The Perception of Time

    I just finished reading Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and I was struck by the attitude that he had toward time. Then I remembered that my mother had a similar attitude, and so do many of the people that I have encountered. That attitude is that they felt that they were very old, and that things in their lives happened a long, long time ago. I previously had the impression that people developed a longer view of things as they matured. It makes sense that little children would think that anything that happened before they were born happened a long, long time ago, but they would learn that their parents and other relatives may have lived back then, so it couldn't be all that long ago. And as time passed that view would extend to even earlier times. I have found that I consider anything since the fall of Rome to be fairly recent. I don't know anyone who was alive then, but I can imagine the times and events. Sometimes I stretch a little and remember that Babylon throve not long before that, so maybe recent times go back to 3000 BCE. Part of the reason why Olden Days seem recent to me is that I am comfortable with history and feel that I have a good idea of how people and things were then, while many people think that it was unfathomably different. There are even some people who think that people didn't have a sense of individuality until quite recently.
    That strange idea is held by a fair number of people in academia, especially ones who never bothered paying attention to history and literature. Perhaps people are getting the idea to the past was so different from those academics. If one reads ancient literature carefully, then one will realize that people thought and acted the same three or four thousand years ago as they think and act now.
    Then too, time, or the perception of time, is variable. "Time flies when you're having fun." This is a common perception that most people have at least some of the time. And there are things that seem to take forever. Such perceptions seem to be quite individual. Then there was the time when I met someone who I hadn't seen in about fifteen years, and I said, "Ir's been a while." He replied, "Yeah, a long while." To which I said, "No, not that long, just a few weeks." I could remember our last encounter as if it had happened a few days earlier. I take this to mean that perception of personal time is partly based on memory.
    I don't know, but I suspect that one's understanding of the past and feeling of how distant it is depends largely on how clearly one recalls or understands. People who know nothing of the past would find it impossibly distant, outside their understanding, while someone who knows history reasonably well and feels comfortable with it would regard the past as things that happened in the knowable yesterdays, rather than in some unimaginably distant time.

How do other people perceive the past? Was Julius Caesar's murder something that felt like yesterday's news when you heard of it, or was it something that happened in a different world? Can you imagine sitting down and having a comfortable conversation over dinner with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and a few others of that era? .

It's a New Era

Since the world will be coming to an end on the twenty-first day of this month, we have to start a new world. For that purpose, I propose a new era, which will be named “The New Era”, and a new calendar that will start when the Mayan Calendar ends. This new calendar will be named The New Calendar. The year will start with two intercalendral holidays that will not be part of any moth: Winter Solstice and New Year’s Day. After that we will get to the common matter of the ten day weeks, three to a month.
For convenience, and so we won’t have to learn all new names for the days, we will retain the seven days that the old-fashioned calendar has, and to those we will add days named for Neptune, Pluto, and Jupiter, Neptday, Plutday, and Jupday.
We may want to rearrange the names of the days, but that isn’t important. It will be important that there will be a three day weekend every week, but, at least for a while, there will be no holidays. The situation will be much more convenient, because 31% of the days will be weekends or intercalendral, while only 28% are such at present. It will also be easier to remember what day of the week falls on which date, because each day of a month will fall on the same day of the week every month.
Everyone will win, except for the Moon worshippers (well, someone had to lose), and the people who print calendars, because two will serve for every year – one for regular years and one for leap years.

I have already calculated the dates for many years to come, and I will post that when I figure out how to make a spreadsheet look right in here.

The Advantage of Lust

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

The Advantage of Lust

There is a great article in The Economist regarding sexual differentiation, longevity, and the pursuit of women. Human females have a longer life span than men, but men can extend their life span, if they continue to pursue women. It also implies that men in long term relationships with women will live longer than men who have polygynous relationships. Ii also says that it appears that humans in the far distant past were polygynous along the lines of horses and deer; obviously that relationship has ceased in general.

If the conclusions from the study are correct, then I suppose that it would be best for men to have a few long term sexual relationships. It has already been shown that women in long term relationships tend to outlive their mates, and women often die within a few years of their mates. So it would be better for women to dump their mates before they die; and it would be best for men to dump their mates for young women when the prior mate reaches menopause.

Related studies have shown that high level of testosterone lead to greater general health and longevity. In fact, in the past testosterone was used as a life extender for both men and women; there were some side effects, especially in women, so that treatment was stopped. I would guess that women shouldn't have levels of testosterone that are too much higher than their natural level at times of sexual arousal, which is only about ten percent of the normal level of men. I would imagine that the treatments of women who are so foolish as to have sex change procedures would indicate the maximum safe level.

