 
                        20080628.02

     Thank you for your thoughts on my musings
concerning time.  I want to comment on them even at the
risk of seeming vain and self-important.  For the sake of
clarity I reproduce what I wrote:

          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.

and here is your reply:

     analysis:
     I agree completely with the first paragraph.

     the second doesn't really say anything, though;
     that is, I do not see that his proposed definition
     is any different from the definition using
     "consciousness" - that's what we MEAN by
     "consciousness."

     the third paragraph seems to ignore what we
     know about spacetime - that it is in fact not
     separable into "space" and "time". so i don't
     see that you've made any real difference.


     Over the years, I have found it very satisactory to be
told that my ideas are nothing new. It implies at minimum
that these ideas are valid, and since they are new to me,
it implies that I have learned something, but it means also
that the world is no poorer for my not being a teacher
since I have nothing to add to its treasury of knowledge.

     In my second paragraph I define the present as
distinct from consciousness. I argue that the present is
best defined not as what I perceive or describe but as the
_unconscious_ parameters that determine my action and
behavior.  You say that the _unconscious_ parameters
which I define as "present" is "what we MEAN by
consciousness."  An important point on which I beg to
differ. To my mind, consciousness has an ineradicable
esthetic component. It is the coincidence of my awareness
of the world and of myself, in Keats' words: "Silent upon a
peak in Darien". Consciousness is what I experience when I
watch the breakers rolling onto the Madaket shore, or gaze
at the mountain laurel in bloom on the Iron Mountain Trail,
or watch the moon rise over Elk Garden.  What I tried to
say was that consciousness, when defined in this way,
because it is temporally unbounded, is incongruous with any
mathematical conception of the present.

     You are course correct that in my third
paragraph I have ignored "what we know about spacetime".
The obvious explanation for my ignoring is my ignorance, to
which I plead guilty. My experimental definition of the
present as the individual's "orientation", - more
felicitous terms that have occurred to me since, are
"disposition" or in German "Verhalten", deliberately
eschewed notions of time and consequently notions of
spacetime as well. I am not aware that relativity theory
sheds any light on the experience of consciousness or on
the concept of the present.

     The ineluctable implication of my experimental
definition of the present as orientation, disposition or
Verhalten is its applicability separately to each
individual. Just as each person has his own consciousness,
so each person lives in his own present, a subjective
reality which becomes objective when he/she acts.  That
such a subjective frame of reference is inaccessible to
contemporary science does not necessarily impugn its
validity.

I apologize for my compulsion to have the last word,

                     * * * * *
Copyright 2008, Ernst Jochen Meyer
