TED Community » Krystian Aparta

More About Me

I'm passionate about

some science fiction, some cognitive science (e.g. conceptual blending), constructive novel perspectives, disowning authority, some music, non-philosophical forays into the mind, kinesthetic thought

An idea worth spreading

"Distance doesn't mean the unity of space" - this is a mnemonic that sums up one of the study quests that I am interested in.I explored the idea of time (conceptualization, inner logic, sources of its "concreteness") in my master's thesis, using conceptual blending and research on episodic memory. While getting to the bottom of my understanding of time,I realized that much the same work could be done for the concept of space.I am especially interested in the concrete conceptual reality of unitary space (non-discrete), and I would like to get deeper into what this is based on, cognitively and culturally. My intuition is that one major source of the power of this "concreteness" is the conceptualization of distance,and its cultural elaboration (e.g. models of location). I find it interesting that I live in, and live by an infinite and yet concrete environment of space. I don't like it that it's counter-intuitive that it be discrete, and would like to explore the structure of my intuition.

Talk to me about

everything but why dogma is not that bad. the unimaginable. ideas pushing out of scope

People don't know that I'm good at

computers, reading (some aspects of) people ;)

Comments

• TEDCred score: +313 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Talk: Clay Shirky: Why SOPA is a bad idea

  Jan 19 2012: Shouldn't it be "at the TEDOffices"? ;)

• A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Dec 2 2011: I meant to say that no answer is free from new questions :)

• A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Dec 1 2011: I think the beauty is not in the answer but in always being able to ask, after a beat: oh really? why? when? what if... etc. :)

• A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Dec 1 2011: Thank you for sharing. Just to clarify: I am not sure how the way a culture writes influences the left-right directionality of time, and if the writing convention influences that at all. They just seem to coexist and probably reinforce one another. Also, your experience of front/back time seems also to be shared by the majority of humans (although what is "front" and what is "back" may differ). The left-right model is a special case. It's more like if for some reason you think about the chronology of causation and decide if that would start from the left or from the right, in one culture most people would say right, in another left. You can see that in advertisements, for example: you get "DIRTY SHIRT - DETERGENT BOX - CLEAN SHIRT" and "CLEAN SHIRT - DETERGENT BOX - DIRTY SHIRT" with the same intended meaning, depending on what orientation is more common in a culture.
  
  I think that understanding the ordering of events in a linear model and understanding of temporal events as linear can be analyzed separately. The temporal events are easy - it's easy to learn than "11 o'clock" is earlier than "12 o'clock," so when you conceptualize "11 o'clock" as the time you did the laundry, and "12 o'clock" as the time you folded your clean clothes, you can say that you conceputalize time linearly. Also, when you feel that one event caused another, I feel there is usually some precession there for most people, but I think it's not necessarily temporal (a very subtle difference - you don't need to know about "time" to understand what happened first). But in a more general way, I can understand how your idea of causality would not be "step by step" but based on the importance and meaning of the causal links - since I think the same way. I find it hard (an effort) to think about what's happening or what happened in a linear way - I have this big bag of interrelated memories of an event but without many temporal links that I'm aware of. I like it when people explain sth as a whole.

• A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Nov 30 2011: Thanks for these interesting visualisations. I often think that we should not presume that our models of what is rational represent an outside world - our models (conceptual and formulated) are not "reality", they pick out regularities in experience (I'm borrowing this phrase from Fauconnier and Tuner), but that does not mean that they make the experience objective (outside of human comprehension). Since our models of time (the non-conscious ones that seem obvious and unquestionable) arose based on our experience of embodied motion in a specific environment (land on Earth), they work very well for us and here. But as we expand our experience to non-intuitive input (as we think about the world and create things like maths and physics), these models may not necessarily be what we can base judgments of what is rational thinking/logic or not. This is why it may ultimately be impossible to explain such issues (like the ones you discussed) by using analogies to what we understand immediately as making sense, deriving from normal human experiences. These analogies are used for teaching purposes and may be indispensable (although there may be exceptions), but my point here is that we don't necessarily need to be able to explain what it means that there is no change or no past to still believe these models are true in the context of other abstract models that we have created (i.e. in the context of the logic of some theories in physics or cosmogony). It can be absurd and not make immediate rational sense, but still be true and STILL have no bearing on how we should reason about in the everyday world, where these models don't fit and are not useful :) Although I sometimes find it useful to look at a wall and think of it as traveling at light speed (I have this intuition that it can always be traveling at a near-light speed, but maybe not "now", just as a potential of energy, or maybe from a different frame of reference?)