How Real is What?

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

How Real is What?

I just saw something that reminded me of part of the way that my calculus teacher explained imaginary

numbers when I was in high school. He said, "Imaginary numbers are really more real than real numbers." I went to a Catholic high school, and the teacher was a member of the Xaverian Brothers. I didn't usually think of him, or the other brothers, as Medieval thinkers, but that idea was very spiritual and Medieval. That idea was also mystical and closely related to the Kabalistic view of the universe.

In that view, humans are made up of four 'bodies' or levels of being: the physical, astral, mental, and

spiritual (or the soul). They are also graded in quality in that order from lowest to highest. That succession of 'bodies' also makes humans superior to all other creations, because other animals and angels have only one or two bodies. This is also the way that humans are most like the Gods and Goddesses, because they have at least four bodies; actually, they can have as many or as few as they wish.

Thought is a product of the mental body, which is the second highest body, and some thought is spiritual, and thus emanates from the soul. Real numbers are simply symbols of things that exist in the physical, so they have a nature that is a mixture of the mental and physical. Imaginary numbers do not correspond with anything in the known physical universe, so they are not tainted with the mud of the physical world. In theory, that makes imaginary numbers superior to real numbers.

The questions are whether there are multiple 'bodies' and whether that is of any significance. My experience suggests that humans understand things on different levels, and some people are incapable of understanding some things, but I don't know whether that is evidence. One item that I think is strong evidence is to the

division of the human consciousness into different levels is emotion, which is a matter of the astral body. The evidence from FMRI scans of brains has shown quite clearly the pathways of thought of various things. Matters that are emotional use different paths from intellectual matters.

Even by thinking about emotions, one can detect a difference between emotional matters and intellectual matters, because the emotional thoughts cause physical responses of some sort. People often mistakenly think that spoken or written matter can be purely emotional, but that is impossible. All verbal expression takes the same path from the left frontal lobe to Broca's region, then to the part of the body that will do the expression.

On to the question of degree of 'realness' of various sorts of thought. The mystical thinker would contend that the physical universe is an impure manifestation of the higher levels of being. They may be right, but I would contend that we humans have no practical way to tell. On a practical level, pure thought can be done with less distraction by physical, emotional, and ethical considerations. Some would regard it as purer simply for those reasons. Personally, I regard all levels of existence as having value, so I don't see a great deal of difference among them, but a Kabalistic view of the universe is useful, and it corresponds quite closely to the view that provided by Quantum Physics.

I suspect that it's a matter of point of view.

Time and Tense

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Time and Tense

'Now' is an interesting concept, and it has been defined reasonably well for at least the last several millennia, but how well do we understand it, and what does it really mean?

Studies of brain function and perception have shown that there is a lag between stimulus and the brain's reaction to the stimulus. Such a lag is necessary, because impulses have to travel along nerves to the brain, and the electrolytic conduction of nerves is not instantaneous; it isn't even as fast as a current through copper wire. It is likely that sensations from the feet take the longest time to reach the brain, but vision, even though the eyes are extremely close to the brain takes time, because the brain has to process the images that are formed on the retina before it can react to the images. The amount of time that it takes varies from person to person, but the between sensation and brain reaction is about three hundredths (0.030) of a second, with reactions times from 0.035 seconds to 0.05 seconds being more common.

The variation can be seen in the results of the catching a dropped dollar bill test. One person holds while the person being tested holds his fingers away from the bill until it is dropped. When the bill is released, the tested tries to catch the bill. Some people say that no one can catch the bill, but a small percentage can, and those are those of us with the reaction time of 0.030 and 0.035 seconds.

The interval between initial sensation and reaction is the period that makes up 'now'. We never see, hear, feel, or perceive in any way anything that takes place outside of that short span of time. The world doesn't actually exist outside of that span; we can see images, energy, and matter that existed before the present now, but those things are gone, only the memories of their existence is in the present now.

I have tried to picture the present in an analogy, but nothing is quite the same. It is kind of like balancing on a rail with nothing in front or behind. The rail is 0.35 seconds wide, which for light is a fair distance, but for humans isn't very far at all. The rail slides forward, or it stands still and events come at us, we can't tell, and I am not sure whether it makes any difference. We live our lives in this band of time, and we can only get out of it through imagination. Memories and artifacts from the past are evidence that there was something before the present band of now, but memories may be defective, and we can never be sure about external evidence, because it might have been altered in some way or planted. We have no evidence that the future is there (or will be there), because there is nothing beyond our band of now, and no memories or artifacts from the future have been brought in its past, our now. The future is pure imagination.

