/lit/ - Literature

awesome question but all you're gunna get in /lit/ are some soft philosophical answers, or "yeah, possibly, cool question," which is what I'm doing.

Other animals don't have a concept of time. They also don't mature like humans do so even if they did understand time, our scale wouldn't be very applicable to theirs.

I'm pretty sure some smart asshole somewhere once said that time is purely a human fabrication. It makes sense because if you think about the universe with the absence of humans, shit like the number of revolutions around the sun doesn't mean anything. It's just a means for humans to measure shit.

>>3858019
I'd also like to add that a fly's response to a threat with quick reflexes is involuntary and actions like that don't really require higher order thinking or even a brain at all. It's not like flies enter the matrix and slow down time when they sense that someone is about to swat them. They also don't know what it's like to be human and humans don't know what it's like to be a fly so even if flies did have a perception of time, it would be pretty damn hard to compare the two since we can't communicate with each other.

>>3858017
lol, thanks for the response at least.

>>3858031
That's true... I guess if we are ever able to put our brains inside a computer would we have a different concept of time than when we were human? Time is objective, but wouldn't different creatures concept of time be subjective?

>>3858019

You are explaining time in the abstract sense known to reason as such. Time understood in a quantitative sense, or in terms of the numbers on a clock.

Time in the empirical sense is conceived by very intelligent animals like parrots and dolphins.

Time in the a priori sense on the other hand is a form of the intellect and therefore present in any animal capable of sensuous perception.

>>3858050
So in the empirical and priori sense is it possible that each creature has a different understanding of the same amount of time passed?

>>3858062

A priori is universal.

Empirical would likely be conditioned by the quality of the given intellect. An animal might have some awareness that a quantum of time has elapsed, but as it can make no quantitative analysis of this intuition, it simply passes by unnoticed.

In other word, animals can perceive that time is passing through reference to themselves and their interior activity, but as they lack all ability to form an abstract conception of this time, the impression is limited. They lack a general consciousness of time. They understand things like 'age' from other, simpler cues.

>>3858100
That makes sense. What about the trans-humanist argument? If in our future we are able to continue living by implanting our brain or personality inside a machine would we have a different concept of time because we do not have a typical human's senses?

>>3858050
I'm not gonna pretend like I'm an authority on this matter. I'm just reiterating what I was taught, what I have read, and what I have heard.

Like I said, I have read that time is a human construct. I have never heard of any other animal as being capable of perceiving time, but if you have a link to an article demonstrating otherwise, I'd be more than happy to read it.

If you eliminate humans from the picture, then time ceases to exist. What relevance does the revolution of the earth around the sun have to the collapse of a star in a distant part of the universe? In a universe that has always existed, time has no meaning, no consequence, and no means for being measured.

>>3858114

Unless you are talking about changing the underlying anatomy and nervous functions of the brain, time in the a priori sense would be identical, whatever your sensory data was. The brain would work up perceptions in accordance with the same forms of intellect as it does now, namely time, space and causality.

That these forms are quite flexible is demonstrated in that all animals endowed with perception share them as well, and their unique sensory impressions (echolocation, electroreception, etc) conform to their order.

>>3858130

Eliminate man and you eliminate most all abstract knowledge. But even so we may still say of these things you list (stars, moon cycles, plant activity) that they are what would appear if an adequately endowed observer were in a position to perceive them. Likewise with all the geological activity which preceded man: this is what would have been seen and heard and understood, had there been an intellect available to represent these things.

>Question for ya lit, is it possible that other creatures that have a faster reaction time than us also have a different concept of time?

Yes

>Like a fly for example, much faster reaction time than us, and much shorter life span. Does the fly understand it's life in a weeks worth of time like we would?

No/maybe

Or because it perceives everything faster than us would it's life span seem longer?

Maybe, depends how it's wired. Could be see-slow move-fast or see-fast move-slow, you know? How fast can it think? How much working short term memory can it cache?

The distance between nerves, the CNS region responsible for the reflex/sensory input processing, and output (behavior/reaction) would all need to be taken into account.

