Tag Archives: measuring time

Temporal Measures are Like Currency (Standards for Experienced Duration 3)

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Previous: Time and Tide Previous: The Windowsill Clock Note: The three posts here inspire my thinking in my more formal paper ‘Against Illusions of Duration‘, published in the anthology The Illusions of Time (which I co-edit with Arstila, Bardon, and Vatakis). However, along with being less formal, these three posts develop the ideas in much more detail than that paper.

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The man is bemused by this exchange. His colleague makes some tea and sits by the window. Looking out at her ‘clock’ (or, he thinks, exactly not a clock). “How about this” she says, after some while (or other). “Let’s define a new unit of time. A unit to which we can neutrally refer. It refers to what an hour, second, etc. refers to, but can be linked to any standard. The tide, a dripping tap, experience, etc.” “For standard time — that measured by a clock — it might be a second, minute, hour, day; whatever you like. But for any other standard or means of measurement, it needn’t correspond to a clock hour, second, etc.” The man grunts. “And what will we call it?” She scratches her ear. “I don’t know….a moment, perhaps? That seems neutral enough.” He grunts again. “That’s very general. It could mean anything. A second, a millisecond, a year, even, given the scale.” She dips her head to the side (like the sea did). “That’s right. Or, at least, it is empty. It denotes a unit of time without any specification of what defines that unit. It’s like units of currency defined without talking about pennies, pounds, kroner, cents. But here’s the thing: that’s good. We shouldn’t be judging time measured by the tide as accurate or inaccurate according to the clock. They are completely different processes. It is ridiculous to do so, even if they coincide occasionally. You wish to hold on to the terminology of ‘hours’, etc.. Any use of these terms implies evaluation with respect to a clock. It is always an Hour O’Clock, never an Hour O’Something else. So we need a new set of alternatives for other measures of time. First,  some neutral terms referring to any unit of any measurement of time. Without the presupposition that we mean clock time — or tidal time, or even experienced time. Second, for each measure, specific terms if we like. We might do it by qualifying the neutral term, e.g., it is X Moments O’Tide. For the particularly common measures, we might use condensed terms, or even familiar terms. Obviously, for the standard time of human society, we use ‘seconds’, ‘minutes’, ‘hours’. So, now I say it takes ….4000 tidal moments for the event to happen and there is no problem with the clock — at least, initially. Two last things. First, like currency, these measures can be translated into one another. But they aren’t required to stay in fixed translations. Say a moment of tide matches a GMT hour on one occasion and not on another. This is not a reason to reject either the tide’s measure or GMT. It’s not evidence of error on either side. It’s evidence of a complex relationship between them. — It’s like the relationship between the kroner and the yen. — It’s not like the relationship between a good dancer and a bad dancer. Or a bad painting and a good painting. Second, I might give a rough answer to a question about how much time has passed in clock time. But what I’m doing is basing it on a guess as to how tidal time translates to clock time. It’s like if you asked me ‘How much does an umbrella cost?’ in Kroner. I have no idea; but in my home country, in Japan, I know: I look at one for sale in the local shop window. If you insist ‘tell me in Kroner‘, I can try an answer, of course. But I’m not looking in the shop window at the price. I’m guessing based on all sorts of half-rules and -remembered bits about the two currencies relationship. If you used my answer as a base to judge that I don’t know how much an umbrella costs at all, or am under an illusion of its price, I think it’s fair to say you have gone wrong in your thinking, not me. Sure — I get the wrong ‘kroner’ answer — but I don’t have any information about the kroner answer, except the half-stuff I have about its relationship to the yen. It shouldn’t surprise you, then that when you ask me, in clock time, ‘how long does it take to walk to the beach?’, if I say an hour, I can be quite off. But I am not deviating or misjudging the clock time duration. I am guessing the clock time duration based on a measurement of tidal duration. There is a complicated relationship here between two measures:

i. One which I am using to measure time.

ii. The other in terms of which you are asking me to answer.”

“That is a lot of work?” said the man. “Yes, it’s complicated. Doesn’t make it false.” (Now it’s time for a pint).

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On the experience of time:

(1) Illusions are instances of inaccurate experiences (or non-veridical or false experiences).

(2) A typical judgement of experiences of duration is based on matching clock time with experienced time, e.g., a clock-read hour matches an experienced half-hour (if you’re having fun, by all accounts).*

*Strictly speaking, it involves matching clock time with a reported experience of time. But assume for the moment that the reported experience accurately captures the experience.

