Thoughts on Time:1

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Wed, 24 Dec 1997 15:07:06 -0800 (PST)

Dear Colleagues,
What follows is a collage of observations about time
and development. Recall (the XMCA homepage can serve as
external memory) that this discussion is linked with the
macro-micro issue, different ways of conceiving of context,
and the issue of multiple, interacting time scales.
First, an exerpt from an article called "Remembering
the future" which appeared in a feitschrift for George
Miller edited by Gilbert Harman. The epigraph is from St.
Augustine, a passage which I first encountered in an
article by Davydov and Zinchenko on development that
appeared several years ago in "Soviet Psychology."

"Expectation refers to the future, and memory to the past.
On the other hand, the tension in an act belongs to the
present: through it the future is transformed into the
past. Hence, an act may contain something that refers to
what has not yet come to pass."

(Had I known it at the time, I might have included the
following: "It is perfectly true, as philosopher's say, that life must be understood
backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forward. Soren
Kierkegaard (1843)"

Here is how I introduced the issue at that time:

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
We are all accustomed to the notion of remembering as
the summoning up of past experiences in the process of
dealing with the present. The study of memory,
conventionally understood, has been one of psychology's
most productive growth industries since the 1960s, thanks
in no small part to George Miller's contributions.
Nor is concern with the question of time and cognition
alien to George's work. Speaking of tasks confronting
American psychologists during and after World War II,
Miller commented:

It's the purpose or goal of a machine to get a gun aimed at
some particular point, for example. It [the gun] has a goal
in the old teleological sense that scientists had ruled out
on the grounds that the future cannot control the present.
But in the servo-system the future position of that gun
controls the present motion of the gun in a very real,
perfectly intelligible sense. (Interview with J. Miller,
1983, p. 24),

It was, I argue, the goal not of the gun, but of the
gunner and servomechanism designer to aim a gun at a
particular point. In particular, I hope to demonstrate the
way in which the designer's goal influences the fine
structure of the gunner's actions through the servo
mechanism is but an esoteric example of the general
properties of mediation through artifacts, or what
Vygtostky (1929) referred to as "the cultural mode of
thinking."
In an earlier era, when learning theories were in the
ascendancy and before American psychologists were helping
to create smart tools for wartime use, Edwin Boring, one of
Miller's former colleagues at Harvard, pointed out quite
clearly that our common-sense ideas about events occurring
in the present are really based on the memory of the past.
Appropriately enough, Boring's message returned lately
through the popularity of the work of Edelman (1989), a
Rockefeller colleague not known for having a high opinion
of psychologists. Edelman's book, The Remembered Present,
begins with the quotation of a passage published by Boring
in 1933:

To be aware of a conscious datum is to be sure that it has
passed. The nearest actual approach to immediate
introspection is early retrospection. The experience
described, if there be any such, is always just past; the
description is present. However, if I ask myself how I know
the description is present, I find myself describing the
processes that made up the description; the original
describing is past.... Experience itself is at the end of
the introspective rainbow. The rainbow may have an end and
the end may be somewhere; yet I seem never to get to it.
(Boring, 1933/1963, p. 228)

Edelman summarized a vast array of evidence from the
neurosciences to substantiate his theory about what sort of
organism human beings must be if the phenomenal present is
"really" the past. I am less concerned with the technical
adequacy of Edelman's neurological model than I am with
the fact that remembering the present, if somewhat odd, is
nonetheless broadly recognized.
What then of memory for the future? Whether we look to
the ideas of St. Augustine on the future as expectation,
Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960) on plans, or Bernstein
(1967) on the organization of living movement, one message
repeats itself: The present is a dynamic, evolving,
trajectory which not only integrates current sensory input
with prior experience, but also "calculates" an "imagined
future" which then "feeds back" to complete the
fundamental, transformational cognitive cycle.
Ingvar (1985), whose article on "memory of the future"
triggered the idea for this chapter, summarized evidence
that plans, ambitions, and "sets" are normally remembered
in great detail, just as memories of the past can be
reconstructed. In addition, he summarized the
neuropsychological evidence that memory for the future is
selectively lost owing to lesions of the prefrontal and
frontal cortices. Ingvar referred to these structures as
the "neuronal substrate of the future" (p. 130).
Of course, in one sense we all take for granted the
existence of a memory of the future. I can speak
coherently, for example, of my memory of what I will be
doing (plan to do) this weekend. Research on the selective
disturbance of planning functions as a result of prefrontal
and frontal lobe lesions has been well known for a long
time (Luria, 1970). Previously I did not think of such
phenomena as memory for the future. It was only
when I recently happened upon a reference to Ingvar's
article, while ruminating about cultural mechanisms of
cognitive development, that memory for the future began to
seem like a necessary property of human thought.
I then go on to offer the analysis of prolepsis that
can be found in Cultural Psychology and include, toward the
end, the fragment by Walter Benjamin on "Angelus Novus"
that I posted in response to discussion of Pirsig's *Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*. Here is what Pirsig
wrote:

