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.

Lies

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Lies

Big lies aren't new. About seventy years ago, Hitler created several, and FDR created several others. The USSR was based on big lies, and NATO was based, in part, on another set of big lies. Fortunately, the U.S.A had a few leaders in the sixty years who were fundamentally honest. Eisenhower told us to beware the military industrial complex, and he was ignored. He was one of the very few fundamentally honest ones, but we have had some leaders who were partly honest but greatly misled, Johnson for one. Jimmy Carter for another, but he was not much of a leader.

Then there is the kind of leader that is fundamentally honest but has been misled and takes the misleading as fundamentally true. Gerry Ford and Ronald Reagan were such people. Going into the details of each individual is not helpful, the important things are the lies, how they are created, how to detect them, and how to eliminate them. Redefining the terms that refer to the matter is the first step. The next step is to act on the redefined matter, as if it were important. The debate over "gay marriage" is illustrative.

The fundamental issue behind the matter of gay marriage is not marriage, nor is it sexual preference or orientation; the basic issue is whether all people should have the same rights. A wide variety of government programs are available only to married people, which clearly shows discrimination against people who are not married. The easiest and fairest way to eliminate this disparity would be grant all rights and privileges that married people have to people who are not married, or to eliminate all privileges that married people have. In either case, everyone would be treated equally. Instead of attempting to eliminate the inequality, some people decided that they wanted those privileges, regardless of the fact that they were discriminatory. The whole matter of governments being involved in registering interpersonal relationships is relatively new. A few hundred years ago people would have a local religious person give their unions a blessing, or they might just live together without the benefit of clergy and call themselves married. Either a religious or common law marriage was considered to be valid. The registration of marriages happened at different times in different places, but it was always a way to restrict the rights of people to do as they wished, and it was an attempt to hold men accountable for any children that they sired. But that was a few hundred years ago. Now the registration of marriages bring with them a variety of privileges that may be worth a significant amount of money to some people, and people who would not get married for reproductive purposes want to get married for financial reasons. The resulting change in marriage laws continues to move along, and it probably will continue until a substantial part of the world has enacted such regulations. I wonder when single heterosexual people will sue for elimination of the financial advantages.

That is a minor issue and watching it progress is almost humorous. The issue where redefinition has taken place that is a major issue and may become a much larger issue is "healthcare".

I don't like or use the term "healthcare", because that implies health, and that is something that is personal and only affected by individual activities, treatments, etc., so generalizing health to the population at large is impossible. That extension has changed the discussion about access to medical care, medical costs, and so on from a matter of personal well-being to a matter of the health of a population. Medical care is and should be dependent on medical problems, but the politicians, ideologues, and popular media have changed it into something that it is not and cannot be, a national problem; and now another President is trying to make a personal matter a matter of concern for the country at large. From experience we know that when the Feds get involved in something, quality will deteriorate and costs will skyrocket. At present there is a minor problem with the cost of medical care rising faster than the CPI, and that is a problem for some people. There is also a mismatch between he supply and demand for medical services and facilities; the medical people like to live in nice places, while people who are sickly tend to live in other places. There has also been encouragement for people to seek medical care for problems that can't be helped significantly by medical care.

As the discussion is being played out in the press and by the politicians, the quality and availability of medical services are not the main issues; centralized payment and oversight of the medical system are the principal matters. Availability and payment may be major issues to particular individuals, but it is not important to the society as a whole.

This is not to suggest that medical services should not be available to everyone, but the drive for "healthcare reform" will lead to higher medical costs, at least for a period of time until the government takes complete control over the medical establishment. At present, about a quarter of all medical costs are for administering insurance, and there is no reason for that to decrease with additional government regulations on the practice of medicine. It would be reasonable to expect to see the expenses of most medical practices to increase as additional reporting and record-keeping requirements are introduced by government regulators. The costs to insurance companies that would be increased by government regulations would also increase the net costs to most people.

At present, employment based medical insurance is a transfer of money from healthy people to people with major and chronic medial problems. For a healthy person the cost of insurance exceeds by a large amount the cost of medical care. People in the insurance industry would say that allows the insurance companies to build up reserves for the eventual illnesses of healthy people, which would be reasonable, if it worked that way, but the insurance companies simply convert those premiums into profits. For most individuals it would make more sense to put some money away for eventual major medical problems. That would pay off for many people, but for others their estates would simply be larger.

Instead of learning the facts about medical costs and insurance in the the popular press, we hear about a crisis, and we hear about ideas to create a huge centralized bureaucracy to handle the medical insurance situation. Some people even put forth the idea that the government bureaucracy should be the actual insurer. None of those ideas would help to correct any of the problems in the medical business (and there are some problems), and those ideas would create worse problems, if they were put into action.

These are only two matters where an issue has been defined into a major problem. There are many other issues that would be improved greatly, if the issue were discussed fully and openly, rather than in the way that the press has defined the matter. Other such recent matters include the invasion of Iraq, global warming, and even the present economic recession and its causes and potential cures.

The Coolness of New England

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The Coolness of New England

Being a New Englander, I have become immune to extremes in weather. I have worn an overcoat a few times this winter but only when I was shovelling snow. People who can't take the coolth of a New England winter shouldn't live in New England. It seldom becomes cold here. Temperatures in the single digits are fairly comfortable, but it starts becoming uncomfortable around ten degrees below zero. It isn't actually cold until it gets down to twenty below. I have been out in such temperatures, and it was rather uncomfortable.

On the opposite side of warmth, I surprised a few years ago when I learned that people from Equitorial Africa couldn't stand normal New England Summer weather with temperatures in the nineties and humidity to match.