(3) If you look at the literature on time distortions, illusions of duration (I’ll be very interested in any exceptions to this), you get this idea:

An illusion (or distorted experience) of duration is classed this way because the experienced duration (e.g., the half hour) does not match the clock duration (e.g., the hour).

(4) Like the tide, we aren’t using the same thing to judge the time. We are perhaps measuring something in our experience of time, e.g., such as a succession of emotional/introspective/physiological states. The relationship between that and clock time is, as with the tide, like the relationship between currencies. It’s complex.

(5) This complexity is not a sign of an inaccurate measurement under a common system on the part of either clock or experience. It is a sign of two different measurement systems.

To judge an illusion of duration with standard clock time, then, we need to do the following:

(6) Have a correct system for translating measures in terms of clock time to measures in terms of what is being used in experience,

(7) Whatever value we get in standard clock time, use the system in ‘6’ to translate it into the measure of experienced time.

(8) This value in experienced time is, at the very least, the better candidate for judging the reported experience of time.

I think, actually, that the idea of even judging in the last point, in ‘8’, is more complicated than that. But I leave it here for now.
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Tide and the Clock (Standards for Experienced Duration 1)

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Note: The three posts here inspire my thinking in my more formal paper ‘Against Illusions of Duration‘, published in the anthology The Illusions of Time (which I co-edit with Arstila, Bardon, and Vatakis). However, along with being less formal, these three posts develop the ideas in much more detail than that paper.

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Recently I had a conversation with Marc Wittmann, a psychophysicist/cognitive scientist working on time perception (at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health). The discussion was very engaging and useful, touching on several issues in time perception and time consciousness. I expect to come back to many of them in later posts and work.

This current post is about something I felt we only touched off, and about which I wanted to say more. This is the experience of duration and how one might conceive of it as going wrong. The specific point I want to make is this: the experience of duration may go wrong, but one has to be careful about how one judges it to go wrong. What precisely is it to supposed to do to be right?

In our conversation, Marc told me about the theory he thinks is the best candidate for temporal experience, in particular the experience of duration. This is what might be called the introspective/emotion theory of temporal experience. If I have it right (and Marc can hopefully correct me if not), the theory is as follows.

Our experience of duration is an introspective experience. If is of things inside the experiencer (the subject of experience), not of something out in the world. In particular, as held by Bud Craig, it’s the view that it matches the subject’s emotions — at least, the experience of duration seems to match the progress or succession of emotional states. As Craig puts it in this (publicly available) paper:

[T]he neural substrates responsible for sentience across time are based on the neural representation of the physiological condition of the body, which is consistent with the essence of the James–Lange theory of emotion and Damasio’s ‘somatic marker’ hypothesis (Craig 2002,2009).

Here, I think (drawing also from the conversation with Marc, and a TIMELY conference in Delmenhorst where I saw Craig speak), Craig identifies James-Lange’s ’emotions’ and Damasio’s ‘somatic markers’ to be neural representation of the physiological condition of the body. Further, that our sentience — our awareness or experience — over time is based on emotion.

Whatever it is, though, the view is that our experience of duration is introspective and, if of anything, is of something endogenous — of something within us.

This raised a question for me about the idea that we can have illusions of time — by which I include

illusions of duration, distortions of time, discrepancies between the apparent and actual duration of something.

It seems pretty reasonable that we do have at least illusions of duration. Putting aside even lab-bred illusions (including Eagleman’s drop; search for “We designed an experiment in which “), it’s common to say that in some experiences, a certain duration felt like some other duration, e.g., that conversation felt like an hour rather than the five minutes it was. Or a kid having fun might be surprised that it is tea time already. Once we include experiments, such as Eagleman’s, the evidence seems stacked in favour of the idea that we can have illusions and distortions of time.

But I think that this is the wrong way to think about these judgements of time.

In order to explain my point, I find it helpful to think of the relationship between experienced time and standard clock time with an analogy or metaphor — the relationship between the tide and standard clock time. The following stories (one in this post, one in each of the following posts) illustrate this latter relationship; each is followed by a comment regarding temporal experience.

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The Tide and Time

A man is standing before the tide. The tide is lifting and falling back in front of him. It is dragged to this position by the tugging between the Earth and Moon. It is not clear whether or not the tide is coming in and out.