When we speak, we use verb tenses to indicate the past, the future, and now. There are several tenses for the past, because our views toward it vary. Sometime we wish to express that something happened before something else in the past; sometimes we speak of continuing action in the past, and sometimes we speak of things that are simply over and done. There are forms for all of those ways of speaking. When we speak of the future, we often use modifiers, although we can speak directly about the future. So in addition to "I will", we can use "I plan to" and "I expect to". Anything said about the future is indefinite, more indefinite the further into the future we project. There are a few different ways of speaking of the present, but fundamentally it comes down to saying "I am..." The present tense refers to things that are actually happening in the band of now that we are living in at a given moment.

In writing there are conventions about tense. Some are good and reasonable, while others are absurd. The most absurd convention about tense in writing is the "Historical Present", which is closely related to "Reportorial Present". The two are related and it appears that the historical version was derived from the reportorial form. At some point in the sequences of now, someone decided that news reporting should be in the present tense. That happened sometime in the last hundred years and was not adopted uniformly, because some news is still written in the past tense. Examples of the Historical Present are somewhat amusing.

It is silly to hear that Eisenhower commands the army at D-Day; Eisenhower has been dead for decades. To hear that once is slightly amusing, but a few minutes of such absurdity is annoying. History hasn't always been written that why. The ancients wrote history as things that happened in the past, and that was true through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, but during the twentieth century the present crept in.

The reportorial present can be even more absurd, especially when it is mixed with a proper time sequence. I have heard news reports that stated that someone "is" involved in an automobile accident, and 'is' taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released. That kind of reporting makes a great statement about itself and about the mental processes of the people who make such reports.

I started this exposition to discuss the use of the present tense in fiction, rather than to consider it in other types of writing, but fiction writing is like historical writing. A work of fiction recounts or retells in written form something that happened. The writer is telling the reader something, but it has been written down, so it clearly has to be an account of past events, even if the fictional time is far in the future of when the reader reads. Just as it is absurd to read the Dwight Eisenhower is invading Normandy today, it is absurd to read an account of an invasion of Planet X that is written in the present tense.

The whole process of telling stories has been around for a few hundred thousand years; although for most of that time it was truly telling, because the story-teller spoke to the listeners, but most of the forms and conventions of storytelling have not changed. Story telling is intimately intertwined with language in general and with the linguistic structures. The structure of language is the essence of logic, and differentiation in time and cause and effect are central to logic and to language. Just as people three hundred thousand years ago couldn't listen to a story teller recount a story that happened during the day time during the previous Fall in the present tense, because they could see that it was night in the Summer in a different location, so it was not happening at that moment. Today we don't have a story teller sitting on the other side of the fire recounting events from times past; we have books from which we read; but the book serves the purpose of the story teller. The book sits with light from the fire of the electric light shining from its features, and the book tells us the story. We use a different sense to take in the story; we can read at one's own pace and don't have to wait for the storyteller to relieve himself. Now the story teller waits when we have to do something else, but the book is still telling us what was written. The book is already there, so we know that the events being described aren't happening at this moment; although they be imaginative events that take place in the book's time far in the future, but the events have already been set down, so, like the storytellers story about the migration five years ago, we know that the book already happened; how else could it be written.

Writing a story in the present tense destroys one of the basic assumptions about stories: that it is possible. A story can't be recorded and be happening simultaneously. The people aren't doing whatever there on the page; the page has been printed, so the people did their deeds sometime in the past. To reflect that the events already happened, the story is written in the past tense, just as the story teller told us many thousands of years ago of events that happen in times even earlier, and the story teller didn't lie about when the events occurred; he told us that it was in the past, in the days of his youth or in the times of his father or in the days of his grandfather's youth or in times far past. What has happened has happened, and it probably won't happen again, so make stories make sense, tell them as things that have happened. The story teller that we use today, the book, shouldn't lie as to when something happened by claiming that it is happening at this moment.

After having written a Novel

Monday, December 7th, 2009

After having written a Novel

I finished writing a novel last week. It's just a lot of words, but it was not easy to write. There were times when I didn't know what to write next. Fortunately, some of the characters wanted to express themselves, so they forced me to finish. At present, there are five people trying to read an report back on it. I can imagine all sorts of responses, but I have no doubt that it is better than much of what has been published in the last few years, and it has themes that are significant to most people. The next step will be to write a synopsis and query letter, and to start shopping the thing around.

I just remembered that I had a blog on Live Journal, so I am going to move some o the entries over here.