'Time' in Different Cultures

hello um I would say that anthropologists tend to think about human cultural diversity a little bit differently to other people in that I think if you ask the average person what kinds of things are different between cultures they'll say things like what kinds of food people eat what you know what music is like what musical conventions are like what people consider to be polite uh what clothes people wear and stuff like that um but anthropologists tend to have a kind of a more abstract view of it um obviously those things are different from culture to

culture but even things like how we think about logic and causality can change depending on uh what culture we're in there's a famous um description of aande culture that um that goes into detail about how you know in the west if two events coincide with each other like somebody walking under a tree and a branch falling and hitting them on the head we'd explain that by saying the branch was rotting or it was weak so it fell and the person was walking under it because they were going to their friend's house but for the aande

they require a third um a third line of causality which explains why the two things happened at the same time time and why the branch fell on this person's head rather than just falling on the ground and I think most western cultures you know the average person's answer to that would probably be it was just a coincidence there doesn't need to be a separate explanation but to the isando there does need to be a separate explanation so that's that's an example of even fairly basic logical axioms being different an example of how sensory perception can

be different is to be found in Dan Everett's account of his time with the pahar and I know there are some aspects of that which are controversial um but I think this this one um or or at least one of these things has been followed up by I think an MIT study so there's a more kind of academic robusticity to it but Everett talks about how when he was walking in the jungle with the Paha people who live in the Amazon um he was struck by the fact that sometimes they would say watch out there's

a snake in that bush and he'd look in the Bush and even if he looked exactly where they were pointing he could not find the snake until maybe it moved um and this is if you think of the human brain a bit like a machine learning algorithm obviously it's you know the brain is kind of what machine learning algorithms are trying to emulate in in in in a lot of cases so it's it's weird to think about it that way around but if you think about it as an algorithm that learns to understand the world

based on training data the pah hard have had a lot of training data about if you're looking at a bush what are the statistical patterns in the visual field that indicate to you that there's a snake in the bush uh what does a snake look like what you know obviously we all know what a snake looks like but that you know their perceptual system is just better trained to pick up a snake in a bush uh and Everett's perceptual system and I suspect my own perceptual system would not be trained to recognize the snake in

the bush and so we can't see it we can't tell it's there an inverse um version of that happened when Dan Everett started showing them photographs um and they couldn't really understand what the photographs were supposed to be he he explained um what they were he explained they were supposed to represent real things and that they were visual representations of reality and eventually they seemed to kind of understand what he meant but they were still you know photographs of obvious things that they should recognize they were kind of turning over upside down and trying to

work what they were because although it may seem obvious to us that a photograph of me is is the same as looking at my face in real life of course they're not the same a photograph is a two-dimensional sheet with colors on it and looking at me in real life you you have two eyes you have binocular vision you see you see me in 3D um and so if you're not exposed to photographs your perceptual system uh your visual system will just not have the the training that it needs to interpret the photograph and recognize

objects within it anyway that was a very long-winded way of saying that basic things can differ from culture to culture and in this video I'm going to I'm going to address how much time perception changes from culture to culture I'm going to start with a very broad Strokes thing of like in the distant past and the distant future how do people think about things how do people think about seasons and years and then I'm going to go very granular into a more philosophical uh discussion of the Moment by moment um phenomenological experience of time I'm

sorry that the intro was so long-winded I hope it was at least interesting I'm going to leave it in because I I like the the photograph thing I will go into anthropological research on specific cultures but let's ease into it by thinking about this it's easy to imagine how a culture without modern Western physics might think that in thousands of years when the world ends it will cycle background uh and repeat itself from the start again without Western science there'd be nothing in our environment that contradicted this idea nobody's expected to live long enough to

see the cycling backr so nobody can say from experience that it doesn't happen and if you're used to working season by season year by year it might make sense to extend that cyclicality out over a larger time span you could also imagine how people in for example hunter gatherer societies might not really think about wasting time in the same way we do you just respond to Natural cues movements of prey species the life cycles of certain plants where people are hungry you may also have notice that as things get further into the past it's easier

