Notion of time in persespectives

[BurnedOut]

Today, I was thinking about a concept: Thinking Pastly and Thinking Presently.

Assumptions

1. Time is a product of causality
2. The past is an array of present consolidated in time frames that exist independently but are conceived due to causality materialized in the time-frame preceding it:
   • Present is a different but unique configuration of the time-frame preceding it.
   • Present exists independently of the past
   • Present, is however, not a 'version' of the past in the sense that it does not share anything common with the past preceding it. This is because net causalities have changed. A simple analogy - Hydrogen + Oxygen = Water but Water is entirely unique.
     • Net causality can be defined as causality of causality. This is a real causality that is composed of attributes of matters + Random factor

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Thinking Pastly

Thinking pastly is conceiving the present as a result of the past entirely. The thought process associated with this focuses strongly on

1. Information is filtered through the lens of the past
2. Deriving trends from the past information and declaring that as the evidence of present being present.
3. Present is looked upon as determinable. Believes that spontaneity is due to undocumented information rather than pure randomness
4. Statistical in nature
5. Dictates that chasms in recordings of circumstances do not matter so much because there is a definite trend that is going on as net causality is always 0: Everything is explainable with the right amount of information.
6. Believes that adaption is the process of accommodation of new information rather than changing circumstances that are novel and independent.

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Thinking Presently

Thinking presently is conceiving the past as a product of the present. This means that

1. Past contains pseudopatterns rather than anything that can prove that is per se a trend.
2. Past can be used to predict nothing but rather refine measurable causalities. However, causality itself cannot be used for predicting as it because net causality is never constant.
3. Present is not looked upon as determinable but a unique setting that is familiar on the surface due to the presence of the same objects. However, the presence of the same objects do not ensure same circumstances.
4. Each successive frame of the present justifies the existence of the present frame before it.
   1. This basically means that the precedent frame's precedent frame and so on cannot be figured out if the chronology of arrangement of objects is not recorded.
      1. Basically, this means that if there are chasms in recording of matter, determining the past is mere speculation and hence determining the present based on conjectures is not as good as recording it directly.
5. Believes that thoughts are time-disjunct due to memory limitations. Therefore, we are not very good at determining the time-frame and locus of each thought causing us to give an illusion of being able to influence the present based purely on the past.

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The questions

1. What aspects of our perception is pastly and what aspects are presently?
2. Is it possible that if people can be classified into two of these categories
   1. Change their thinking style
   2. Capable of influencing behaviour. If yes, then in what manner?
3. Is thinking too pastly correlated with depression? (I was musing on this theory when I felt that somehow depression persists because of another heuristic than refuses to acknowledge, more acutely, the salience of randomness in reality.)
4. Do people remain the same, do they change over time?
5. Do thinking pastly and presently really cancel each other out or is it simply a matter of perspective?
6. Any practical applications? In therapy? Counseling? Research?

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PS:

1. I conceived this on my own. Therefore if this coincides with any other theory which is more fleshed out, I will be more than happy to read and review it.
2. Tear this whole thing apart, logically.
3. This is not a different version of Sensing v. Intuition because both the styles require constantly collecting new information, new frameworks and adaptions to the new environment. This is not based on MBTI.

 

[Black Rose]

You made me think about future-oriented people. In perception, they are always anticipating what happens next. They make predictions and actively perceive the future.

 

[The Grey Man]

Thinking pastly and thinking presently seem to be equivalent to thinking deterministically and thinking liberalistically (not in a practical or political sense, but in the speculative or theoretical sense) respectively.

Broadly speaking, the advantage of thinking deterministically is that, if the past determines the present, then, by extrapolation, the present determines the future, and, since the future is to the present what the present is to the past, the same reasoning that explains the present as a function of the past can be used to articulate courses of action that describe possible futures insofar as they depend upon one's actions in the present. In short, the advantage of deterministic thinking is its utility for strategic planning.

The disadvantage of determinism is the fatalism that sometimes accompanies it. Some think that, because all of history is determined from eternity, nothing we can do can change the future. But this is a fallacy, a non sequitur: the bare consideration that we are destined to either have sausages or not have sausages for breakfast does not decide whether we will have sausages or not. It is we who make the decision by having sausages (or not) according to motives and appetites that escape rational calculation. Willing, as I am fond of saying, is the sword that cuts the Gordian knot of skepticism, and it also cuts the knot of fatalism.

This brings me to the advantage of liberalism: that it conforms to our incorrigible intuitions of ourselves as free agents and thereby "saves the phenomena." On the other hand, just as determinism degenerates into fatalism in the absence of a compensating liberalistic influence, so does liberalism degenerate into foolishness if it is not tempered by a prudent acceptance of causal laws as the limits within which the will can do its work. Determinism and liberalism are thus complementary: we cannot dispense with the concepts of liberty or necessity without falling prey to the Scylla of foolish decision-making or the Charybdis of fatalistic paralysis.

1. What aspects of our perception is pastly and what aspects are presently?

I think that perception and cognition in general are past-oriented insofar they are based on memory and their objects manifest lawlike patterns, whereas the will is future-oriented, since objects of desire are always in the future. In the present, these past and future hemispheres of man (Schopenhauer's will and representation) meet. The present is, to borrow a term from another thread, the quintessence of time, which is why Christian theologians like Boethius and Augustine have described God as eternally present.

2. Is it possible that if people can be classified into two of these categories

1. Change their thinking style
2. Capable of influencing behaviour. If yes, then in what manner?

You mentioned sensing and intuition but, as I explained above, I think that the distinction that you have made is that between perception and cognition, on one hand, and volition on the other. If we classified people according to their proximity to either of these poles of human nature, the result would be something like the much older distinction between the active and contemplative types, Martha and Mary. This distinction is alluded to in those lines of Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" which refer to people caught in the "sensual music" of youth who "neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect." This last line suggests also the affinity of the contemplative, intellectual 'hemisphere' for the past.

3. Is thinking too pastly correlated with depression? (I was musing on this theory when I felt that somehow depression persists because of another heuristic than refuses to acknowledge, more acutely, the salience of randomness in reality.)

If 'fatalistic paralysis' can justly be identified with depression, then I think the answer is yes.

4. Do people remain the same, do they change over time?

That's a very complex question. It depends on what counts as a 'person.' If a person is no more than his body, then people notoriously do change over time. On the other hand, people can be conceived as souls or as timeless archetypes who are only accidentally associated with history.

5. Do thinking pastly and presently really cancel each other out or is it simply a matter of perspective?

As I've said, I think that, far from cancelling each other out, they are complementary, meaning that they complete each other.

6. Any practical applications? In therapy? Counseling? Research?

Is any enterprise possible without the presuppositions of human freedom and natural necessity?

 

[scorpiomover]

1. Pastly: Ti, Si, Fi, Ni. Si most of all.
Presently: Te, Fe, Se, Ne. Se most of all.
If I would give an order, from most pastly to most presently, then it would be: Si, Ti/Fi, Ni, Te/Fe, Ne, Se.

2. Not really. People who are very presently about some things, are extremely pastly about other things. People who are very pastly about some things, are very presently about other things.

2.1 Yes, people can change. People who are very presently about some things, are extremely pastly about other things. People who are very pastly about some things, are very presently about other things. So no-one is stuck permanently in one mode or the other.

2.2 Pastly thinking and presently thinking present different arguments. So they can both influence behaviour.

3. I can see the argument. If pastly thinking is deterministic, and depressed people are people who are depressed because they believe that their past dictates their present, then depressed people are more likely to be those who believe that the present is doomed because of the past.

If that was the case, then any such person who was reminded that the past does not always dictate the future, would immediately stop being depressed.

4. People change over time. But whether they change their pastliness or presentliness, depends on the person, their experiences, and how they reacted to those experiences and changed as a result.

5. Do they cancel each other out? In the same person, at the same moment, in the same way, they conflict. But if it's not the same person, or at different times, or in different ways, then no, they don't cancel each other out.