Dear Joseph,
> I feel that in point 3. of your note you describe a key to time but you do > not use it! Right. The last time, I skipped over something. The issue is how to descriptively approach phenomenological time via the interplay between real, physical systems without prior reference to the flow of time on the global scale. My intended entry for this endeavor has been to pay attention to some physical body remaining invariant while being constantly involved in exchanging its constituent subunits. That is to say, once a molecular aggregate happens to appear whose class identity is kept intact while the constituent subunits constantly come and go, the through-flow maintaining the class identity of the aggregate can superficially be associated with the flow of time as we know of it in the contradictory sense that while passing away constantly, time remains as time as keeping its identity. The flow of time here is only taken as “a representation”, or an anthropocentric metaphor at best, of the material through-flow as a decisive factor for keeping the class identity of a physical body at the cost of the vicissitude of the individual identities of the constituent subunits. The cyanobacterial circadian clocks are just an empirical example of keeping the class identity of a KaiC hexamer while constantly exchanging or shuffling the monomeric KaiC subunits. >The objective, as you have written well earlier, is to better understand the >interplay of what we call the tenses in language. The underlying issue is how can we construct the flow of time from the tenses. When the constant update of the present perfect tense in the present progressive tense is referred to in the finished record, we can perceive the flow of time as driven by the transitive verb “update” in the present tense, though only in retrospect. This updated version of the flow of time in retrospect exhibits a marked contrast to the flow of time riding on the intransitive verb “flow” in the present tense unconditionally, the latter of which is common to the standard practice of physical sciences even including relativity. The occurrence of the perfect tense is due to the act of measurement of material origin distinguishing between the before and after its own act, while its frequent update in the progressive tense will be necessitated so as to meet various conservation laws such as material or energy flow continuity to be registered in the record, e. g., not to leave the failure in meeting the flow continuity behind. The KaiC hexamers of cyanobacteria are involved in the constant update of the prefect tense in the progressive tense. >How is that for using time as a synthetic construction rather than as an >analytical tool?! The flow of time read by the externalist, say, by Ptolemy-Newton, into an invariant cyclic motion of the stellar configuration displayed over the sky is enigmatic in relating a cyclic movement of physical bodies to a linear movement of something else called time. A less ambitious approach could be to relate a linear movement of physical bodies to the linear movement of time even if the latter is an anthropocentric artifact, unless the artifact interferes with the physical bodies. The flow of time read-into by the physicist implies no linear flow of time in the absence of the physicist as leaving only the original cyclic motions behind. That must be quite stifling. In contrast, appreciating the material through-flow keeping the class identity of the supporting material aggregate as being represented as the flow of time comes to imply that the through-flow is informational in that it presumes both the message (e.g., the subunits to be exchanged) and its dative (e.g., the aggregate processing their exchanges). Both information and time, once set free from the read-into flow of time, are common in sharing the similar materialistic and energetic context in incorporating the transitive verbs into themselves as holding the contrast between the direct and the indirect object of a verb, that is to say, between a message and its dative. Despite that, I am not quite sure at this moment whether this synthetic view would merely be one step backward for the sake of the likely two steps forward to come. Best, Koichiro
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