>>3858050
Fly's don't have a brain capable of processing the conceptualization of their perceptions of time. You may as well ask a rock.

>>3858300
I think you're underestimating the power of the fly's brain.

>>3858310
Processing power isn't the same as algorithm complexity.

Its not like i've studied brainz and stuff or nuffin tho brah.

It wouldve been cool if Tolkien had focused more on Elves weird perception of time, living thousands of years and all. Like how Legolas says the rest of the company sans Gandalf seems like children to him. I know the seasons barely register to them.

>>3858311
Well, change power to fluidity or capability or something like that. Flies are able to do a surprising amount of stuff using their brains. They're often though of as little pre-programmed robots that are only capable of certain predfined actions to stimuli, and that's not true.

>>3858323
That's not what im saying or stating. You're reading what im writing and then deciding that you're going to ignore it and pretend to that i've asserted something i didn't and then respond to the imagined post ...

... you are full on retard. No offense.

Fly's don't have brains powerful enough to perceive time in the sense that we understand it. Because they don't have brains capable of storing that much information or conceptualizing it even if they could.

I think that they totally do, and I also believe that this is the reason why life seems to go by faster as we age. At first one day is your whole concept of eternity, as your life goes on your concept and feel for life expands.

>>3858019
> It makes sense because if you think about the universe with the absence of humans, shit like the number of revolutions around the sun doesn't mean anything

>If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Since you're asking about our psychology of Time (capitalized to enunciate that we're talking about Time as a psychological phenomena), I'd say that the model that most accurately captures our intuition would be the Possiblist theory.
For an event X, we intuitively consider it real if it occurred in either the past or the present; to say that a future event Y is real could be correct in a metaphysical sense but none in a psychological sense.

I'd say that the Possiblist captures our intuitions of time. How it relates to reaction time and whether there's a relation between it and our perception of Time is feasible if the following statements are true:
1. A creature performs behaviours in response to what it's experiencing in the present.
2. A quicker reaction time by a creature C1 entails a different relationship to the present than that of a creature C2 with a slower reaction time.
3. Memories can be formed from the present, so two creatures that experience the present differently will have a different conception of the past (assuming that they're able to form memories).

Going off of this, if organisms C1 and C2 were to produce a complete inventory of the Times they've experienced (except for the immediate present, for that causes an infinite regress), they'd create different inventories.

>>3858357
forgot to attach this:

>>3858327
You don't know that, unless you can experience the same way a fly can. Sure, you can use our knowledge of an animal to say how it experiences time, but then you're committing yourself to the stance that an organism only experiences time if it is in a way that is intelligible to our knowledge. But that's not true: That's a judgement based on how we think an organism construes time based on what we know about how an organism could construe time which is invariably based on how we construe time. Any Physicalist endeavour into an animals experience comes down to this. Sure, it fits with all of our science and shit but it's not right. I'm not saying that flies are infinitely more complex than we say they are, but that to understand how a fly experiences time is to understand how a fly experiences. That understanding comes from nothing short of experiencing as a fly experiences.

>>3858367
read nietches thing on cows they arent aware of time

>>3858373
That doesn't mean they don't experience it. But thanks for the recommendation, I'd love to hear everything Nietzsche gleaned from his conversations with farm animals.

>>3858327
You've gone from
>Fly's don't have a brain capable of processing the conceptualization of their perceptions of time.
>their perception
to
>Fly's don't have brains powerful enough to perceive time in the sense that we understand it.
>we understand it
These are rather different statements and say very different things. The first one isn't held up by research, do a cursory google scholar search if you want to look into it. The second is just weird: flies aren't that similar to us full stop, the way they come to the world is therefore also pretty much completely different. Even if their brains were similar in "power" to ours, there's no reason to think they'd understand the world like we do.

>... you are full on retard.
You mixing up your pronouns again

>>3858382
hey bro nietczhe was into farm animals remember he went insane for a horce

>>3858395
that's the joke