But it is clear that the man does not look happy. He looks at his wristwatch and then at the tide. Finally, annoyed, he says:

“You’re late.”

After a few moments of gentle waves, a fragment of surf forms a torrent of seething foam. Some rises up to form a face directed toward the man. The hiss and hush of the foam breaks in staccato bursts, becoming words.

“Why am I late?” The puzzled face asks.

The man shakes a finger at it.

“You were here yesterday much earlier — and much much earlier the days before that. Fact is, you’ve been getting later and later each day. I have you down as coming at 3pm, and it’s —

6pm. Unbelievable. I had to come down here myself to see it with my own eyes.”

For a moment, the sea stares at the man without saying a word. (All that can be heard is the wind on the sand, distant seagulls, and the throbbing of a vein in the man’s temple).

The face then leans sideways a little, into the surf, as if the sea is studying the man like a baffled terrier. Then, after some moments, it straightens back up again.

The sea says to the man:

“I don’t think you understand how natural processes work.”

“Now, wait on just a second,” says the man, his loose fringe flying back and forth across his brow. “I have a very accurate watch — a VERY accurate watch, and I can tell you that you did, indeed, come in at a much earlier time.”

“In fact –” he warms up to his point — “given the time-scale of your tide, the amount in which you’ve differed is significant. SIGNIFICANT. It’s not like — ” he pauses, thinking “– it’s not like you’re off by a second or two every year, like — like the sun. No. The sun is very reliable. (I am a big fan of the sun).

Now, you — We’re talking about being off by hours every twenty-four hours. That’s a serious margin of error.”

He folds his arms, and taps his foot in the sand.

There is another pause as the sea does not reply. Finally, the man waves both his hands at the sea:

“Well, can you explain why you are so inaccurate at keeping time?”

Despite being a vast and ancient natural process, the sea has manners. It simply doesn’t know how to politely respond. But, to itself, the sea wonders:

Why on earth would this man believe that my activity should match his watch? Is he serious? That the tide should be judged as accurate or inaccurate by a clock? Why? Because the man can measure it with his clock? Well, isn’t that his business, and not the sea’s?

Humans.

When oh when will they die out?

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Substitute the sea with the processes within us underlying the experience of time. Assume the wristwatch is a well-calibrated clock. Then, taking the italicised paragraph above, we have what might be called the calibration question of temporal experience:

Calibration Question of Temporal Experience

Why believe that the experience of time should match a well-calibrated clock? […] That the experience of time should be judged as accurate or inaccurate by a clock? […] Because the experience of time can be measured with a clock? Well, isn’t that the clock’s business, and not experience’s?

I take this from the question as applied to the sea. I think one can generalise it for any natural process. I assume that temporal experience is as natural and physical as the tide. Temporal experience is smaller, more localised, and comes in multiple instances. But that difference shouldn’t matter. Even if it does matter, we can adjust the metaphor so that the difference disappears.

Perhaps the tide is slightly different on different shores, and so we can treat it as being as broken as experience. One might object that the tide all over the world is linked in a significant way that different instances of temporal experiences never could be linked. But we can adjust that too: the multitude of tides each belong to different bodies — tiny moons in space, say; these are still tides, still something repetitive that one might use as ways of measuring time. This is closer to temporal experience, this separation of tides into different worlds.

One might also think that the following difference is important: if, as suggested above, temporal experience is a measure of something internal, the tidal measure is a measure of something external. However, a difference in internality or externality is an irrelevant difference in this context. Their similarity in relation to calibration by a standard clock is what is relevant here. This is why I think I can substitute one for the other in the paragraph above.

There is this difference, however, between tides and temporal experience: Unlike the tide, temporal experience is a possible (I’m assuming, likely) product of evolution. Unlike the tide, it may be something selected and refined. And it may also have a use, a specific use relevant to clocks: to be how we measure time in our lives. If how it measures can go wrong, then, we can talk about experience being inaccurate.

Even so, there is some plausibility in saying that, like the tide,  the relevant selection is natural. It is plausible to hold that there is no condition on a naturally evolved system that it be evaluated by a socially constructed system. By ‘evaluated’ I mean that its accuracy is set by the socially constructed system. Standard time is a socially constructed system. As such, it is plausible that there is no condition on our experience of time that it must be evaluated by standard time.

Except – we often treat it that way