to forget exactly what order they happened in or how long ago they were so without strict recording you could imagine a culture that believed the past was just a big soup with no definite linear order to it but what other ways could cultures perceive time differently anthropologists have argued about this for decades are there cultures that perceive time as sometimes being reversed or turned backwards are there cultures that think things which happen in the future can cause things which happened in the past Alfred G's book on the anthropology of time goes into detail about different

people's perspectives the Anthropologist Edmund leech beli that most cultures before the ancient Greeks viewed time as a system of alternating opposites all layered on to each other night flips today flips to night winter flips to Summer flips to Winter uh and other things sickness flips to Health he argued that this wasn't cyclical almost like each night happened at the same time as all the other nights and each day happened at the same time as all the other days and we just flick between the two states the apparent Paradox here is that people writing back then

obviously acknowledge that one thing happens before another that things that happen in people's lives aren't reversible and don't just go back to normal when the day night cycle flips leech addresses this by saying that what we think of as time is actually split into two separate things things that are repetitive like natural cycles day night winter summer and things which aren't repetitive like life changes Gil doesn't feel that leech produces very convincing evidence that this is really how people in that culture feel time works G also points out that there are kind of layers to

the idea of cyclical time as well if time goes round in a big circle would there be some extra layer of time indexing which cycle we're on are we on the fifth cycle of the universe or the seventh can different Cycles run differently if there was such a way of indexing the Cycles wouldn't that be ultimately linear time at the start of the video I talked about Evans pritchard's perspective on uh aande Notions of causality and how they believe in extra layers of causality and you know you don't just have to explain why two things

happened you have to explain why the coincidence why did they happen at the same time and um Evans pritchard's perspective on time the anthropology of time is actually covered in Gail's book and in this case he's talking about a group of people called the Nu from the Sudan area and he says that the Nu um don't think of time as this additional backdrop against which things happen they just think of processes happening Seasons happening uh there's no extra layer of time against which they can be compared um and at first I thought I kind of

understood this but I couldn't really explain it back to myself which was a sign maybe I didn't fully understand it so I came up with a bit of an example so if you imagine um I'm working on my car and 5 miles away somebody's pouring a glass of water and at the exact same moment that I slam shut the Bonnet of my car they turn off the tap and finish making their glass of water um to me it makes perfect sense to say that these two things happened at exactly the same time I'm not saying

anything Magic's going on I'm not saying that they somehow caused each other or that they're somehow linked but they are related in the sense that they happened at the same point in time um I suspect if if Evans pritchard's account is right that a aare person would kind of struggle to understand what I meant or the meaning of what I meant the meaning of what I meant you know what I mean they would struggle to wrap their heads around the idea that um that these two EV were in some way related even though they didn't

they didn't have any causal link with each other at all they were part of different processes why would I connect this moment in this event to this moment in this event they're just um they they're just totally unrelated that they've got nothing to do with each other why would I imagine this magical extra layer of time that somehow connects them what's the point what does it explain it doesn't doesn't doesn't have any explanatory power so here I think the shoe is on the other foot because in the case of the aande and their perspective on

causality um I as a sort of British person think that the the the requirement for a third layer of causality is kind of confusing and why would you need that but the no May well think the same thing about my idea of time um as I was saying earlier I think this makes sense in a culture where things aren't very rigidly recorded and you know if you're not looking at the clock all the time this has implications about how larger spans of time are perceived in societies like the no long spans of time as in

many societies are thought about generationally new generations being born Mark the passing of time in a way Generations are much more socially relevant than years because they're demarcated by social Milestones like births and deaths but as gel points out Generations aren't like years they don't happen at what we in the west would call regular intervals take 10 people who are all exactly the same age and come back to their families in 500 years and their descendants are not all going to be the same age as each other not even remotely you can have first cousins

