© 2012 Ralph E Kenyon Jr.
One main problem in general seems to be the conception of an inherently "right" or "correct" component to the early conception of time-binding, paraphrased as "if it has 'wrong' results, it is not 'time-binding'" - that time-binding entails "improvement". The sense that a "right" and "wrong" value judgment component goes with the nature of "time-binding" seems to pervade the characterization and writings. Symbols may be passed from generation to generation, but every person must learn with his or her own unique experiences what those symbols "mean" to him or her self. Contrary to the claim that each generation begins where the previous left off, each person in each generation must learn from scratch, although he or she benefits from the abstractions of past generations that simplify the learning and weed out some obsolete stuff. Moreover, each person also "anti-benefits" from passed on mistakes, untested assumptions, and speculations, as well as untestable beliefs. We begin with an altered and possibly improved by some standards set of symbols, but we must each go though the learning process to create our meanings for those symbols using communication processes.While we may read ancient texts, we do so with the modern meanings we have each individually learned resulting from generations of loss and error magnified by breaks in the chains of communication. New stuff - both good and bad relative to any particular context - grows almost exponentially.
What is good and what is bad depends on the environment of the organism and the purposes of the organism, consequently, there can really be no "good" or "value" component to the definition of time-binding, as that will always vary with the environment and the organism. The passing of information from generation to generation ALONG WITH the continuous chain of effective communication that standardizes behavior with respect to the symbols used, like all information channels, is subject to loss and the injection of noise - loss and error. We can no longer make violins like they used to, but we can now make atomic bombs and power plants. Most city dwellers have never learned what plants in the forests can be safely eaten, but most can read the ingredients list on packages in the supermarket. Some have even learned more about those ingredients than just their names.
Time-binding is our capacity to build a symbol system to represent information together with communication that transmits the knowledge of what to do with those symbols - the knowledge of how to use the information - continuously from generation to generation.
| This page was updated by Ralph Kenyon on 2013/03/20 at 10:29 and has been accessed 3519 times at 33 hits per month. |
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