Time

As with every other aspect of human nature, it’s been claimed that there are cultures out there that have no conception of time. the linguist Bernard Comrie examined the claims and has noted that they are not credible. A person belonging to a culture with no conception of time could not generalize that people invariably are born, grow up, age, and then die, and thus would be unsurprised to meet someone who started out as a corpse, came to life as a senior citizen, grew younger and younger, and eventually disappeared into his mother’s womb. Needless to say there is no society populated by such madmen. And people in societies all over the world order the events in their autobiographies, genealogies, and histories, and their myths about such things as a creation of the world or the arrival of their ancestors.

People also keep track of time in the words and constructions of their language. In many languages the ordering of events is expressed in adverbials like yesterday or a long time ago. And in about half the world’s languages it is embedded in the grammar in the form of tense. The semantics of time suggests that even the claim that many peoples conceive of time as cyclical should not be taken too literally. Though people are aware of the recurrence of days, years, and phases of the moon, it does not overwrite an awareness of the linear sequence of events that make up the flow of life. No language has a tense for example, that means “at the present moment or at an equivalent point in a different cycle.”

But our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an infinitesimal instant. Indeed, it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous “now” but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future. William James called it “the specious present”

“The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two direction into time. the unit of composition of our perception of time I a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were – a rearward – and a forward-looking end…We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time be as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it.”

How long is the specious present? The neuroscientist Ernst Poppel has an answer in a law: “We take life three seconds at a time.” that interval, more or less, is the duration of an intentional movement like a handshake; or the immediate planning on a precise movement, like hitting a golf ball; or the flips and flops of an ambiguous figure like those on pages 43 and 145; or the span within which we can accurately reproduce an interval; of the decay of unrehearsed short-term memory; of the time to make a quick decision, such as when we’re channel-surfing; and of the duration of an utterance, a line of poetry, or a musical motif, like the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Time, at least as it is expressed in the grammatical machinery of language, also differs from Newtonian time in not being measurable in units. A language’s tenses chop the ribbon of time into a few segments, such as the specious present, the future unto eternity, and the history of the universe prior to the moment of speaking. Sometimes the present and future are subdivided into recent and remote intervals, similar to the dichotomy between here and there or near and fat. But no grammatical system reckons time from some fixed beginning point (as we do in our technical vocabulary with the traditional birth of Jesus) or uses constant numerical units like seconds or minutes. This makes the location of events in time highly vague, as when Groucho told a hostess, “I’ve has perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”

There is a close parallel in the degrees of precision that are available to languages in the way they express number, space, and time. Using phrases composed of words, we can express quantities from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large with any degree of precision, thanks to number phases (three hundred and sixty two), directions (the third house on the right off exist 23), and dates and times (seven forty two P.M., May seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven). But if we restrict ourselves to simple words a few words like one, two, twelve, and twenty with space, propositions like across and along; with time temporal adverbs like now, yesterday and long ago. And when we rely on the distinctions coded in grammar, the distinctions become still more schematic. In English, we distinguish only two numbers (singular and plural), and perhaps five tenses (depending on how you count); this is similar to the way that many languages dichotomize location into “here” and “there”.

The imprecision in the way language expresses time is related to the imprecision in the way we experience and remember it. Though no on experiences time in coarsely as the handful distinctions in a tense system would suggest, we don’t live by a mental stopwatch either. There is a joke about a father who asks his son, a physicist, to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity. The son says, “You see, Dad, it is like this. When you’re in a dentist’s chair, a minute seems like an hour. But when you have a pretty girl on your lap, an hour seems like a minute.” The father ponders the explanation for a moment and says “So tell me, For saying thing like this, Mr. Einstein makes a living?”

In fairness to Mr. Einstein, his theory says that time is relative to the internal frame in which it is measured, not that it is subjective. The human experience of time is, of course, subjective, and it spreads up or slows down depending on how demanding, varied, and pleasant an interval is. But one aspect of Einstein’s theory does have a counterpart to the psychology of time, at least as it is expressed in language: the deep equivalence of time with space. ~ Pages 188 to 190 (The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker)