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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 10 Jul 2013

Taken: 10 Jul 2013

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Keywords

Steven Pinker •
The Stuff of Thought •
Except •
Second excerpt •
Heaven on Earth •
Author •
Michael Shermer •

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Though the continuous flow of time is a medium of our consciousness, that is not how time is treated within the division of thought connected to language. In that division, time is treated like a dimension of space, and humans think of events as material laid along it. Time may be thought of as a road on which we march, or as a parade that marches past us. It is not measured with a stopwatch or calendar but divided into discrete regions. Humans tend to trichotomize time into a psychological present (a moment of awareness about three seconds long), an indefinite past (sometimes split into recent and distant), and an indefinite future (also splittable into impending and distant). The past and the future are often not pure temporal concepts but are infected with metaphysics: the past is merged with the actual, and nonpast with the hypothetical, the future with the willable. The events populating the mental time line are conceived as extrusions of timestuff: like objects they can be punctuate or extended, can have crisp boundaries or fade on indefinitely, and can be composed of a single happening or an aggregate or repetitions. A mental zoom lens can zero in on the microscopic nature of the activity (crossing the street) or can pan back to take in the event in its entirety (crossed the street). And like the mental tape measure, the mental stopwatch is calibrated to human purposes. It runs differently when an act is seen as voluntarily enacted and when it seen as just occurring, and it starts when actors exert their will and stops when they consummate their goals.

Humans see more things just happening and others as being caused. Causality is assessed not just by correlating things in time or by pondering what would have happened if things were otherwise, but by sensing an impetus that is transferred from a potent agent with a tendency toward motion to a weaker entity that would rather stay put. Variations on this mental cartoon of pushing and resisting give rise to intuitions of helping, hindering, preventing, and allowing. ~ Page 430
11 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
A year represents a sliver of time that amounts to a mere one one-hundred-fifty-thousandth of the life-span of our species, one ten thousandth of the epoch of our civilization, one five-hundredth of the Age of Science, and one one-thousandth of the age of Einstein, who discovered that space and time are indivisible. Further, our species is but one among hundreds of millions -- perhaps billions -- of species tht evolved over the course of 3.5 billion years on Earth, itself around 4.6 billion years old and accounting for only a third of the age of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe. If you lived for century, that would amount to a mere 0.0000000073 percent of the cosmic life-span ~ Page 239 "Heaven on Earth" Author - Michael Shermer
6 years ago.

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