http://www.inteco.cl/biology/nature.htm
"We belong to a culture that lives mostly, and particularly in the domains
of science, philosophy and technology, in the explicit or implicit
acceptance of some kind of independent reality as the ultimate reference
for all explanations. This attitude permeates our manner of asking question
and our listening for answers. Thus. in our culture as we ask the question
what is time, we
expect an answer with the form of a reference to some kind of independent
entity, in the implicit understanding that such reference will give
universal validity to our answer. According to what I have said that
reference cannot be done, not due to a limitation in our capacity for
knowing, but as a feature of the nature of the phenomenon of cognition.
Therefore, that which we
connote with the word time cannot be a thing in itself.
In our culture the notion of time is used as an explanatory notion or
principle in the same way that the notion of reality is used. But if we are
aware of this situation, and we are aware that the word time cannot refer
to an entity that exists independently of what we do, we must ask our
questions differently as we ask about to that which we connote in daily and
thecnical life when we use the word time. What features of the coherences
of our experiences do we connote or abstract as we use the word time?
a). We use experience to explain experience. Explaining time, therefore, is
an operation that I shall perform with element of the domain of our
experiences. Accordingly I shall use features of our daily experience, not
notions external to it, as I explain of describe what I think that we do as
we use the word time. Experience is our starting condition both to ask
question and to answer them. Thus, I shall start from finding ourselves
doing and in the capacity of doing all that we do daily or thecnical life.
Experience is not our problem as we want to explain what we do, explaining
it is our task.
Similarly, the use of the word time or any other word in daily life is not
the problem, but to explain or reveal what we do as we use them, or how we
live them is.
b). I maintain that the word time connotes an abstraction of the ocurrence
of processes in sequences as we distinguish them in the coherences of our
experiences. As we distinguish sequences of processes, we also distinguish
simultaneity of procesees as a feature of our experiential coherences that
we connotes with the expression "at the same time". Such an abstraction is
made
possible in the first place, because in the operation of our nervous system
sequences of activities are distinguished asconfiguration of relations of
activities on the surface of the nerve cells in the generation of the nerve
impulses. As a result that which from the perspective of an observer is an
operation in time, in the distinction of time as an abstraction of a
process appear as an operation in the present.
c). At the moment of the abstraction of the relation of sequence in the
distinction that we call time, time arises in the experience of the
observer with directionality and irreversibility. Even in the case in which
we distinguish cyclical reversible processes, we make such a distinction in
the context of the directional irreversibility of time that permits the
distinction of the sequence process and its reverse as a process
configuration that we call reversible time. So, reversible time is an
abstraction of a particular irreversible and directional experience.
d). Once time arises as a distinction in the domain of the experiences of
the observer it becomes an operational entity that in our culture appears
as having independence from what the observer does. An this is so because
once time has arisen it can be used by the observer (any one of us as a
languaging being) in his or her reflections on the regularities of his or
her experiences precisely because it arises as an abstraction of the
regularities of his or her experiences. With the notion of time, therefore,
happens the same as with the notion of structural determinism that is also
an abstraction from the regularities of the experiences of the observer,
which can be use to deal with the regularities of the coherencees of the
observer precisely because it arises as an abstraction from them.
e). I consider that what I have said is valid in any domain, including, of
course, physics. The domain of physics arises as a domain of explanations
of certain kinds of experiential coherences of the observer through the use
of certain kinds of experiential coherences of the observer. So, physics is
not a primary domain of existence, it is a particular domain of
explanations of a particular domain of experiential coherences of the
observer. Theoretical notions are abstractions of the experiential
coherences of the observer in some domain, or at least are intended to be
so. Due to that condition, theories are operationally effective only in the
domain where they apply as such abstractions.
f). Unidirectional time and reversible time arise as theoretical notions in
physics as abstractions that the observer makes of his or her experiential
coherences and that he or she denotes with the words time and
reversibility. As theoretical notions unidirectional time and reversible
time can be handled as entities that have operational effectiveness in the
experiential domain from which they are abstractions. That seems obvious.
What is not so obvious, however, is that we frequently forget that
unidirectional time and reversible time are indeed abstractions of the
experiential coherences of the observer as I have indicated
above. When the latter happens, we treat unidirectional time and reversible
time as if they were entities that exist independently from what we do as
observer, or as if they were reflections or representations of such
independent entities, and we generate conceptual and operational conflicts.
When the latter happens we do not even see that mathematical formulations
in theoretical
propositions arise only as effective in their coherences as the abstraction
of the coherences of the experiences that they represent.
As the notion of time has been generated as an abstraction of our
experiences of sequences of processes in the many dimensions and forms of
our human existence, it has been generated in relation to the multiplicity
of forms in which we live. As a result there are as many forms of time as
forms of abstracting the regularities of the experiences of processes and
sequences of processes. Thus we speak of fast and slow time, passing time,
letting time pass, having or not having time, time coincidence, networks of
time, simultaneity, ... in many different fields of experiences, and in all
cases we refer to the same kind of
abstraction in the domain of sequences of processes. Indeed, each domain
has its own time dynamics as it has its own process dynamics. The awarenes
that the notion of time arises as an abstraction from the coherences of the
experiences of the observer that he or she uses as an explanatory notion is
not a problem. What becomes a problem in the long run, is the unaware
adoption of the notion of time as an explanatory principle that is accepted
as a matter of course giving to it a trascendental ontological status."
Maturana, H. (1995). http://www.inteco.cl/biology/nature.htm.