Time Part II

The sequel to my latest talk, "Humberto Maturana’s Time: Living in the Present," given at The Complexity Lounge in November. Some thoughts on experienced internal time.

Time Part I: Humberto Maturana’s Time: Living in the Present Recorded Lecture

Introduction

If I say, “a table is that entity that arises as I put a plate upon it”, I am not being peculiar, I am showing the operational condition that bring[s] forth a table being aware that the table is not a table by itself. Once I have done that and I have brought forth the table, tableness, and the operational domain in which tables exist, I can speak of tables as if they existed independently of my distinguishing them” (Maturana, 2005, pp.58-59).

According to Maturana (2005), the placing of a plate upon a table is the operational condition that brings forth the table and its tablness, articulating that “the table is not a table by itself.” Importantly, he comments that once he has brought forth the table and the domain in which the table is found, he is able to speak of tables as if they exist in the world independently of his act of distinguishing them. In the same paper, and elsewhere in Maturana and Poerkson (2011), Maturana writes that an observer can refer to something they have distinguished, independent of their drawing a distinction and bringing it forth with its domain into being. However, the observer who drew the distinction must not forget that they distinguished the object, person, or experience that arises in their world. Connectedness must be maintained over separation (Maturana, 2005; Maturana and Poerkson, 2011).

Maturana wonders how humans speak of entities that we can “only connote as features of our experience?” Time fits neatly in Maturana’s (2005) description of things humans can only talk about as from our experience. He said, “ All that we can do is to describe the experiential conditions under which such experiences arise, and as we do that, what happens?” (Maturana, 2005, p. 59).

In this short essay, the word “time” will refer to “internal experienced time.” Here, two questions about time are asked.

1. What is an operational condition that brings forth time?

2. What are some of the experiential conditions under which the experience of time arises?

Time is (first) not yet

Time may be experienced as something that just exists, entirely qualityless. That is, until questions are asked of it that make unexperienced time have substance, and in doing so, shatter the transparency that was time without properties (Varela, 1999). Questions that might be asked of time include whether time is fast or slow, whether things are happening in sequence or simultaneously, and whether there is or is not time for a behavior or activity (Maturana, 1995). It might also be asked if time is passing or if it is still, moving forward or backward, or “true or false, valid or invalid, good or bad, adequate or inadequate” (Maturana, Muñoz, & Ximena, 2016, p.665). Once such a question is answered, the broken transparency of time is endowed with initially obtrusive properties that make time a-thing while before it was not yet.

Duration

Duration, the amount of experienced time an event or events lasts, is also a consideration in answering both questions. In The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience Varela, in an experiment he discusses elsewhere, shows study subjects flashing lights, which if are “shown successively with an interval less than a period of 0.1-0.2 seconds, they will be seen as simultaneous, or in apparent simultaneity” (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1993, p.73). Alternatively, if the lights are made to flash faster, they appear to flash rapidly. If the interval between flashes is increased even more, the flashing of the lights becomes markedly sequential (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1993). In the ability to draw a distinction between “simultaneous” and “sequential” lies duration. Duration does not define time, but time is in duration, and duration is in time.

Duration, the passing of experienced time, may be where Maturana’s plate is eventually placed as the operational condition that brings forth time. The earlier experiment with flashing lights and the interval of 0.1-0.2 seconds largely fits in Varela’s (2000) 1/10 scale that ranges from 10 to 100 milliseconds, and is the span of basic elementary events (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008). Behaviorally, writes Varela (2000), the 1/10 scale is where basic or fundamental events occur, and its timing represents “the minimum distance needed for two stimuli to be perceived as non-simultaneous, a threshold which varies with each sensory modality” (Varela, 2000, p.117).

In simultaneity, there is no elapsing of experienced time, though there is the minute passing of chronological time. If no amount of time was experienced as the events occurred in simultaneity, then there is no time to bring forth by way of Maturana’s plate. Sequentiality, on the other hand, is a passing of time: one thing happens then, and another later, even if separated by a barely perceivable interval.

Duration can take the form of remembering what happens and converting it to an operational referent that will be used to experientially measure the interval that has passed in the ongoing flow of experienced time, and move forward into the event that happens at an anticipated later. A plate is placed somewhere in the moving flow from the duration leading from one operational referent and bypassing a field of other logical referents until it is connected with the one it corresponds to, showing definite duration. The plate moves with the flow and thus brings forth time as the passing of time, or duration. Time’s timeness, in the case presented here, is its ability to have duration. Time is not time by itself (Maturana, 2005).

Another way of approaching the operational condition of time is the evaluative questions that are asked of it: Is it still or passing, are things happening all at once, is it moving backward or forward, is it good or bad, adequate or inadequate? In asking questions of time, time transitions from being an unperceived experience by observers to something perceived and engaged with. The questions asked of time serve as an operational condition and move from time as perceived to bringing forth its timeness by representing the qualities of the questions. Time is the questions that we ask of time, bringing it forth in a particular way correspondent with the question or questions asked. Are we running out of time? Is time passing too quickly? Is time moving too slowly? Is the experience we are having in time good or bad? Are the assertions being made in time about time valid or invalid (Maturana, 1995; Maturana, Muñoz, & Ximena, 2016)?

Distinctions

6. Generation of worlds. The world we live in every moment is the realm of all the distinctions that we make, that we think we can make, that we thought we would make, or that we thought we could not make as human beings in the course of our living as beings who exist in our reflexive operating as observers who live in conversation (Yáñez & Maturana, 2013, p.77).

If distinctions are how worlds are generated, then time must be distinguished as part of this generation, and the time that can be distinguished is sequential; it is duration. Worlds are not generated solely through the distinctions we have made in the present, but those made in the past, could have made, thought we eventually could make, or could never be made, will always make, or will never make. The distinctions we perform generate the world we are left to live in, for a moment, until we start making distinctions again. As written above, time is part of this world generation, but it is the way that time is distinguished that matters. If time is distinguished with duration as central, then in my world, time is the passing of experience until that experience ends by distinguishing some operational referent that is a memory, like the first referent, that tells me that which has been continuing is now over, and I will now distinguish the beginning of another period where time continues.

Conclusion

The above draws from two Varela articles and two book chapters, and some of Maturana’s works that were used in the Time Part I. The intent was to find the operational condition that brings forth time, and some of the experiential conditions under which time arises, which appeared in the narrative. An answer to the operational condition came to the fore through duration, and a secondary answer through the questions asked of time. Duration is the means through which observers experience time, and the distinction of time passing as the operational condition that brings forth time. Should time’s primary characteristic be that it passes at a rate that is perceivable and paid attention to by observers?

There are a a multiplicitiative of perspectives on time. The one presented here draws from duration, questions, and distinctions to answer the initial questions. This short essay leans heavily on duration as a means of explaining time and may serve as the foundation for later work in answering the central question: “What is an operational condition that brings forth time?”

References

Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2008). The phenomenological mind: An introduction to philosophy and cognitive science. Oxfordshire: Routledge.

Maturana, H. R., Muñoz, S. R., & Ximena , D. Y. (2016). Cultural-Biology: Systemic consequences of our evolutionary natural drift as molecular autopoietic systems. Foundations of Science, 21, 631-678.

Varela, F. J. (1999). The specious present: A neurophenomenology of time consciousness. In J. Petitot, F. J. Varela, B. Panchoud, & J.-M. Roy, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in contemporary phenomenology and cognitive science (pp. 266-329). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1993). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Varela, F., & Shear, J. (Eds.). (2000). The view from within: First person approaches to the study of consciousness. Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic.