Time and Being : On Those Stepping Into Rivers

Metaphysics & Epistemology
41

Beautiful.

But as we had a choice between logical systems, here we have a choice between mathematical systems. We can do our calculations using ℚ, or we might choose ℝ… we don’t need to claim one as fundamental here.

So yet again, the problem derives from the expectation, or even the demand, for a fundament. I suspect it’ll make an arse of us.

The intermediate value theorem might force my hand here. But I rather think it might turn out to be a choice, too.

To my eye Wittgenstein’s account of rules cancels any viciousness in the hermeneutic circle. That there is no beginning is irrelevant since in the end it is just what we do. It’s again the demand for a starting point that brings about the problem.

Just get on with it…

And I could offer this as a reply to either of your two present threads.

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42

I’m not sure what this means. As I understand it, Whitehead distinguished his panexperientialism from panpsychism because he didn’t want to say that everything is conscious, but he did want to say that everything experiences. For example the cliffs experience the weathering effects of wind and rain.

By “uncertainty” I was gesturing at both epistemic and ontological uncertainty (the latter since I don’t believe the world is fundamentally deterministic). So, for me epistemic uncertainty is uncertainty for us, not for “consciousness stuff” whatever that could be. Ontological uncertainty is a way of stating the openness of the future for all events, whether they are evnts known by us or not.

I don’t know what this means―could you explain?

Again, I don’t know what this means.

43

From my POV, I think you are missing that this just is philosophy as clarification of language. What the hell do we mean by “time” and “being” ?

To me it’s obvious that we need not give a damn. We do it because it feels good. It’s concept jazz, the dance of signs.

When I show up to post here, it feels the same kind of way that showing up for band practice felt. It’s art. To me the pleasure alone is sufficient to justify the thing, but I do think there are nice by-products.

Discussing slippery concepts with others at a high level makes handling moderately intricate concepts at a not-so-high level easy in practical life. The self-assertion required rubs off on the rest of life.

One is less and less in the habit of just accepting the given as fixed, of merely falling into “what one does.” Practical life often requires that we do things the old-fashioned way, even if we can see it’s a stupid way. Moloch’s a dirty old bastard.

Here we can experiment.

44

Your very question is an example. The unresolved meaning of the object is “futural” to the degree that you pursue it. It presents itself —and therefore absences itself — as not-all-here-yet.

But this is just “poetry” and not “truth.” Unless we think of “truth” purely as the ongoing revelation of objects.

Sort of like this:

The “essence” of φύσις is this “resplendent” (but “inapparent”) temporal emerging-withholding of all things, including the gods and human beings. Yet this hidden “harmony” of rising-setting is the same as “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit), which the Greeks named ἀλήθεια and which we have come to call “truth” (Wahrheit).
…
understood in their “essencing,” φύσις and ἀλήθεια say the same.

The “never-setting” that is the “ever-emerging” that is φύσις is also ἀλήθεια, provided that we always keep in view that ἀλήθεια is un-concealment, that is, emergence from out of concealment. “Emergence bestows favour upon self-concealing.” Φύσις and ἀλήθεια are the same in this way.
…
…ἀλήθεια must, in the first place, be understood as the way that Being “is” and not as any kind of function or activity of human knowing or cognition. First and foremost, ἀλήθεια (“truth” understood in an originary and primordial manner) refers to the peculiar and proper manifestness of Being and not to the manifestive activity of the human being as this has been maintained in one way or another in the long tradition of philosophical thinking in the West:
…
The thinking of metaphysics knows truth only as a feature of cognition. That is why the hint presently given – that “truth,” in the sense of ἀλήθεια, is the inception of the essence of φύσις itself and of the gods and humans belonging therein – remains strange in every respect for all previous thinking.
..
Φύσις “is” ἀλήθεια “is” Being itself. This is Heidegger’s original and distinctive position, as I have maintained all along, but he states the case with particular clarity and emphasis in this passage. He leaves no room for doubt: ἀλήθεια, in the first place, “is the fundamental feature of Being itself” and not of the human being.

45

Being happens as measured in the present.

Becoming happens as measured over time (and space).

“As measured” speaks to experiencing things being, or experiencing things becoming. The measure we take of things, our perception, is our experience of being/becoming. Time is found in the measure, in the mind that is minding (knowing perceiving measuring) things becoming present or being present.

Things exist in the present - they may be dynamic and newer things the very next moment, but then only those newer things exist, as only the present moment is the time when things exist.

The past is not a thing or a place or an existing time. The past refers to things and places that no longer exist.

So to perceive motion, to perceive becoming, we have to employ a tool to track and recall (re-present) changes and the motions we perceive.

Time enables us to track state A against state B.

But time is the mental tracking tool, not a thing in the world. That tool may avail itself in things that don’t have minds, but only minds can take up the tool and use it, so the invention of time is really the recognition (re-cognition) of present moments ordered now according to past-present-present to be. This can make time look as if time was separate from the things occurring in it, as if there are things moving, and separately, the time it take them to be moved.

Motion contains the tools for minds to make time.

So really, except for the mind, and except for the present (the now, the here), time has little to do with being.

The fulcrum is the notion of the present. It’s a special term meaning here; and it’s a temporal term meaning now. The present is related to being. Now is just one of the ways, the temporal way, to organize experiences of things presently being things.

46

Motion itself, continuity, pure becoming as fuel for constant fire, is the mysterious thing. Time is another name for motion, or continuity - or time is the measuring stick, fixing numbers and pints to the continuity presently being there, becoming newer there.

But more directly, continuity can’t explain time anymore than time can explain continuous motion. I don’t think this is many mysteries - it’s one mystery complicated into many by we minds minding the motion in portions we can call different times.

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47

Yes, as the visual field I am everything that constitutes the visual field, just as Nagasena’s chariot is everything that constitutes the chariot – its wheels, axle, and frame.

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48

I think I agree with you. It’s one mystery…with many aspects ? And itself is amusing. “Being is said in a many ways.”

Reminds me of “all is vanity” in Ecclesiastes. As a fan of etymology, I traced “vanity” back to the Hebrew word hevel/hebel. In the original language, the word is already richly metaphorical. It can be read as breath or vapor or emptiness or foolishness and so on. “All is breath” suggests some kind of reference back to our own in-progress meaning-making.

You say the issue is complicated by “we minds,” which can be read as the sounds we make with our breath. The sounds are signs only through participating in the “being” of an iterated “ideal” sound-image.

49

Would it be right to say you are the unity of the being of the things in the field ? That you, as field, are more exactly the chariot itself ? But, crucially, including its “quality” as “there” or “present” ?

50

What do you make of a memory that is present now with the “quality” of the echo of something no longer present ?

51

I’m not sure I understand the question, but I would say that I am the unity of the field in the same sense that people talk about the unity of consciousness. The field is the presence of its constituents. When the constituents are not, then I am not, but in the sense of conventional existence and not ultimate existence. So there is no abiding “me” but rather a succession of different "me"s, like in Hume’s bundle theory, or like Wittgenstein’s thread in PI 67.

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52

Thanks. I thought so, and it’s nice to have the confirmation. Basically I enjoy our agreement on this issue, so it’s nice to reconfirm it.

Maybe I was also asking about the unity of the field. The given-togetherness of its constituents. I think “being” ( in the grand sense) and “world” are charged with this sense of unity or synthesis. Parmenides and Plotinus spoke of “The One.”

If we unify all “snapshots” from all “perspectives” we have something like “World” or “Reality” which is “One.” Though I think we need the snapshots to flow.

53

The ‘snapshot’ is what Whitehead calls an actual occasion of experience (AOE). An AOE doesn’t change – it only becomes and perishes (but becoming and perishing aren’t processes in time). What give a thing its perdurance (in time) is the thing’s involvement in what Whithead calls a ‘society’ – the collection of AOEs as they present to each other (dependent arising) – the web of interrelated beings.

This way of looking helps me to understand Buddhist ethics – suffering is inherently communal. One cannot be fully enlightened while the community remains in pain, because the individual is constituted by those very relations.

The Bodhisattva can be understood as a society (person) that feels and integrates the suffering of the wider world. By delaying their own final satisfaction (their own extinction in Nirvana) they serve to stabilize the broader society (community) of sentient beings and orient it towards the eradication of suffering.

I’m not sure if this answers your question, or if I’ve just gone off at a tangent.

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54

I can’t tell if this is close to my own “ontological perspectivism.” Whitehead writes somewhere that there nothing nothing nothing except “for” sentience. (I paraphrase.) So I tend to think he’s breaking up “streams” into “moments of situations” ( snapshots.) Do objects perdure by having their temporal bits ( members of a community ) in a succession of thereby entangled snapshots ?

For instance, you and I are in the same room, and a vase falls off the table and breaks. The “same” vase appears via many aspects in many snapshots. Is the vase a “community” of “aspects” ?

Can you elaborate on this becoming and perishing ?

Yes, this makes sense. Also reminds me of Schopenhauer’s approach to ethics. And he probably “stole” it from Buddhism, etc.

Even in terms of “emotional intelligence,” we largely are what we are through how we are for others. My wife is much of my life and I am much of hers. Where is the boundary ? Only in the books of the IRS, only in a system of signs that ignores connection for this or that purpose.

We might read this as active love as a reason to live. Active love, as opposed to sentimentalized love, “has time” for the woes of others.