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in
our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that
you are aware of of intellectually, because of that small
time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always
unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in
the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment
of vision before the intellecutalization takes place. There
is no other reality.(This preintellectual reality is what
Pirsig refers to as "quality. Quality, in this view, is
"the parent, the source of all subjects and objects."

Pirsig continues: "You look at where you're going and where you are and it never
makes sense, but then you look aback at where you've been and a pattern seems to
emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then somtimes you can come up
with something (Pirsig, p. 167)"
In my own thinking, this way of thinking about time and human experience is
linked to the metaphor of the weaving of different "genetic domains" (phylogenetic,
cultural-historical, ontogenetic, and microgenetic) emphasized by cultural-historical
psychology. The "weaving together part" is not well captured by the fragments provided
so far. My favorite weaving example is presumably from William James' *Pluralistic
Universe" but I have not been able to locate it in the original text so have not used it in
print:

The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending
at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unite them
completely in our minds... It is easy to see the world's history pluralistically, as a rope of
which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as
an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living
an undivided life is harder. The great world's ingredients so far as they are beings, seem,
like the rope's fibers, to be discontinuous, cross-wise, and to cohere only in the
longitudinal direction. Followed in that direction, they are many.

I take the emphasis on tracing "threads" over time, and continuity adhering in the rope
not the threads intuitively satisfying, and a"spatio-temporal" embodiment of the earlier
ideas that focus on time directly.

The last example also links space and time in a way that seems to relate to the micro-macro discussion:
In an article in the November "Natural History" about how species can co-habit
the same geographrical space without destroying each other, Steve Gould talks about
ways in which species may be temporally invisible to each other, even though they live
in the same place.

"This fascinating form of imperception ... raises one of the most illuminating issues of
intellectual life and nature's construction: the theme of scaling, or strikingly different
ways of viewing the world-- with no single way either universally "normal" or "better"
than any other-- from disparate vantage points of an observer's size or life span.
...
Species can also share an environment without conflict when each experiences life on
such a different temporal scale that no competitive intraction occurs. A bacterial life
cycle of half an hour will pass beneath my notice and understanding unless the
population grows big enough to poison or crowd out something of importance to me.
But how can a fruit fly ever experience me as a growing changing organism if I
manifest such stability throughout its full life cycle of two weeks or so? The pre-Darwinian Scottish evolutionist Robert Chambers devoted a striking metaphor to this
point when he wondered if the adult mayfly, during its single day of earthly life, might
mistake the active metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog for proof of the immutability
of species, since no visibible change would occur during the mayfly's entire lifetime.
---------
All of this is background to issues raised by Naoki, Eugene, and others. Recall Naoki's
point:

In this context, I can paraprase the following G. H. Mead's phrase.

'When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then
was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could,
that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place,
he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present
within which that use must take place. A string of presents conceivably
existing as presents would not constitute a past.'(Mead, p.30)

Ueno's paraphrasing Mead is as follows;

'When one recalls his macro social structure or large scale process, he cannot get into
them as it then was, without their relationship to what his present practice has become;
and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the macro or large scale as it then took
place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present practice
within which that use must take place.
--------------------

This message is already way above the norm in length. I hope it can lay the groundwork
for thinking about the criticisms that Naoki raised about the usefulness of distinguishing
different levels of time/structure, the shortcomings of a concentric circles metaphor
of context, etc. Enough for now.
Mike