I would imagine that the comfort that New Englanders have with extreme temperatures played a part in our becoming tolerant of all sorts of unpleasantness from some people to silly government regulations. If people want to part silly regulations into law that's fine, but it doesn't mean that we should pay attention to those laws.

Untitled

This post has been viewed more than any other, but until now there was nothing in it.

3/19/2013, 7:30 PM

The Fresh Wave of Anti-intellectualism

The Fresh Wave of Anti-intellectualism

Recently on the Internet I have encountered people who take their facts their own way without regard for what happened in the world. Apparently people have taken to making up new realities and writing it down, but they don't bother to call it fiction. I realize that is an ancient custom, but until recently the authors have claimed that one god or another inspired them to write, so it must be true. Sometimes Bacchus inspires me to write, but that only makes it drunken ramblings. No, these recently examples of pseudo-science were not presented as anything except plain fact. Fortunately, no one with any noticeable intelligence took them as factual. 

The first example was on a site that dishes out ancient history. Someone posted on the associated forum ravings about The Ancient Greeks having borrowed their stories from the Ancient Hebrews. That wasn't completely impossible, but The Greeks were a widespread and numerous people, while the Hebrews were a tiny tribe. I suggested that it might be more likely that the Hebrews were influenced by the Greeks, but the poster wasn't willing to accept that. Another post suggested that the Greek Gods were derived from Hebrew sources. I replied that the Greek Gods went back to Proto-Indo-European sources and got a reply to the effect that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had nothing to do with the Ancient Greeks. At this point I confessed that I had wondered for a long time that perhaps I had been transported here from a different world, but that post made the matter certain, because in the world were I am from the Ancient Greek culture and language were derived from the earlier Indo-European culture and language. That person didn't post for several days, when something about the "elohimic games" went up. I didn't bother to respond, nor did anyone else.

While that was going on there were posts on two separate forums to which I belong about the Earth being "fixed" in space and the planets, Sun, and stars orbiting the Earth. As with the Greeks the poster did not mention religion as a source for this foolishness. While there was a suggestion of fundamentalist Christian influence in regard to the Ancient Greeks, The people with the geocentric ideas didn't give any suggestion of anything except their Medieval ideas, and like some Medieval minds they were unwilling to accept that their ideas might be mistaken. Most people find the concept of an accelerated frame of reference easy to understand after things like a ride in a car are described, but that made no impression on these people. I concluded that they were doing it for fun, rather than believing their foolishness; but the expressions were of extreme ignorance and unwillingness to accept facts. A number of good proofs that the solar system is heliocentric were given, including the phases of the Moon, Foucault's Pendulum, precession of artificial satellites, but the facts were of no avail.

If the people who put forth those anti-scientific arguments had been ignorant children, then I would have ignored the whole thing, but the writing was intelligent and mature. The posters were clearly educated, and they were not children. I can't be sure, but I believe that they were Americans. I want to know how they managed to evade education so much that they had the belief that a geocentric universe. Even an elementary science course that touches upon the Solar System would provide enough information to show the geocentric universe to be impossible. A high school science course that included the math would make the idea of a geocentric universe completely absurd. Is it possible that someone could graduate from high school and still believe in geocentricism? I sure hope not. Even if there is some religious cult that teaches geocentricism, that shouldn't be able to outweigh the science. 

But maybe there are religious beliefs that strong, because a non-religious belief has some people believing the canard of anthropogenic global warming. Apparently there are people who think that CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, and it appears that that leads them to think that AGW is real. I suppose that I shouldn't expect that people would have learned about greenhouse gases in high school, I didn't, but I did learn how to learn. I learned that CO2 is barely a greenhouse gas at all, because the amount of greenhouse potential (ability to hold infrared radiation) is determined by the dipole moment of a gas. I won't go into what that means, but molecules that are symmetrical have lower dipole moments than molecules that are asymmetrical. CO2 is perfectly symmetrical. In addition, there are people who think that humans have put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to do something to the climate. That isn't an absurd idea, but it turns out that human additions to atmospheric CO2 are less than the year-to-year variation, the noise. Since humans are not adding anything that is beyond the "noise", they are not actually adding anything to the atmosphere. (There's an interesting argument there, but I won't go into it.)

The larger question is whether there is a relationship among these examples. Is there a connection among beliefs in AGW, the geocentric universe, and the Greeks deriving their culture from the Hebrews? Well, there is a relationship. Those beliefs show all too clearly a huge lack in education. No one should be able to complete a secondary education anywhere with the concept of geocentricism as anything except an old and disproven concept. No one should be able to complete a secondary education without without a decent understanding of ancient history, along with Medieval and Modern History. No one should be able to complete a secondary education without knowing how to research scientific matters. 

Unfortunately, there aren't many people teaching in primary or secondary education who have much of an understanding of science or history.

The effect of the lack of adequate teachers is that anthropogenic golbal warming is being considered seriously by Congress. I won't go any further than that now, but the lack of actual scientific backing for such laws makes the consideration a waste of time.

The next thing you know, the feds will be thinking that everyone is capable of being educated. That might lead to people with IQ's of 50 getting BA's. What will that do to the value of a BA? That's a little extreme, but the idea that everyone should be getting a high school diploma is almost that bad. Intelligence is distributed in a bell curve, and the people on the lower end are not capable of learning or understanding complicated ideas, and at the extrmeity they are not capable of much at all. It might be a beter idea to accept that everyone can learn and understand to his or her own level and have education that would cater to the spectrum of capabilities. 

We shouldn't expect people with small intellectual power to be certified as educated, but we should want most people to have a good general education that would be well beyond the capacity of the people at the bottom level of intelligence. Similarly, we don't need all that many people to have college educations that add little to their general educations but provide some vocational training.