ; fis@listas.unizar.es 
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2011 2:09 AM
Subject: RE: [Fis] replies to several


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

 
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis

Reply via email to