Psychophant's Rants
28.4.14
Synchronicity
Time is a tangled mess. On one hand neurologists tell us that time as we experience it is a fiction, an illusion created by our conscious to give the impression it is in charge, while in many cases it is a retrospective edition on the causes for our actions, as the subconscious acts much more quickly.
On the other, physicists recognize time as a property of the universe, but one that only goes in one direction and we can never reproduce. Time backwards models are among the hardest to do, and they usually fail after a short period of time.
Almost all of us in advanced countries carry one time piece, or several, hoping that they will help us make better use of our time, to avoid being late or early, to find our place in the temporal landscape. But usually its only use is to remind us that there are other things we should be doing, and diminish our enjoyment of what we are doing just now, for the lack of the other things we could be doing.
Yet it is necessary for any teamwork to have a similar time frame. Otherwise you are not together, you are just working on the same thing. It is not only a matter of starting and ending, but also the working speed. Because speed is space/time, or in general, any discrete magnitude divided by time. Eating speed is food/time, but it is also an idea of the food reserves you have, if you take food available instead of food on my plate. Reading speed is text/time, and shows you how much text you need, or can profit from.
As we do have different speeds, that means the experience of time is different for all of us, and it is very difficult to relate with someone at a different speed. It is not only a problem of coordination, as in teamwork where, in a working team, everybody tries to adjust to the lowest speed. It may even affect basic communication, as an experience may be so different that we cannot relate. Imagine a book lover, with a reading speed of two pages per minute, and someone with reading difficulties that reads one page in one hour. They are not experiencing the same book, the same story, even the same relation with other books that is the base of most literature.
We are all swimming along the overwhelming current of time, but at different speeds. In that metaphor, friends then are those who, at certain parts important for both, share your speed so you can actually be at the same speed and communicate.
I suppose all have had the experience of sharing something in common that you cannot explain to a third person. How can you explain the exhilaration of the first scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark or the head-banging, fist-pumping opening of Green Day's Holiday? Those are examples that are significant mainly for a certain age block, with a few outliers of earlier or later periods, and are clearly related to a particular point in time, but others cross through time references, such as puzzles or an appreciation of Bebop. To complicate matters, we are not static beings, and what meant a lot to me ten years ago may be worthless today. Or I may slow down (maybe speed up?) so jazz suddenly acquires a meaning that I could not appreciate before.
Once you reach this point I cannot help but wonder if I have an irregular speed regime, as I change interests with more frequency that others around me, and have difficulty keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances. That also means I have great difficulty picking a favorite book, song or movie, and instead I gather snapshots of what I liked in a certain time frame, and those timeframes build up to make an evolution in preferences, a moving picture of myself.
Or maybe it is the same for all of you, the others, but I do not know because I cannot communicate with them to see how things are on their side. Only those who are very close might tell me, and in that case we are influencing each other so much that we guarantee we stay in synchrony, which is, after all, to be at the same time. Are we close because we are synchronized, or are we synchronized because we are close?
Maybe that is the problem, my resistance to outside influence making it hard to synchronize with others, so I depend on random synchronicity events, when you are synchronous by chance with someone else, and you can enjoy those highlighted moments of extreme closeness, and then often spend a lot of time trying to recover those fleeting moments, growing apart instead of close through those same efforts to grasp a past time that will always be inapprehensible.
This meaning of synchronicity is different from Jung's, though related to it, using it just as the feeling that we really understand a fellow human being, that we are synchronized in our worldview, our mental landscape. As such it does not connect events, but people. ¶ 4:47 PM
Time is a tangled mess. On one hand neurologists tell us that time as we experience it is a fiction, an illusion created by our conscious to give the impression it is in charge, while in many cases it is a retrospective edition on the causes for our actions, as the subconscious acts much more quickly.
On the other, physicists recognize time as a property of the universe, but one that only goes in one direction and we can never reproduce. Time backwards models are among the hardest to do, and they usually fail after a short period of time.
Almost all of us in advanced countries carry one time piece, or several, hoping that they will help us make better use of our time, to avoid being late or early, to find our place in the temporal landscape. But usually its only use is to remind us that there are other things we should be doing, and diminish our enjoyment of what we are doing just now, for the lack of the other things we could be doing.
Yet it is necessary for any teamwork to have a similar time frame. Otherwise you are not together, you are just working on the same thing. It is not only a matter of starting and ending, but also the working speed. Because speed is space/time, or in general, any discrete magnitude divided by time. Eating speed is food/time, but it is also an idea of the food reserves you have, if you take food available instead of food on my plate. Reading speed is text/time, and shows you how much text you need, or can profit from.
As we do have different speeds, that means the experience of time is different for all of us, and it is very difficult to relate with someone at a different speed. It is not only a problem of coordination, as in teamwork where, in a working team, everybody tries to adjust to the lowest speed. It may even affect basic communication, as an experience may be so different that we cannot relate. Imagine a book lover, with a reading speed of two pages per minute, and someone with reading difficulties that reads one page in one hour. They are not experiencing the same book, the same story, even the same relation with other books that is the base of most literature.
We are all swimming along the overwhelming current of time, but at different speeds. In that metaphor, friends then are those who, at certain parts important for both, share your speed so you can actually be at the same speed and communicate.
I suppose all have had the experience of sharing something in common that you cannot explain to a third person. How can you explain the exhilaration of the first scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark or the head-banging, fist-pumping opening of Green Day's Holiday? Those are examples that are significant mainly for a certain age block, with a few outliers of earlier or later periods, and are clearly related to a particular point in time, but others cross through time references, such as puzzles or an appreciation of Bebop. To complicate matters, we are not static beings, and what meant a lot to me ten years ago may be worthless today. Or I may slow down (maybe speed up?) so jazz suddenly acquires a meaning that I could not appreciate before.
Once you reach this point I cannot help but wonder if I have an irregular speed regime, as I change interests with more frequency that others around me, and have difficulty keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances. That also means I have great difficulty picking a favorite book, song or movie, and instead I gather snapshots of what I liked in a certain time frame, and those timeframes build up to make an evolution in preferences, a moving picture of myself.
Or maybe it is the same for all of you, the others, but I do not know because I cannot communicate with them to see how things are on their side. Only those who are very close might tell me, and in that case we are influencing each other so much that we guarantee we stay in synchrony, which is, after all, to be at the same time. Are we close because we are synchronized, or are we synchronized because we are close?
Maybe that is the problem, my resistance to outside influence making it hard to synchronize with others, so I depend on random synchronicity events, when you are synchronous by chance with someone else, and you can enjoy those highlighted moments of extreme closeness, and then often spend a lot of time trying to recover those fleeting moments, growing apart instead of close through those same efforts to grasp a past time that will always be inapprehensible.
This meaning of synchronicity is different from Jung's, though related to it, using it just as the feeling that we really understand a fellow human being, that we are synchronized in our worldview, our mental landscape. As such it does not connect events, but people. ¶ 4:47 PM
