Lee Rudolph wrote:
wotthehell,wotthehell. I am willing to bet a latte at our next meeting that you and I are the only two people on this list who know the source of this quote. Arent there three whotthehells? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Lee Rudolph Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2015 10:02 PM To: Nick Thompson; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Kitchen] FW: P. and V. Jaan, Nick, Philip, and lurkers, I am avoiding learning anything about "abduction" at this time. But I want to wholeheartedly endorse the following passage by Nick, particularly the last two sentences (emboldened for those who can see such things; which is me at the moment but not when I'm using my preferred mail client) of his first paragraph. ________________________________________ [...] But it would seem to me that the experience of time is, like the experience of me and the experience of you, or the experience of real as opposed to the experience of dream or the experience of now, or then, or soon, something that has to be worked out and developed during early childhood. It is a cognitive achievement which children master only slowly, as demonstrated by their behavior on long car trips. It is easily deranged by fatigue, or drugs, or illness. It seems a bit truer to me to say that time is the result of our experience of processes than to say that our experience of processes is the result of our understanding of time. That is, time is inferred from o[u]r experience with events and processes. This is the best I can offer at the moment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- And very good it is, too! Though I might quibble about the extent to which we can "experience [...] events and processes" *as* "events" and "processes" until we have developed "time". The last sentence might better suit my (pre-existing to Nick's post, even if not yet as developed as Nick or I might like) own intuitions/beliefs/wool-gatherings/pre-thoughts about time if it were rephrased along these lines: "That is, 'time' and 'events' and 'processes' are inferred from our experience [singular!] before any one of them is 'understood'; it is in our 'coming to understand them' that our experience becomes our experiences [plural!]." Not as pithy, and still doesn't get everything into one statement. Maybe we should just stick with Nick's version. ...Oh, well. Here's another cut-and-paste job, from my first Jaan-commissioned paper, on time. Let's see if it can be tickled into giving someone some ideas about induction. (After I paste I'm logging off for the night; see you all tomorrow.) ===begin=== [mathematical maunderings precede this, in which I propose one mathematical model of what I call a "full time", which is more or less like a string of beads: they come in sequence, and to that extent are "1-dimensional" in both a colloquial sense and a mathematical sense; but each bead has its own multidimensional quality, interior to itself] One common hypothesis about psychological time has been stated by Whitrow (1980). "Our awareness of time involves factors which we do not associate with the abstract concept of time, notably fixation of attention. Our conscious awareness of time depends on the fact that our minds operate by successive acts of attention " (p. 71-2) He refers this hypothesis back to numerous authors, including Mach, Woodrow, Mowbray, James, and Cassirer; we have seen it above (p. 5) in the passage from van Uexküll (1920/1926). In a later chapter, Whitrow continues "our intuitive conception of time as one-dimensional may be due to the previously mentioned fact that, strictly speaking, we can consciously attend to only one thing at a time, and that we cannot do this for long without our attention wandering. Our idea of time is thus directly linked to our train of thought, that is, with the fact that the process of thinking has the form of a linear sequence. This linear sequence, however, consists of discrete acts of attention." (p. 115) This restatement of the common hypothesis can be read as endorsement of modeling psychological time by a discrete totally ordered set (linear sequence of discrete acts). What is missing from the common hypothesis (as restated by Whitrow) is an account of what, if anything, interpolates between successive discrete acts of attention, as our attention is wandering timelessly. I suggest that, in the world of psychological phenomena the better understanding of which all our modeling is in aid of, what interpolates successive discrete acts of attention are states of ambivalence. I further suggest that, in the mathematical models contrived the better to understand that world of psychological phenomena, a state of ambivalence among some given number n of foci of attention should be modeled by a mathematical space of dimension n 1. (The selection of this dimension reflects the naïve idea, surely wrong as stated, that ambivalence is divided attention. Of course the division of a thing into n parts depends on n 1, not n, free choices.) As long aslike Whitrowall ambivalences are merely two-fold, the choice of a line segment as the interpolating 1-dimensional space is natural enough, and has the familiar effect of turning the standard model Z of a time series into the standard model R of a time line. [a small further mathematical maundering follows, and concludes the paper] ===end=== By the way, I doubt that n is ever larger than 3. But wotthehell,wotthehell.
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