Re: mesogenesis and friends
David Dirlam (ddirlam who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Mon, 17 Nov 1997 10:27:12 -0800 (PST)
Jay
Your analysis of the problems of time revealed the problems with
more clarity than I have seen before. There's another way of looking at
time in which many of these problems would be radically simplified or
would even collapse altogether.
I think one of the key problems is that we have been viewing time
scales as different levels in a hierarchy of scales, where microseconds
are embedded in seconds, seconds in hours, hours in months, months in
centuries, etc. The concentric circles are just another way of graphing
this same set of relations. It's the old physics again.
It is possible to conceive of the scales not as embedded but as
separate *dimensions* -- where dimension is defined from the Cartesian
product, so that every element of one dimension is paired (or tripled or
n-tupled in the 3-D or n-D cases) with each element in another. In a
simple three-dimensional case, one would have actions, say, on the x-axis,
activities on the y-axis, and cultural practices on the z-axis. Then, it
would not confuse the issue when the durations of changes in actions
overlapped with the durations of changes in activities. One would just
extend the dimension in question. Trajectories could also be plotted as
3-d with changes occurring simultaneously in minutes within the
action dimension, in hours within the activity dimension, and decades
within the cultural practice dimensions.
David