 
                        20080620.01

     The perplexity created by the conventional
representation of time is that it leaves us in cognitive
and functional limbo. The future is conclusively
inaccessible to us who can live only in the present, and
the past is inaccessible because we are unable no matter
how hard we try, to reconstruct it from memory. That leaves
us with the present, the stage on which our existence is
played out, as a mathematically vanishing intersection
betwen two inaccessibles: past and future.  It is not that
the present is not real, but that our intellectual
conception of the present is grossly inadequate.

     One explanation for this inadequacy of our conception
of the present is our insistence that it be measured by,
defined by, or even reflected in our consciousness. Instead
of defining the present by what I am able to perceive or to
describe, I propose to define the present as analogous to
the focal point of a virtual image, as the set of the
parameters that determine my present action, my present
behavior, contemplating which one mustn't pay any attention
to the time. Throw away the clock.

     Because what I do, when I awaken in the morning is
determined principally by my locating myself in space: -
which way to the bathroom - I propose to replace the notion
of the present as the span of time in which I act, with the
notion of the present as the orientation by which my action
is determined, where the word "orientation" extends to all
the characteristics of my mind - of my brain, if one wants
to be anatomical about it, - including my facility with
music, language, mathematics, as well as my familiarity
with people and places. Is such deliberate exclusion of
chronology from experience possible? If so, what are its
implications?  I don't know.

                     * * * * *
Copyright 2008, Ernst Jochen Meyer
