“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.”

Knowing that the ‘roots of history’ r alive 2day,
I acknowledge both nurture & nature.

I reject, tabula rasa, as my experience points to
quite the contrary. A world ensouled, in which complexes
‘have people’.

Jungian, transpersonal, depth, would be the school
of thought I admire. James Hillmans, ‘poetic basis of the mind’.

The Qualitative aspects of time r psyche/soul.

The metaphorical equivalent of ‘dark matter/dark energy’ as they r ‘unconcious’ &
to an extent ‘unknowable & unseeable’, yet pervasive. The contents can only be inferred
indirectly.

For me, it’s a ‘Qualitative Universe’, or as Robert Pirsig said @ the end of
Lila, “Good, is a noun.”

The most basic of these dreams consisted of random ‘sound, visual, feeling of movement images’ consisting mainly of spots and lines against pulsating bright field of vision (a more visual than auditory sensation, and the feeling of movement was more deliberately willed). The images changed every half a second. All I did was experience them, and I couldn’t “think” about them.

The crucial difference between that experience of time and the current one I have now is that in the womb I had no understanding that the images repeated. That frequency of half a second was too fast to permit me to think about the sensation. The images were familiar, but their familiarity was not associated with their repeating. They were familiar images simply because they, like my consciousness of them, were always there.

My current experience of time is that of a succession of events.

I think there is a fundamental frequency of experience. It’s about half a second long, and you can’t think about it, because it is smaller than the minimum scale of thought. The minimum scale is why there is a difference between thinking about something and realizing something.

@ that point, time stands still, & one is witnesses to ‘the eternal moment’. The direct temporal experience of a the transpersonal. The ‘symbol’ contains the psychic opposites.

It’s a blessing & a psychic healing, in the East it is called Nirvana.

I think that this blog is very intriguing. I think that your view of time is very interesting, because I have always found the way that we as people calculate time as a little strange. I am currently a senior in high school and as a physics student, it always interests me to see ways that physics is used in real life.

Megan Brochu

Just thought someone may be interested….

I am just hinting back to a long discussion on this blog, some months ago, about the relevance of philosophy to scientists.

I’m also pretty sure that quite a bit of work had been done on this concept in relation to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I cannot recall the magic searchterms to find the discussions on LanguageLog, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you could do worse than shoot off an email to Mark Liberman and ask him nicely.

(And then invite him for a chat on whatever service takes over after BloggingHeadsTV.)

Oh – and not that it matters, but I have no conscious synaesthesia, myself. My image of time is straight out of the book/blackboard – a straight line running left to right – but I don’t think I actually use that image. Of course, I absolutely suck at remembering dates – in history as well as scheduling and recurring.

“History” is transactional — events broadcasting and observers receiving (no consciousness necessary) and in turn becoming events. These all have 4-coordinates measured in seconds.

“The future” is probabilistic to me with events advertising themselves in bubbles whose surface expands at the speed of causality until captured by an observer; that surface is a semitransparent veil which obscures the view in the sense of limiting what can be said about the state of everything inside the bubble (and able to capture the event) by a reasoning being outside the bubble. A reasoning being closely coupled to an observer inside the bubble can only say “I can’t prove that *possible* event”, however the existence of the event might be inferred by future observations.

In my head, the speed of causality is set against something close to a scalar field where each point is measured in s^2 that contracts or dilates the second marks on the rulers (or clocks) at that point, but this field is dynamic and unique for every observer.

Seconds are pretty damn long, though, and not very natural.

When it comes to calendar time, I think of lists of things to do and I use daily lists. I am a tremendous list-maker; it is the only way I can figure out where I’m supposed to be when. But I don’t really think of that as related to my visualization of time, any more than I think of a grocery list as related to my experience of eating. Calendars and lists are just a way for me to keep track of things but they have little to do with mental imagery for me.

“I can see my breakfast table or any equally familiar thing with my mind’s eye, quite as well in all particulars as I can do if the reality is before me.”

to

“My powers are zero. To my consciousness there is almost no association of memory with objective visual impressions. I recollect the breakfast table, but do not see it.”

Regarding my mental image of time, my basic response is “Mental image? You mean, something that seems visual?” I have a sense of spatial structure when I imagine something, but nothing like an image except in dreams, or in for a moment at the edge of sleep. When I think of time intervals in an explicit way, they have a spatial quality if a physical trajectory is involved, but they are more abstract in regard to events and calendar time.

I have to say that when I was reading your description of time I got a very Sam Beckett, Quantum Leap, impression. Except, that was a ball of string not a ribbon.

When thinking about historic time (like up to 4000 years ago), time is not really linear. I always connect a specific event to where it happened. So getting the big picture of history becomes like getting to know a city: You suddenly notice how to get from one place to another, and can locate that place more accurately on your inner map.

Geological time and cosmological time is more linear, probably because we care less about spatial location for such events.

If I had to put time on an axis, it would be a logarithmic axis running from left to right. The year, however, is a disk, somewhat like Steffie Lewis’ torus.