Once Upon A Time

[coberst]

Once Upon A Time

Long, long ago, I took a course in physics at Oklahoma Agriculture and Mechanical College now called Oklahoma State University. That physics course defined speed to be equal to the distance traversed by an object in a unit of time. For the initiated that is s=d/t. It was assumed that distance and time were more primitive concepts than was motion.

I live in the mountains and often go hiking. On occasion some motion among all the other fluttering motions going on within my perception halts all activity, my pulse races, chills run down my back, and all my attention is focused upon a particular motion. Later I consciously analyze the situation and discover that that motion was similar to a dangerous motion as defined by my genes. We are hard-wired to respond to motion. I discover every time such an incident occurs that motion is number one and time is not supreme.

“What we call the domain of time appears to be a conceptual domain that we use for asking certain questions about events through our comparison to other events: where they are “located� relative to other events, how can they be measured relative to other events, and so on. What is literal and inherent about the conceptual domain of time is that it is characterized by the comparison of events.�

“This does not mean that we do not have an experience of time…What it means is that our real experience of time is dependent, is always relative to our real experience of events. It also means that our experience of time is dependent on or embodied conceptualization of time in terms of events. This is a major point: Experience does not always come prior to conceptualization, because conceptualization is itself embodied. Furthermore, it means that our experience of time is grounded in other experiences, the experience of events.�

What, if anything, is time ‘in itself’? I suspect no one can answer that question because such a thing, I guess, does not exist. We are able to talk of time only with metaphors.

Common linguistic expressions: “That’s all behind us now. Let’s put that in back of us now. We’re looking ahead to the future. He has a great future in front of of him.�

A Moving Time Metaphor: “There is a lone, stationary observer facing in a fixed direction. There is an indefinitely long sequence of objects moving past the observer from front to back. The moving objects are conceptualized as having fronts in their direction of motion.�

Common linguistic expressions: “There’s going to be trouble down the road. Will you be staying a long time or a short time. Let’s spread the conference over two weeks. We passed the deadline. I’ll be there in a minute.�

A Moving Observer Metaphor: “What we will encounter in the future is what we are moving towards. What we are encountering now is what we are moving by. What we encounter in the past is what we moved past.�

We see in these time metaphors a duality of figure and background reversals. In one metaphor time moves and the observer is stationary while in the other the observer moves and time is stationary. Such duality of figure-ground reversals is apparently common in human perception. “Object-location duality occurs for a simple reason: Many metaphorical mappings take a motion in space as a source domain. With motion in space, there is the possibility of reversing figure and ground.�

The quotes are from “Philosophy in the Flesh�.

[santa]

http://www.aip.org/pnu/1998/split/pnu408-3.htm

RELATIVISTIC SLEIGH RIDE. The December 11 issue of Fermi News seeks to answer the perennial question of how Santa Claus can, in the course of a single night, deliver gifts to each of the world's 2 billion children. Even if a full-scale quantum computer were to work out the optimum course plan St. Nick must still cover a flight path of some 160 million km and stop at 800 million homes along the way. How does he do it? By traveling at close to the speed of light, of course, which, incidentally, also explains why (thanks to time dilation) Santa never seems to age. The Fermi News article helpfully addresses such questions as to how it is that the fat fellow can fit into Lorentz-contracted chimneys in the first place and how one can determine the color of the Doppler-shifted light emitted by Rudolph-the-rednosed-reindeer at sleigh velocities approaching the speed of light.

[BTS]

Ah....... Metaphors.....

Love them..
I am not educated nor a deep thinker but I feel I am in tune with a lot of the thoughts you write about IE.... time and how it is perceived by humankind (including animals and all other living creatures for that matter) and do believe time is something we know little about. I think there are different levels of time that we can not or are not able to comprehend. We can write about the theories but they remain theories as such, nothing more.