“Delaying nirvana” suggests something like the serene detachment that is “sacrificed” in order to help others. Perhaps a person is able to enjoy solitude. They don’t need people that much. But they sacrifice some of that solitude and perhaps this sacrifice offers something deeper than serenity.

55

In Plato, the time of the material world is opposed to the immobile world of Ideas, which does not change. Nevertheless, something still seems to happen in that world. For example, if it is immobile, why do reincarnations take place? How can souls drink the potion of forgetfulness? I am not sure that Plato ever fully resolved these inconsistencies.

In general, the idea of an immobile God was a prevailing one. I think the assumption of determinism comes from this idea. But what if there exists a timeless, yet still processual, reality that changes the present, the past, and the future simultaneously? What if non-time is not the same as staticness?

It seems promising to me to think through processes and relations rather than objects. A similar idea exists in mathematics: group theory thinks through operations rather than through the objects themselves, which become secondary — nodes in a network of relations. This is not a direct explanation, only a metaphor.

Phenomenologically, the human being is already included in, thrown into, this world. The human gaze upon the world is a way of entering it and changing the structure of the possible through the present, the past, and the future. Through thinking, time itself is disclosed. Language, in this sense, is a map of time — a living sketch of possible relations.

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56

It means atemporal. Something exists (e g. qubits) independent of time. But distances emerge from it, and with distances you can have events extended in space and time, such as flowing rivers.

Thus rivers are non-detachable from time. Qubits, however, are more fundamental and “eternal” in the atemporal sense.

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57

OK. This suggests structuralism. ( Perhaps you should visit my Saussure thread. ).
I’ve studied abstract algebra seriously, so I know what you mean. We study groups in general by ignoring everything non-group-ish about a system. The results of group theory apply to any group as such.

A binary operation is expressible as a relation.

Perhaps you mean we can understand the timeless as the enduring structure of the coming and going. This is actually my preference. I connect it to philosophers trying to hunt down the “form” of all possible experience. Or linguistic philosophers trying to find the enduring structure of language.

Am I close ?

58

This is where Whitehead (and Rovelli too) get a bit tricky for me – this logical mode of change that I can’t get a handle on. Perhaps it overlaps with Heidegger’s notion of time where past present and future coexist and ‘time’ (as the word is used in common speech) is derivative, but I’m way too far out on a limb here so I’ll say no more on that.

As far as I can tell, the idea is that there are no “things in themselves” – there are only “things for each other” (societies). An AOE is an instantaneous unchanging snapshot that has only a fleeting existence. So time as we understand it is derivative from change, but change is discontinuous, leaping from one AOE to the next as it integrates data from its environment (other AOEs in the society) by an internal process that Whitehead calls prehension.

Rovelli seems to provide the physical platform (network of relations), and Whitehead insists that we begin from experience and so there can be no ontology that excludes experience.

I think the vase itself would be regarded as a loosely-coupled community (an aggregate) that presents in other AOEs (the “dominant monads” as Leibniz would have had it) that are you and I in the same room, so there are “levels of community” (like a major node in a network that brings a group of minor nodes into cohesion). Relations and process.

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59

I like all of this, but I’m fascinated by the bolded part especially. What is thinking ? I tend to agree with Peirce that we think “only in signs.” Language is a map of time. Yes. How exactly ?

Early Heidegger really grabbed me initially with his discussion of the historicity of meaning. To me this means the same signs “radiate” their significance differently. But an old hat is a sign in that it can “mean” something to me. It’s that hat that my ex-girlfriend bought my in Chicago, but we had that horrible fight because I thought I looked stupid in it. But now, years after she married some guy had his kids, I miss her as my best shot at love and I even think I look great in the hat now.

So objects are “already signs” in that they are enduring unities with historical significance. Thinking is something like trading “custom made” objects that are very convenient for being charged with such radiance/significance.

To recognize the river as a temporal synthesis is to recognize it as a “sign.”

60

You are right: abstract algebra does resemble structuralist thinking. But I do not reduce being and time to structuralism. For me, this is rather a metaphor that helps us understand how one can think the world through pure relations.

But then I make a different move: in the real world, these relations are not rigidly fixed; they are fluid. In our minds, there is a constant flow of disconnected images. Before the twentieth century, this was often regarded simply as garbage, as unformed thinking. Freud introduced the concept of the unconscious. The post-structuralists, in many ways, developed this line of thought further.

But if we start from the connection between time and thinking — and I believe that reducing this to the connection between language and thinking is a mistake, since language is only a model of time — then perhaps this work of thought also hints at something about the structure of reality itself.

The gaze, in essence, is engaged in selecting relations in the world, building a hierarchy of possibilities, and distinguishing what is important and essential. Perhaps being works in the same way: as a constant restructuring of models and hierarchies. Deleuze’s ontology may intersect with this problem.

I apologize for the stream of consciousness. This is not a defense of my position; perhaps it will simply give you some associations of your own.