Toward a Practical Theory of Timing: Upbeat and E-Series Time for Organisms

Naoki Nomura,Jun Tomita,Tomoaki Muranaka,Koichiro Matsuno

doi:10.1007/s12304-020-09398-5

Abstract

Timing adjustment is an important ability for living organisms. Wild animals need to act at the right moment to catch prey or escape a predator. Land plants, although limited in their movement, need to decide the right time to grow and bloom. Humans also need to decide the right moment for social actions. Although scientists can pinpoint the timing of such behaviors by observation, we know extremely little about how living organisms as actors or players decide when to act – such as the exact moment to dash or pounce. The time measurements of an outsider-observer and the insider-participants are utterly different. We explain how such essential operations of timing adjustment and temporal spanning, both of which constitute a single regulated set, can be carried out among organisms. For this purpose, we have to reexamine the ordinary conception of time. Our specific explanatory tools include the natural movement known as the upbeat (anacrusis) in music, a rhythmic push for the downbeat that follows, which predicts future moves as an anticipatory lead-in. The scheme is situated in and is the extension of our formulation of E-series time, i.e., timing co-adjusted through interaction, which is derived from the semiotic/communicative perspectives. We thereby demonstrate that a prediction-based timing system is not mechanical but communicative and entails meanings for future anticipation.

Highlights

We humans resort to mechanical clocks to measure time based on the global standard time, other living organisms neither use such clocks nor count time apart from their actions or living circumstances
Two linguistic tenses are relevant – i.e., the present progressive tense and the present perfect tense – for the interacting players (Matsuno 2013a, 2013b), since organisms that participate in interaction in such cases as the sticklebacks jointly “progress” toward measuring temporal spans and collaboratively set timing for action as a tentative “perfection” (Steps 1–10)
As we have introduced in the previous section, the two sets of upbeat/downbeat and command/ report enable both timing adjustment and meaning making for living organisms

Summary

Introduction

We humans resort to mechanical clocks to measure time based on the global standard time, other living organisms neither use such clocks nor count time apart from their actions or living circumstances. The observation seems warranted that what is visible to us is not time per se but organisms’ act of timing adjustment This is perhaps a safer empirical ground on which we can rebuild a reliable theory of time. The goal of the present paper is to construct a practical theory of timing from the viewpoint of organisms, not from the perspective of outsider observers. Such a theory of timing naturally entails anticipatory characters due to organisms taking action right at hand, because timing adjustment cannot be judged by a clock sitting outside the organism but must rely on the organism’s own ability to regulate the timing for operation, that is, the ability of time-ing

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Conclusion