Until we can travel forwards and backwards in REAL time we will only be able to do it in our mind and our mind alone. I think it will be our minds that we travel in when we do figure it out though. I do not think in our form of existence it is possible to be in 2 places at the same time (only in the mind). But if 2 people are in the same place and time in their minds there is a way to communicate without talking............ I know crazy huh?

OK a few of my favorite Time Metaphors I found years ago from :

The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor

George Lakoff
(c) Copyright George Lakoff, 1992
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~market/semiotic/lkof_met.html

Time is understood in terms of things (i.e., entities and locations) and motion. Background condition: The present time is at the same location as a canonical observer.

• Mapping:
• Times are things.
• The passing of time is motion.
• Future times are in front of the observer; past times are behind the observer.
• One thing is moving, the other is stationary; the stationary entity is the deictic center. Entailment: -Since motion is continuous and one-dimensional, the passage of time is continuous and one-dimensional. Special case 1: -The observer is fixed; times are entities moving with respect to the observer. Times are oriented with their fronts in their direction of motion. Entailments: -If time 2 follows time 1, then time 2 is in the future relative to time 1. The time passing the observer is the present time. Time has a velocity relative to the observer. Special case 2: Times are fixed locations; the observer is moving with respect to time. Entailment: -Time has extension, and can be measured. < A extended time, like a spatial area, may be conceived of as a bounded region. This metaphor, TIME PASSING IS MOTION, with its two special cases, embodies a generalization that accounts for a wide range of cases where a spatial expression can also be used for time. Special case 1, TIME PASSING IS MOTION OF AN OBJECT, accounts for both the linguistic form and the semantic entailments of expressions like: The time will come when... The time has long since gone when ... The time for action has arrived. That time is here. In the weeks following next Tuesday.... On the preceding day, ... I'm looking ahead to Christmas. Thanksgiving is coming up on us. Let's put all that behind us. I can't face the future. Time is flying by. The time has passed when ... Thus, special case 1 characterizes the general principle behind the temporal use of words like come, go, here, follow, precede, ahead, behind, fly, pass, accounting not only for why they are used for both space and time, but why they mean what they mean.
  Special case 2, TIME PASSING IS MOTION OVER A LANDSCAPE, accounts for a different range of cases, expressions like:
  • There's going to be trouble down the road.
  • He stayed there for ten years.
  • He stayed there a long time.
  • His stay in Russia extended over many years.
  • He passed the time happily.
  • He arrived on time.
  • We're coming up on Christmas.
  • We're getting close to Christmas.
  • He'll have his degree within two years.
  • I'll be there in a minute.
  Special case 2 maps location expressions like down the road, for + location, long, over, come, close to, within, in, pass, onto corresponding temporal expressions with their corresponding meanings. Again, special case 2 states a general principle relating spatial terms and inference patterns to temporal terms and inference patterns. The details of the two special cases are rather different; indeed, they are inconsistent with one another. The existence of such special cases has an especially interesting theoretical consequence: words mapped by both special cases will have inconsistent readings. Take, for example, the come of Christmas is coming (special case 1) and We're coming up on Christmas (special case 2). Both instances of come are temporal, but one takes a moving time as first argument and the other takes a moving observer as first argument. The same is true of pass in The time has passed (special case 1) and in He passed the time (special case 2). These differences in the details of the mappings show that one cannot just say blithely that spatial expressions can be used to speak of time, without specifying details, as though there were only one correspondence between time and space. When we are explicit about stating the mappings, we discover that there are two different-and inconsistent-subcases. The fact that time is understood metaphorically in terms of motion, entities, and locations accords with our biological knowledge. In our visual systems, we have detectors for motion and detectors for objects/locations. We do not have detectors for time (whatever that could mean). Thus, it makes good biological sense that time should be understood in terms of things and motion.

[coberst]

BTS

It was Lakoff's book "Philosophy in the Flesh" that I was quoting. I guess you are another of Lakoff's fans.