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Linear time - continuation of an older thread

Linear time - continuation of an older thread

Checksum
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Posted 03/16/04 - 01:16 PM:	#1
A while back somebody had a very profound topic going about linear time. His idea was that time is not nearly as linear as we perceive, and that it only comes off that way because we can only perceive differences one at a time. I really enjoyed that topic, but I got to thinking - isn't language mostly to blame for that kind of thinking? If you have a cat in a dry yard sitting in a tree under a blue sky, you'll notice how you see that as cat, pause, dry yard, pause, tree, pause, sky, pause. You don't read it and think 'that scene.' To introduce a little movement into the scene, lets' say the wind blows the tree and startles a bird, who the cat then pounces at. We'd see the wind blow, THEN the bird get startled, and THEN the cat pouncing, in a 1-2-3 kind of fashion. I think this is because our language is linear and doesn't let us talk about multiple things at once. Were we to never learn language, would we still be susceptible to the 'illusion' of linear time?

wuliheron
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Posted 03/16/04 - 01:48 PM:	#2
There are languages without linear time. For example, the verb to be is not a part of several languages including the Navaho Nation, and Asian cultures are famous for circular images of time. That is not to say they have no conception of linear time, just that it forms a small part of their view of time which is more holistic. For example, in chinese there are no real concepts of "objects" per se. Change is the only constant in such a worldview, so what we perceive as objects such as cats, wind, and trees are viewed as processes rather than objects. What is air might become water or nitrogen fixed in the soil, what is a cat will inevitably return to earth as well, and all of these processes are parts of a larger organic whole. In this same fashion, what we call linear time is a smaller aspect of circular and non-linear time. This is similar to the way Quantum Mechanics and Relativity treat the subject as well. For all anyone can tell, quantum events can occur backwards in time as well as forward. The more dramatic the scale difference, the more dramatic such differences appear to be. For example, an astronaut falling into a black hole seems to come to a complete standstill in time from our perspective, while from their's we seem to accelerate into the realm of pure energy or light. Taking this analogy of scale a bit further, if time were to flow backwards for us, we might not notice any difference. It may simply be physically and mentally impossible for us to rationally conceive of the passage of time in any other way, but Asian's do often claim that existence has "suchness" or "isness". Again, another perspective of time which is nonlinear.

Floyd
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Posted 03/16/04 - 10:47 PM:	#3
Were we to never learn language, would we still be susceptible to the 'illusion' of linear time? I think it is more likely that our language was influenced by our perception, regarding this, of time, rather then vice-versa.
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Checksum
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Posted 03/17/04 - 01:56 AM:	#4
So you're saying that if our minds could accomodate nonlinear time properly, we wouldn't speak in a linear fashion?

wuliheron
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Posted 03/17/04 - 08:48 AM:	#5
Ya'll just seem to continue to miss the point: Everybody does not speak english and every language does favor linear time over other ways of perceiving time. Your arguments are nothing more than ethnocentric rubbish. If you are going to speak about deep aspects of language, learn something about the varieties that exist!

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