A horrible multiple-entendre, but such, perhaps, is life, reality and, most probably, time itself. I plan not to address catching up, in any sense, or with regard to anything, but of fabricating "time" itself, or at least the sense or perception thereof. Alexa, read that back slowly. Oh, wait, I have no Alexa, just as I have no time and don't know who knows where the time goes. OK, enough of that.

I'm trying to figure out how to present the convergence (damn, implies motion, directionality and ergo, temporality) of 3 avenues of thought and can't come up with any decent segues. Perhaps I'll just jump in and see what transpires.

Reality is a construct. The only reality we really grok and participate in is that which we construct, our model or map of the sum of our lives' experiences, formulations, understandings, ruminations and conceptualizations. This is true of all of us, whether it is intentional or accidental for any individual. There seems to be, in all of us, some seemingly intrinsic je ne sais quoi that leads or drives us to some sort of resting state apperception that there is a real, external reality that we are incrementally investigating, analyzing and elucidating, but we can't be because we cannot interact with das ding an sich in any form. We can "experience" collaboration and work out collaborative models, but that too is simply part of our individual models. We are each, furthermore, unique, and, as a result, so are our models, our realities, our vocabularies, languages, ideas and the like. Whether as models, entities, or beings, whatever those may be, we all, of necessity, speak slightly different tongues. Even if we scrupulously define out terms, the definitions themselves will be in different languages. The magnitude of these effects is, naturally uncertain. I've written about this before to a sufficient extent that I won't go into it any further today.

Given the above, it seems obvious that time, too, is a construct; something we have individually and collectively made up. There is a open question, however, of the extent to which we may have made it up out of whole cloth. Simply put whether reality is a model, or a collection of actualities, is time, in the model or otherwise, a thing, a fourth dimension with independent laws, behavior and existence, a mere epiphenomenon, derived from other, more "real" phenomena, or what. As with reality, I have dealt with at least some of the questions about time before, and won't rehash any of that now. Instead, another rabbit hole has, like Ahab, beckoned and I feel compelled to try to follow.

Since we all speak at least slightly different languages, we must, it appears, consider the extent to which Time is language dependent. Yep, there it is. On June 13, 2017, The Conversation published an article by Panos Athanasopoulos which is linked here: ( https://getpocket.com/explore/item/language-alters-our-experience-of-time ). Language Alters Our Experience of Time Learning a new language re-wires your brains and you’ll begin to perceive of time in a unique way. Note that wording carefully. Since experience is all we have, it implies that TIME, whatever it my be, is language dependent. It is tempting to ask how so and to what extent, but that implies a limit, or limits, which arguably can't be in evidence. So, here goes -

You really need to read the entire article to get exactly what is being asserted, the exact magnitude of the evidence and the fuzzy extent of the implications. It is short enough that you can easily do so, even if you wind up going over it multiple times, like I did. I'm going to quote his opening paragraph for my own sneaky purposes, and then his second one for its relevance -

It turns out, Hollywood got it half right. In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks who is trying to decipher an alien language. She discovers the way the aliens talk about time gives them the power to see into the future – so as Banks learns their language, she also begins to see through time. As one character in the movie says: “Learning a foreign language rewires your brain.”

A study I worked on with linguist Emanuel Bylund shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. But unlike Hollywood, bilinguals sadly can’t see into the future. However, this study does show that learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals.

OK, the evidentiary assertions, to a degree, center upon our tendency to somewhat talk or think about time by using terminology from or relating to space. (Space is a less troublesome and abstract quantity because we can more readily visualize it.) depending upon one's language, the future may be ahead or behind, or down with time arrayed on a vertical axis. In addition to those with linear "analogies", there are those with volumetric ones. Bilingual speakers seemingly jump back and forth in their usages, and, so some extent, perceptions with ease. One is tempted to think that this, in itself, is no big deal, not like measures of duration fluctuate, but one can't help but remember the axon that there is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant. This is merely the state of the evidence as of now, and not some known limit.

OK, warm-ups are over. Who here has not experienced time standing still, or at least moving as slow as molasses? So Hollywood invented aliens who can see into the future, and their language infected a linguist with that same ability. Arguably, if you knew the language, vocabulary and grammar of any branch of science perfectly and completely, you would have attained mastery in that field. If you knew fully and precisely exactly what electrons and photons were, you would have a leg up on every living physicist. So, somewhere in the language of quantum physics, time becomes irrelevant, thanks in large part to relativity. Another short article that is, all the same, a slow read, was published on February 2, 2018, in aeon and is linked here: ( https://getpocket.com/explore/item/you-thought-quantum-mechanics-was-wei... ) The article, You Thought Quantum Mechanics Was Weird: Check out Entangled Time, by Elise Crull, describes an experiment whereby two photons that were never "actually" entangled nor even coexistent came to exhibit properties of entanglement. If nothing else, at least study the diagram and caption. The author's summary

The upshot? The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between ‘temporally nonlocal’ photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted.

sums it up nicely while avoiding all of the implications. The article then summarily discusses how this is fallout from relativity, which staples TIME, whatever the hell that may be, to each and every extant frame of reference such that there can be no commonality, no global or systemic time. (Useful hint: next time you are late for an appointment, remind the other party that they did not specify exactly whose time was to be used.) Strangely enough, the helpful diagram used in the article portrays time as linear and does not specify whose time it is, though presumably it is lab time or experimenters' time. Since the observer's time is never any participating entity's time, there are really no problems or contradictions. Or are there?

In closing, I'd like to leave you with this thought:

have a good one

Title Image is Time

It's an open thread, so have at it. The floor is yours
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