Reduction of Predicates of Time
Hello.
I was wondering if you all think on the subject of "reduction of predicates of time." In this case, the predicates are of the words "synchronic" and "diachronic"...
The reduction in question would be, here, the "syn" to the "dia."
What I mean is this: In an effort to heterogeneity, is it apposite to refuse reduction of synchronicity to diachronicity?
What that means, I think, is this: Conceptually, we refer to reality, the world, and time in-the-moment-of-now as synchronos. But due to our limited horizons, we can only observe a small microcosm of _the synchronos, the universe. Thus we search for a way to "broaden our horizons" -- for our awareness to encapsulate more of "the now." One obvious way to do that is to think chronicity more "uniformly."
To, in other words, reduce the now-all to the now-for-me-through-time, the diachronos. How can this be? Well, since on this side of the planet, I myself will never-now walk on the other side of the planet (only having walked on this side), when I go to ponder the other side, I somehow do it with respect to my own side, to my experience of my own life.
Whereas, if one were to be more strict in the differentiation of categories, if one were to rigorously separate with-time and through-time, syn- and dia-, one would it seems instead get the result of ?heterochronicty... Does this mean the other side of the world would be forever "parellel" -- forever missing from my consciousness?
In other words, this is more an obsession, a solipsism of time, rather than an obsession of being. My own time will ever be only what I ever know. Person X, who I will, say, never meet, remains more of phenomenon of fantasy than a
phenomenon of my reality. Parallel, and not participating in intersectionality as I know it.
I'm new to your list. Thanks for letting me join. David Baird
Aaron and group, greetings to you! A kind thanks for your reply.
I will follow your lead and interlayer our languages, using editors' marks for the text. It will serve as a wonderful reminder of the exact nature of our correspondance.
I think your fears are mistaken. I am not, it seems, headed for a conceptual or other solipsism. In fact, this is what I have tried to escape. In arguing for a parallelism or a nonintersectionality, I do not say I cannot communicate with the people in alien lands. Rather, I can only communicate with the ones I actually communicate with. Perhaps in further exchanges we will hone the nature of communication, but for now I am ruling out signals sent into outer space and chaotic effects, butterfly effects, of our everyday
behavior, and instead thinking "communication" as real, understood exchange between subjects...
Also, I don't think I retread Einstein's steps regarding relativity -- for even if I am not aware of those exact steps, as contemporaneous with Godel, Derrida, Nancy, Feynman and all of you, I could not and would not follow a similar growth as Einstein.
Reinvention, conceptual or otherwise, is a common occurance, but if I am reinventing anything it is simply my self, and if I remind you of relativity or whatnot, it is perhaps because in using the common currency of linguistic exchange, we must perforce deal with many little iconic words with glistening interrelations. "What does that mean," I
would submit, often is ansered by "That meant what the people who were there intuited it to mean..."
I do not pretend to be expert in mathematics, and admit that algorithmic sciences boggle or melt my mind. I was trying to be purely philosophical. Purely without the usage of "equations" -- though we'll await import of such a category until later...
Not that philosophy is less hard than anything. But that physics, in your example, or physicists, even physicist-philosophers, would not be people I am arguing with... I am arguing with those whose prime element is the textual and the linguistic. Not that theory physics is not this, but that it is fairly detached from linguistic concerns, as it has to pay attention to very material realities for most of the working day...
While on the other hand, Logical philosophy at the extreme even, though it uses symbolicity in all its complexity, is not, I think, akin to physics. It would bend thought. Only mediately matter would be its object. Unless we just blend it all and pay attention to the entire world's thinking -- which is a harder job, and I for one can barely keep up with the simple portion of the fields called philosophy.
and now for the inter...!
[Hello David,]
> ...
> What that means, I think, is this: Conceptually, we refer to reality,
> the world, and time in-the-moment-of-now as synchronos.
[You say 'we refer...', but you need to be clear to whom 'we' refers. Do you include new-born infants, 3 year olds, professors of theoretical physics, non-philosophers..?]
I was speaking merely of the specific users of the particular words 'synchronous' and 'diachronous', though I spellt them wrong due to a something mental when I was composing the email...
It is a guess but I would suspect that we are dealing with a relatively small number of people in this group of ours...
Now as to the question of the people who can re-cognize the word but not com-prehend
it, they can be considered our audience, but not our interrogators...
> But due to our
> limited horizons,
[The thoughts of different individuals have different horizons.]
I would concur. But I suspect each has multiple levels of horizons, for instance the social, cognitive, mathematical, physical, ... , and on some of these levels humans are quite similar. And in opposition to your statement, I would rephrase it "..and the _lives_ of each of the extants, the subjects, will be to each unique and special, no matter how homo- or hetero-genous the phenomena of these lives' historicities..."
I am thinking always of the total.
> we can only observe a small microcosm of _the
> synchronos, the universe.
[Are you including observation with the aid of telescopes, microscopes, radio telescopes, etc.? Perhaps a mutant human will one way be born with powerful telescopic eyesight?]
A fond speculation.. Simply referring to phenomenality, the sum total of your sensation, your empirical experience, and I do not here decide whether the empirical includes the spiritual or not...
> Thus we search for a way to "broaden our
> horizons" -- for our awareness to encapsulate more of "the now."
> ...
[Again, more uses of 'we' and 'our' with unspecified referents.
(Of course, that's very common in philosophy -- and very unhealthy.)]
You have identified a Symptom, Mr. Sloman, and for this I applaud you.
And brought up the question of "referents." What if instead of "pointing at that," of referring in the ordinary sense, we are instead "evoking this and what else, what else..."? Mr. Stephen Engstrom at University of Pittsburgh memorably has characterized me as rather impressionistic -- and though the word has hints of negative connotation, if one investigates as to the full resonances of the Impressionist movement in, for say, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Criticism, one can see that this may indeed be a favorable honorific, depending on your views of several things...
[I think you are beginning to retread Einstein's route to his Special Theory of relativity, so you should read what he wrote about it and see if it helps you. His popular expositions were brilliantly clear.]
(thanks for the recommend, I will indeed follow...)
[I remember reading long ago an introduction to special relativity written by him, but I can't recall the title, and whether it was a book or a part of a book. You may be able to get some help from google or someone else on this list.]
(I believe I have heard of the piece you are thinking about in reference to its clarity and brilliance...)
[It may have been the first two chapters of this book, which contained a lot of mathematics in later chapters about the general theory of relativity:]
[Einstein, Albert The Meaning of Relativity]
[Or it may have been a book he co-authored with Infeld. Sorry I can't be more specific.]
I was once a physics student, and I would usually give up around Quantum Electrodynamics, if that means anything to some of you... Feynman was a colorful character I read about when young, and as a musician I was amazed to learn that he could play very long-period polyrhythms, like 42/43 or whatever... He could also dissociate his verbal imagination and his visual, and keep almost perfect time while holding a conversation, by imagining the numbers fall before his eyes...
[The key idea you should consider accepting as a starting point for understanding Einstein's answer to your question is the Kantian notion that things you cannot experience may also
[(a) be effects of things you have done (e.g. sending a signal) and
(b) produce effects that you do experience (e.g. receiving a signal from a remote source.)]
I try to remain aware of these social/historical concerns. I admit to many failures in this regard.
[If you do not allow your ontology to extend beyond contents of your own awareness you are doomed to a concept empiricist philosophy, and will have to stop trusting the products of science, email systems, medicines, and even the author of this message, another (partial) product
of science, or even thinking thoughts about whether they are trustable].
However, "trusting" sources of information is a broad topic. I cannot go into a full account of trustability here. Only to say that feminist notions have famously recommended trusting a source until it betrays you, instead of the, to them, unnatural stance of making beings "earn" trust. Of course there are many situations...
> I'm new to your list. Thanks for letting me join. [Don't expect answers to agree with one another.]
Perhaps a Hegelian thought will do here... Maybe our answers do all agree. Maybe they are different reflections of some singular truth?
My problem is that I am ever tempted to fully encapsulate my meaning in a turn of a phrase, yet I always resist the impulse to totalize the truth, to say it all now, and I slightly in-direct my discourse so as to hint at the particularity, yet move on to more without fully revealing the seeming key I have found.... Not that I am a key-maker, but that instead I would seek keys, use them, and play with what doors I can open...
In any case, wonderful to correspond with you. Keep good working,
David Baird