"Time, eater of all things lovely."

Time Changes Things or Does It?
I listened to rap/hip-hop/whatever it's called all night and I swear, man, I've floated off down some river-of-time tangent that is leaving me further and further away from the mainstream and stuck deep in darker and darker venues. The enthusiasm for this music is mind-boggling (remember that word?). Is it music? Musicians I know don't think it's music, but how are you gonna argue with P. Diddy, for instance, when this untrained musician will be sitting before you with a handful of Grammies and music awards and almost a billion bucks in his many bank accounts! And I listened to this same bunch, a stage full, of rappers all night and it was as if time did stand still for a solid 5 hours I swear--and I'm already swearing a lot in this first paragraph of today's ramble.

Time. And time...you think it's not complicated? Dig this...time has rendered even my vernacular off down some bottomless creek draining toward linguistic hell--linguistic obscurity--is linguistic hell like a word being reduced to an archaic state? Is the ultimate linguistic hell absolute deletion of a word or phrase from a language?

And time is fucking complicated. Everything humans invent is complicated. Did you ever notice that? A child can figure things out without much help--certainly without a manual; however, the further that child passes through the many veils of time the more confusion he has at figuring anything out. Check out the following little discussion of time I found while wiling away some time on the Internet.
___________________________
The puzzle is this. A river flows or passes in virtue of the fact that its constituent drops of water become successively closer and closer to, and then further and further away from, some spatial point regarded as fixed; i. e. at one point in time, t1, any given constituent drop of the river stands at a certain distance from the fixed spatial point, and at a successive time t2, it is closer to or further away from that point. How is it then that time flows or passes?

The advocate of the tensed view of time has an answer to this question. The constituent times that are future are becoming closer and closer to the NOW, and those that are future are receding from it.

It's not clear that the advocate of the tensed view of time is required to see the pastness, presentness, or futurity of an event or time as a literally relational property which depends on a time or event's relationship with this "NOW". This might too be taken as a metaphor, for the fact that futurity, an intrinsic property of certain events and times that comes in degrees, is gradually lost, until the object is present, at which time the event or time begins to gain intrinsic pastness.

Or an advocate of the tensed view might try to explain the metaphor without an appeal to an ontology of past and future events or times. This is the position of Arthur Prior. Prior views the tenses as unanalyzed one-place sentential operators: "I fell out of a punt" is analyzed as "It was the case that I am falling out of a punt"; I will have received my doctorate" as "It will be the case that it was the case that I am receiving my doctorate." Prior also requires more specific tense-operators: "It was the case three years ago", "It will be the case six weeks hence", etc.

To say that something has changed is to say this, according to Prior. Something that was the case is no longer the case, i. e. for some sentence S, to say "It was the case that S, and it is not now the case that S. Now the sentence S itself may have some tense operators on the front of it, as these operators are iterable. It was the case two months ago that was the case three weeks ago that I am getting married, and it is not now the case that three weeks ago I am getting married. It is this systematic change of the truth value of tensed sentences that is the literal truth behind the metaphor of time's passage or flow, according to Prior.

The advocate of the tenseless view of time has no such easy explanation of the metaphor of time's passage or flow. The advocate of the tenseless view of time analyzes such expressions as "now", "is past", "is future", as well as Prior's sentential operators "It was the case that" and "it will be the case that", in terms of McTaggart's B-concepts, by construing them as token-indexicals. "E is happening now" just means "E is simultaneous with this utterance"; "It was the case that P" just means "Earlier than this utterance, P". But these B-concepts attributed to events, times, or sentences, are eternally applicable. If an utterance of "The Civil War is past" at just means "The Civil War occurred prior to this utterance", that utterance is, if true, eternally true, and if false, eternally false. What changes, on the tenseless view of time, is not the pastness, presentness, and futurity of events, times, or sentences, for there is no property, intrinsic or relational, unambiguously designated by our "A-words". What changes (in David Kaplan's terminology) is the one aspect of the meaning of the A-words, the content of sentences containing them. (Although the character of the sentences remains constant.)

References McTaggart, J. M. E. "The Unreality of Time", in Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, eds., The Philosophy of Time. Oxford, 1993. Prior, Arthur. "Changes in Events and Changes in Things," in Le Poidevin and MacBeath, op. cit.

Copyright © 1997 Carl Brock Sides. Permission granted to distribute in any medium, commercial or non-commercial, provided all copyright notices remain intact.
____________________________________
My friend who lives in a boathouse on the Atlantic Ocean tells me I'm a fool to have so many timepieces around. I tell her, but look at them, everyone of them has a different time. That amuses me. I look at a clock and it tells me back face-to-face that it says it's a certain time while right next to it is a clock that tells me back face-to-face that it says it's a certain time, except its certain time is a minute different than the other clock's certain time.

My problem's with the flowing of time, same as the above time physicians used in arguing against McTaggart's "unreality of time"--the "tenseless view of time."

To me there is only sun-time and night-time (the right time...to be with the one you love). Hemingway wrote that his eyes were so sensitive to "daylight" that at the first crack of dawn his eyes woke him up--he couldn't sleep anymore as long as it was sun-time--that was work time to Hemingway. He'd clocked his eyes to wake him up at the crack of dawn so he could get to work writing.

All writers supposedly do their best work at the crack of dawn, nonstop up until around noon when the hunger-cravings start and it's time to break for lunch--the afternoons left for reading over what you wrote that morning--that's the perfect writer's time schedule. Of course, if you believe like I do, you believe everyone's view of life is different from everybody else's, no two alike--even the copycats can be apprehended because no two copycats are alike either.

And in a nick-of-time--after flying a stretch or two across some Internet spaces--I discovered Physical Geography--a new Sociology-bred "science"--check it out:
________________________________________________

(c). Concepts of Time and Space in Physical Geography

The concepts of time and space are very important for understanding the function of phenomena in the natural world. Time is important to Physical Geographers because the spatial patterns they study can often only be explained in historic terms. The measurement of time is not absolute. Time is perceived by humans in a relative fashion by using human created units of measurement. Examples of human created units of time are the measurement of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Geographers generally conceptualize two types of space. Concrete space represents the real world or environment. Abstract space models reality in a way that distills much of the spatial information contained in the real world. Maps are an excellent example of abstract space. Finally, like time, space is also perceived by humans in a relative fashion by using human created units of measurement. Both time and space are variable in terms of scale. As such, researchers of natural phenomena must investigate their subjects in the appropriate temporal and/or spatial scales. For example, an investigator studying a forest ecosystem will have to deal with completely different scales of time and space when compared to a researcher examining soil bacteria. The trees that make up a forest generally occupy large tracts of land. For example, the boreal forest occupies millions of hectares in Northern Canada and Eurasia. Temporally, these trees have life spans that can be as long as several hundred years. On the other hand, soil bacteria occupy much smaller spatial areas and have life spans that can be measured in hours and days.

For more of the fundamentals of Physical Geography, here ya go:

www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/
___________________________________________
Time passes so serenely slowly when you're working and listening to Satie's piano pieces at the same TIME. I'm collared by time. I'm colored by time. I'm aged by time. I'm reduced to bones by time. I'm trick-bagged by time. I'm allergic to time. Where's time in a photograph?

Time and the Aymara
Check out this concept of time and space--isn't space the container of time? Isn't infinity a time zone?
___________________________________
Backs to the Future
Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-Image View of Time

By Inga Kiderra

Tell an old Aymara speaker to “face the past!” and you just might get a blank stare in return – because he or she already does.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind. ...

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the “language of Adam.” More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called “Andean logic” – which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no – to computer applications. ...

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year.”

But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole story.

Take an “exotic” language like English: You can use the word “ahead” to signify an earlier point in time, saying “We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m.” to mean “It’s now 12:40 p.m.” Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.

For more of this Aymara way of thinking, here ya go:

ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp
__________________________________________
Time on my (ay-mara) hands--and, yes, facing forward facing the past is an interesting concept--a rather literary concept, don't you think?

thetimelessgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler