[From Bill Powers (950225.1625 MST)]
Bruce Buchanan (950224.15:30 EST)--
I can see that my remarks found a target. What I'm being stiff-necked
about, Bruce, is any attempt (not just yours) to substitute metaphor and
connotation for description and denotation in a scientific discussion of
human nature. When we conjecture about human nature in a scientific way,
we don't have to be right, but we must at least intend that what we say
be taken literally. When you speak of "the logic of retroactive effects"
you can't mean that literally -- effects in nature are never, ever,
retroactive. So you must be speaking metaphorically: it's _as if_ some
effects were retroactive, for example the way we sometimes edit our
present-time memories. In the same way, you can't literally mean what
the words say in the phrase "the neurophysiology of foresight." There is
no such thing as literal foresight; there can only be present-time
estimations, forecasts, or imaginings about what has not yet happened.
So this, too, must be a metaphor.
Even Korzybki's term "time-binding" is more poetry than science. Time is
not the sort of thing that can be bound. To find any meat in this phrase
we have to look beneath the surface to the phenomena it supposedly
describes: the way we generalized from current memories of the past
(truthful or not), the way we can make plans for the future, and the way
we can create artifacts with lasting influence. None of these things
involves any operations in or on the past or the future: they all take
place in present time alone. If we want to understand how human beings
handle time, we have to look at the organization that exists now, and
the current information being used (whether from perception, memories as
they currently exist, or current calculations of events yet to come). We
have to demystify terms like "time-binding" before we can get any useful
ideas from them.
This is why I am against vague and general terms. They give the
impression that we are talking about something but often, perhaps most
of the time, they merely allude to a phenomenon without describing it,
or tell us what it is like without telling us what it is. I don't think
that such language, or the thinking that produces it, advances our
scientific knowledge, however much it may enrich our poetical grasp of
existence.
ยทยทยท
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Best,
Bill P.