Montag, 15. Mai 2017

A LETTER TO DR. JULIAN BARBOUR ON TIME AND THE SENSE OF IT




Dear Dr. Barbour,

I enjoyed very much your lectures posted on youtube. Being neither a mathematician nor a physicist but rather a humble biochemist and translator of technical and scientific literature, I certainly cannot grasp the mathemathics decorating different learned opinions on the structure of Universe, the essence of Time etc. Nevertheless I am interested in these matters and use them as a sort of gymnastics for my brain.

I would like to comment on one particular subject, which you spoke on just at the end of your lecture "Does Time exist?" at The Perimeter Institute, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkjXuS_Z1ds . It is the problem of so-called sense of time. Or in other words, why time - an illusion according to the QM theory - is so overwhelmingly real in practice. Being a biologist, I would like to assure you that this problem is trivial when approached from an appropriate scientific position. In this case we require neither "a deeper understanding of conscience", nor appellating to Rev. Berkeley, nor meditating on "conscious memory", "logical necessity" etc. etc.

This is the approach of late Prof. B.F. Skinner, who was known as "the father of radical behaviorism". This approach sweeps away as nonsensical rubbish the whole bumptious verbiage of cognitivism-mentalism - the pseudo-science which regrettably is fashionable nowadays.

When considering the problem of the sense of time we should keep in mind the operant nature of behavior discovered and studied by Prof. Skinner. Operant is the universal mechanism of seemingly "spontaneous" animal and human behavior which roughly speaking consists of:
- operant contingencies, i.e. the specific environmental situation in which the sequence of events and actions comprising a given operant can probably start and "develop in time",
- operant signal informing some properly conditioned animal or human that:
- if it/he/she instantly emits the specified act of behavior,
- then with some probability either the positive reinforcement (reward) of this act, or non-appearance of (otherwise inevitable) negative reinforcement (punishment) will follow.

I would like to repeat that the operant nature of animal and human behavior was firmly established by Prof. Skinner and his followers on the basis of extensive experimentation. Operant behavior is a fundamental mechanism of adaptation of individual organisms to their environment, no less fundamental than the Darvinian evolution by means of natural selection which is the mechanism of the environmental adaptation of species.

Being such an important instrument of the individual adaptation of animals, operant behavior as a process taking place on time schedule inevitably involves the "sense of time" as an "inner clock" - the fact also firmly experimentally established by Prof. Skinner.

It is therefore quite obvious that such things as "conscious memory", "consciousness" and especially "self-consciousness" are not necessary pre-requisites for this "sense of time". All of these entities are the result of social behavior of humans and very often involve verbal communication which is a marvellous instrument of social life and the only thing differing mankind from other animals.

Sincerely yours,

behaviorist-socialist