• A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Nov 30 2011: Oh sorry, I realized that I missed two of your questions:
  
  1. I am not sure why Monday would be at the top. Of course the drawing is a simplification, and the real thing has a lot of structure, thoughts and affect in it :) I am not sure how accurate this is, but my current guess would be that it's at the top since it requires the most conscious thinking about organization. Nothing free usually starts for me on a Monday - it's usually the day that is most marked by structures like deadlines and making plans for the week. So I need to wake up early and "light up" my mind to that. I think perhaps the closer to the weekend, the more I can unbind my ego from that sort of work and look for things that are less defined. I am always sad when I need to work on the weekend (work in a time-structured way; I am fine working on an interesting project) because I like to shed a little of the "organization". I am not motivated by abstract models of time, you see ;)
  
  2. I don't read charts from right to left. I read from left to right.

• A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Nov 30 2011: Thanks! :) What you said sounds fascinating and beautiful. However, I strongly believe that there's nothing in "left-to-right" versus "right-to-left" that allows me to tap into some ancient knowing - or if it does, there are billions of people able to tap into it. There are many sources for this, but one good example is the paper "Time (also) flies from left to right" by Julio Santiago, Juan Lupiáñez, Elvira Pérez and María Jesús Funes (www.ugr.es/~psilcom/Santiago-LeftRightTimeMetaphor-2007.pdf). If you search the paper for "Arab," you will see that right-to-left ordering is conventional in Arabic cultures - not only in writing, but in conceptualizing the order in a causation or the temporal order (what happens first). So all these people have this trait - and I only seem to have a right-to-left orientation in my model of the week and the year. If I imagine causation, it goes from left to right (or at least not consistently from right to left like when I think about the week).
  
  About your preschoolers - the ability to order events is a separate, and I think earlier ability from the ability to "blend" that ordering with an abstract model of time. I "tested" this with a preschooler once and she was able to perfectly judge what comes after and before (even in longer sequences), while she was oblivious to the abstract "scenarios" that we all take for granted, e.g. the week as something we go through (the week is a thing, and so once you're in it, you implicitly know that it's going to roll out in full - we're always in the same week, although I don't think anybody's asked the universe for confirmation of this "objective" fact ;)). It's interesting that they would struggle with left-to-right writing, I always though this was also arbitrary. My little cousin first learned to read books upside-down and read them with no problem.

• A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Nov 30 2011: Thanks, have fun reading!
  
  But can you specify the bit about the not conceptualizing an agent influencing the conceptualization of duration? Can you give me an example - e.g. is this something that you feel intuitively? If so, please give me an example of a situation/event and why you believe the agency was not part of the scenario - e.g. did somebody use a construction that obscures/doesn't include the agent. If this is regarding some research that made this conclusion/hypothesis - could you please direct me to it? I would like to understand this, since I find it really interesting that you state that this does influence the conceptualization of time with certainty, so I guess it's something you are sure about. Like I said, I could theorize (i.e. do some introspection and thinking and then use my background in cognitive linguistics to put that into words), but I would like to avoid delving deep into this idea as long as I don't feel that I understand your claim correctly :)
  
  I will throw some other ideas out there to help you make it specific. As far as the language goes (not the concepts), we can talk about tense and aspect as means of relating an event to a model of time. We can also use time adverbials etc., but I'm talking about what you can do with verbs. There are other things that we can do with verbs to communicate various meanings that do NOT put events on a "temporal landscape". For example, the subjunctive in Spanish is used to "locate" an event in the context of potential - so something can be portrayed as dubious, not first-hand knowledge, or even sth that you will into happening (i.e. in using the subjunctive as the imperative). There are many things like that in languages (e.g. evidentiality), all of which don't deal with temporality. So it is possible that you feel that the way you conceptualize agentivity does influence the way you understand an event, but maybe not in a temporal manner but in some of these other ways (like something like mood)?
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Nov 30 2011: When I think about what I'd do in the week, and sometimes when I gesture (I "talk" with my body a lot), I have a spatial model of the week that goes from right to left that looks more or less like this (so there is also some downward/upward movement) http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/717/weekn.jpg
  
  I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not gotten interested in cognitive science (and conceptual models of time in particular). I'm pretty kinaesthetic (in my thinking as well) and I think that this model probably means that I have pseudosynesthesia (in the sense that it's genuine but not perceived as a sensory experience - I just think in terms of shapes about a lot of things)
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: HOW DOES OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AFFECT OUR CONCEPTION OF TIME?

  Nov 30 2011: What do you base this assumption on, about it being impossible to understand? Again, it's actually IMPOSSIBLE for them not to be able to understand. Perhaps I should have explained "lexicalized". When a concept is lexicalized, it is turned into a word (not necessarily glued together out of sounds - "bookcase" is also a word). This often happens when a concept is revisited and you need to be able to activate it in your conversation partner's brain in a way that takes less time (is more cognitively economical) than describing the concept in many words. So again, the fact that other ideas for Western-like numerals are not lexicalized does not mean that any member of the culture cannot come up with another concept that is similar to the concept of a Western numeral "above 5." Once they do, they have a whole collection of methods available to socialized humans to communicate the new idea. I will give you an example. With my friends, I used to play this beat-em-up game on the Sega Genesis where you got a powerup boost at level 7.5. So we called it the "boost level". In our little group, "boost level" meant "7.5". Here, now you know a new numeral - boost level.
  Another example (BTW the one above was made up) - try to recall how when you were little you needed to learn negative numbers, or square roots, or trig. Since some of these ideas are not in common use in your population, the teacher probably tried to build on some of your existing experience to allow you to conceptualize an abstract mathematical concept (e.g. I was taught fractions by an example of dividing a cake). The same thing can happen in a culture where no Western-like numerals "above 5" are lexicalized.
  Also, if the culture does not have a conventional concept of a countable entity multiplied over 5, it makes no sense to ask them to give you something to refer to a concept like that in a conversation, so asking that man "how many" about something you conceptualize as 6 does not test for anything.