who are generationally at the same level as you but old enough to be your parents Evans Pritchard suggests that large scale time to the no is based on a generational structure that seems to be relatively fixed this actually reminds me of something my Granda said that when his father died in the 1980s he suddenly realized that he was at the top of the pile he suddenly occupied the old slot in the generational hierarchy by Evans pritchard's Reckoning the noair think of these generational slots as being fixed with people moving up through the slots as they

age it's a big multi-dimensional web that you could probably never draw a diagram of you have the time dimension of people moving up through the slots as they age and the space dimensions of different families living in different territories because only so many generations are alive at once when somebody drops off the top of the structure the next person fills their place the structure is fixed in the sense that it doesn't grow taller over time as Generations accumulate once Generations drop out of living memory the no don't really seem to register them anymore and at

any given time in Noir thinking there may only have been say 15 or 20 Generations since the beginning of time as Gil points out many cultures telescope their genealogies like this deleting and dropping Generations who are no longer socially relevant so that the beginning of the genealogy always stays about the same depth of time away I'd add that Anglo-Saxon King genealogies look pretty similar with a small number of generations quickly leading back to some mythical figure so the no have two concepts where I have one they have what gel calls ecological time which is just

what happens when you do things and structural time which describes the relationships between people you could criticize all this this by saying well that's not what the English word time usually means I'm redefining the concept and that's a fair point but my response would be that in these cultures there may be no equivalent to the English idea of time and these anthropologists are just describing the closest things to it so far we've thought a lot about the the kind of macroscopic perspective of time uh of what happened in the distant past and does time go

around in a big circle and stuff like that but we haven't talked much about the the more microscopic second byc experience of time where I have an apple and then I drop the apple and then it lands on the floor and those things happen in a very particular order and they don't happen backwards um and this is a this is a difficult thing to think about I I spent a little bit of time before I made this video thinking about would it be possible for one culture to experience time actually backwards is that level of

cognitive difference possible now let's think about time the way that a lot of physicists think about it as uh an extra dimension of the same kind of thing that space is so in space we can think of a a physical object like this mug as being describable in terms of three dimensions the xais the Y AIS and the Z AIS uh length width depth whatever you want to call them so with those three dimensions you can describe the whole physical structure of the mug but if you think about it in terms of space time time

would be an extra Dimension so in the same way that the Mug's Contour is changing along the X and Y AIS it's curving in curving out along the time axis the mug might be going left or right um but the way we experience time in One Direction one second at a time means that we only ever see the mug at one point along the time axis we don't see the whole streaky you know structure of it moving left and right you could view time as if you were a four-dimensional entity looking at it as a

single static structure so imagine that you could see not only the three space dimensions of this mug but you could also see its entire time Dimension from the moment that it was created to whatever you know it gets smashed or whatever you know whatever it gets destroyed and you could see you can't imagine it because because we're not four-dimensional entities but you'd be able to see its entire life as a physical structure with the time Dimension just being an extra dimension of physical space now in in that world imagine that you're looking at a human

and you can see along the time axis the human gets older and older and more decrepit or whatever now the way we normally experience time you might imagine that that human is a four-dimensional static structure but that the conscious experience of the human is scanning through the structure along the time axis and it's following wherever the structure goes along the three dimensions of space but it's scanning through the time axis in a particular direction and so from the person's perspective they're experiencing time second by second first of all if we assume that that's how it

works which is a big assumption could you imagine a person whose Consciousness scanned backwards down the time axis could you imagine a person who had a normal spatial temporal structure but their conscious experience ran backwards now bear in mind I'm not talking about someone who's physically going backwards all the time I'm talking about someone who behaves completely normally has a completely normal brain structure but somehow their conscious experience just goes in the other direction they um they have memories and then the event happens and then they lose the memories of the event um they they

know things and then they learn the thing and then they don't know it anymore because they're going backwards through the the the time axis this might seem ridiculous and alien um but I don't know if you could tell the difference between this person and somebody for whom time was moving forwards and I actually I think it's a lot like um the the question about whether you and I both St the same red whether my red is the same as your red my question would be if someone was experiencing time backwards would there be any structural

