"‘Time’ seemingly represents a general characteristic of all nervous tissue (and, perhaps, living tissue in general) connected with summarizing or integrating. What we have to deal with in this world and in ourselves appears as periods and periodicity, pulsations, . We are made up of very long chains of atomic pulsating clocks, on the sub-microscopic level. On the macroscopic level, we have also to deal with periodic occurrences, of hunger, sleep, breathing, heart-beats, . We know already that, beyond some limits, discontinuous times, when rapid enough, are blended into continuous feelings of pressure, or warmth, or light, . On objective levels we deal with times, and we feel ‘time’, when the times are rapid enough.
In nature the visible and invisible materials seemingly consist of recurring pulsations of extremely minute and rapid periods, which, in some instances, become macroscopic periods. In the first case, we cannot see them or feel them, so we talk about ‘concreteness’, . In the second case, we see the periodic movements, as of the earth around the sun. , or we feel our heart-beats, . We see that the visible or invisible materials in nature are compounded of periodic pulsations and are simply two aspects of one process. The splitting of these processes into ‘matter’, ‘space’, and ‘time’ is a characteristic function of our nervous system. These abstractions are inside our skins, and are methods of representation for ourselves to ourselves, and are not the objective world around us.
It must be realized that under such circumstances we cannot speak about ‘finiteness’ or ‘infiniteness’ of ‘matter’, ‘space’, and ‘time’, as all the old ‘philosophers’ have done, Leibnitz included, because these terms ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’, though they may be conceivably applied to numbers of aspects of objective entities, have no meaning if applied to linguistic issues, that is, to forms of representation outside of numbers.
The terms ‘finite’ or ‘infinite’ are only legitimately applied to numerical problems, and so we can speak legitimately of a finite or infinite numbers of inches, or pounds, or hours, or similar entities, but statements about the ‘finite mind’ or the ‘understanding of the infinite’. , have no meanings and only reveal the pathological semantic disturbance of the patient.
Let us see now what consequences the objectification of ‘time’ will have for us.
If we do not objectify, and feel instinctively and permanently that words are not the things spoken about, then we could not speak about such meaningless subjects as the ‘beginning’ or the ‘end’ of ‘time’. But, if we are semantically disturbed and objectify, then, of course, since objects have a beginning and an end, so also would ‘time’ have a ‘beginning’ and an ‘end’. In such pathological fancies the universe must have a ‘beginning in time’ and so must have been made. , and all of our old anthropomorphic and objectified mythologies follow, including the older theories of entropy in physics. But, if ‘time’ is only a human form of representation and not an object, the universe has no ‘beginning in time’ and no ‘end in time’; in other words, the universe is ‘time’-less. It was not made, it just ‘was, is, and will be’.
The moment we realize, feel permanently, and utilize these realizations and feelings that words are not things, then only do we acquire the semantic freedom to use different forms of representation. We can fit better their structure to the facts at hand, become better adjusted to these facts which are not words, and so evaluate properly m.o realities, which evaluation is important for sanity."
-Alfred Korzybski, "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics [Chapter XVII] " (1933)