way of telling or is it just some question about Consciousness that will'll never be able to answer I'll I'll go into the the question of whether my red is the same as your red to explain what I mean situation a uh my red and blue are flipped with your red and blue so where you see this I see this we make all of the same structural distinctions between colors I can tell the difference between red and blue it's just that what they look like is flipped compared to your red and blue in this situation we

would never disagree because everything that is this color to me is this color to you and so we have a perfect correspondence and we never notice that the other person experiences the color differently because there's no way of describing it in a way that the other person could understand in this world it's almost a moot point whether we see the same red and whether we see the same blue because there's no way of telling however if there was a structural difference then we would be able to measure that our perceptions are different take the example

of red green color blindness in that situation the distinctions that the person makes between colors are structurally different to those of most of the population who see three color channels in this situation somebody would judge red and green things to be very similar in color whereas the average person would judge them to be very different in color somebody with red green color blindness might have specific difficulties doing certain tasks that people with TR chromatic vision would have no problem doing so this is a structural difference that we can actually uh measure by testing the person's

abilities so my question is if somebody was experiencing time backwards on a conscious level would would that be a structural thing that we could test or would it be um untestable and unknowable I think within the premise of um my question I basically answered it if somebody's brain has a completely normal spatial temporal structure and the only difference is that their Consciousness which is not scientifically describable is traveling backwards through time then of course there's no way you could probe or poke them behaviorally to make you know to make them reveal that their Consciousness is

traveling backwards through time because they just behave and react completely normally to anything you did to them um so that's that question was answered at the moment it was asked I think um my my instinct on this at the moment is that uh time is probably just an illusion um that arises from the fact that we have memories of things that happened in the past and we don't have memories of things that happened in the future um because time outside of our Consciousness is so um asymmetrical because it goes in a particular direction events happen

in a particular direction um along the time axis I think that a brain with a normal spatial temporal structure you know if you are the system that is that brain you're just going to feel like you're going forwards there's no way around it that's what I think um my current thinking on Consciousness which again I could be completely wrong about is that at any given moment your conscious state is just being generated or somehow emerging from the brain and that includes all of your memories which are structurally encoded in the brain all of your short-term

memory which is structurally encoded in the brain um and so there's not really any difference between between a continuous Consciousness that goes forward through time and a Consciousness that's constantly being regenerated regenerated regenerated every billionth of a second or whatever um and so from my perspective at any given moment you are a kind of fresh Consciousness that has a load of memories of things that have happened in the past and no memories of things that have happened in the future and so of course you're just going to feel like you're going forwards that's that's what

I think um I'd be more than happy to hear other people's perspectives and if you think I've missed any major philosophical perspectives on this which I almost certainly have I'd love to hear those as well um the one the one thing that I did think for a little while about that perspective is how why is it that I feel very strongly like I'm in a particular time if my brain is just a big spatial temporal structure why am I now rather than in 2005 or in 2028 uh if if I'm lucky enough to survive to

2028 in this this this this warming World um and I I suppose my answer to that would just be somebody has to be if there are a billion consciousnesses uh in in in your life that are generated you know every millionth of a second or whatever you know the one that you are has to be one of those in the same way that I can could easily ask why am I me rather than somebody else well somebody has to be me um so I don't think that's that perplexing a question um part of Consciousness is

the feeling of subjective identity I think or at least part of human consciousness is the feeling that you are you are you rather than something else and so I think it's it's only natural that um at any given time we only feel like we're at one definite Point rather than spread throughout the whole structure I I I feel I've worded that in a pretty messy way but I I really don't know how I could do much better um and I'd love to talk about this in the comments um yeah thank you very much for watching

sorry for all the things that I missed in this video uh and I'll I'll probably make another one about a similar Topic at some point soon but in the meantime uh I shall leave you with maybe some shots of the garden for for