James-Russell Theory of Time

My grandmother at center: Munich, 1927

The James-Russell Theory

A Reconstruction

Bertrand Russell began constructing his first philosophy of time, at around the same period he was writing his Essay on The Foundations of Geometry (1). In this formulation, time was one of two externalities (the other was physical space). This first Russelian theory of time was abandoned along with his neo-Hegelian interpretation of mathematics, as he transitioned from idealism into realism.

Russell never wrote a coherent philosophy of time thereafter, but time was essential to the theory which came to be known as logical atomism. In passages pertinent to other arguments, Russell first deprecates a prevailing theory, namely that a human subject possesses the ability to apprehend or intuit the passage of time. "If we only knew present occurrences which are in fact related to past occurrences, we should never know this relationship" (2). The first thing that is interesting about this claim is its challenge to his erstwhile collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead, who described time as "drops of experience" (3). Russell's claim subsequently entails something surprising, namely that the human subject has direct access to some of his past experiences. If we follow his argument to its conclusion, we see Russell implying that evental objects, which existed, still exist, concretized in the present, for some subjective measure.

The first assumption that tempts the reader is to position Russell within a specific camp of time-theorists, who adhere to a metaphysical notion commonly called "the growing block theory." What the growing block theory posits is a measure of existence for everything that ever existed, up until the present. Future potentialities become concrete as they are instantiated in the present. Once instantiated, these concrete objects persist, in some sense, forever into the future. Peter Forrest (4, 5) is a fair example of a contemporary growing block theorist. For a number of reasons, Bertrand Russell is difficult to posit in this camp. I will try to illustrate the differences between the propositions implied in Russell's theory, and those held out by fans of the growing block theory.

We must first adopt a bit of jargon from engineering and computer science, in order to make our subsequent work a bit more accessible. An "evental object" is something that erupts into the lifeworld of the subject, in such a way as to remap the ontology of the subject's phenomenal environment. An evental object is a word that is heard and intuited. An evental object is a word that is read and understood. An evental object might be a bolt of lightning, noticed in the distance, or it could be a taxi, which suddenly appears around the corner. We spend much of our lives being shaped by evental objects, without ever really noticing their true phenomenological import.

Russell's late theory of time is specifically relevant, not only to logical atomism, but to his work in the philosophy of language. Analytic languages (like English) tend to encode meaning with word-order. In our language, "Brutus killed Caesar." carries a converse semantic sense than "Caesar killed Brutus." (The smart folks call English SVO - for "subject verb object"). Because we apprehend the words as they are heard (or read) in order, we understand and have direct access to the metalinguistic proposition. It is when we attempt a meta-analysis of this process that Russell asserts (correctly) that we risk falling into an infinite recursive loop, which provides us no new information. To speak the words "...the word 'Brutus' preceded 'killed,' and 'killed' preceded 'Caesar'..." not only imply a temporal sense of the first-order sentence we are analyzing, but they also have a temporal sense themselves, and thus we are faced with an additional demand to explain the phenomenon (6).

Russell solves this linguistic problem through an expansion of the definition of the present, to include what is actually the recent past. When one hears the phrases "Brutus killed Caesar," and "Caesar killed Brutus," we are dealing not with the phenomenon of three words in two different permutations, but of "two wholes comprised of somewhat dissimilar parts, which are simultaneous," each of which is "characterized by its constituents, and does not need the further mention of arrangement" (7). Basically, Russell's view is that we have direct access to sense data in the recent past, for at least the time it takes to discern word order in a sentence. This makes intuitive sense, and we can apply it to the fading tones of notes in a piano concerto, or the tolling melodies of the angelus bells.

A careful reading of Russell suggests a model for the rejection of akoluthic sensations. What the heck are these? The word 'akoluthic' is a fancy term, which implies a linear descent, from present to absent, on the timeline. In contrast, Russell contends that temporal passage and its awareness in the human subject might be modeled by something like a piecewise rational function. For example:

If we wanted a geometric model of the probability of direct access in the first few moments of experience, we'd see something like this.

With (0,1) being the immediate present, where we have direct access to all available sense data. The graph above is symptotic, and thus a bit misleading. Direct access tends to drop, as sense data transitions into memory rather quickly. and at some point (I'm calling it μ) we've got an absolute end to the point in which we have access to past sense data. 

So the function is discontinuous and piecewise, and at t = μ , f(t) = 0, with predictable end behavior. Russell's description implies that as every rung bell eventually settles into a ground state, where it quits reverberating entirely. 

Growing block theorists posit a simple linear function: f(t) = 1

One problem with Russell's theory is precisely the theoretical strength of the growing block theory, namely the need to account for the subjectivity of this supremum. Where it occurs is partly a function of the subject's attention span, and partly of his overall cognitive ability, and partly just due to his psychological state at the time. It's fair to say that a guy like Gauss could have kept far more things in his mind at once than the average person. And it's also fair to say that when Gauss got drunk, he was less adept at working with the mathematical models he was famous for. 

The ideological origins of Russell's system are probably the most surprising. We have already seen that they differ, fundamentally, from his erstwhile collaborator on the Principia. His positions immediately appear to conflict with his otherwise strong sympathies toward (and place within) neopositivism. The lack of distinction between time-as-container and time-as-thing-which-contains recalls a Husserlian analysis (8). An even earlier source alludes to an equally surprising origin. "Spatial and temporal relations," Russell declares, "must sometimes be included, in the case of a swift motion falling wholly within the specious present" (9).

The term "specious present" is a reference not to any logical positivist, but to one of the fathers of pragmatism. William James defined it as "the prototype of all conceived times... the short duration of which we are immediately and instantly sensible" (10). In order to make sense of this instant sensibility (sorry), we ought to study a previous passage, where James explains in detail.

"The practically cognized present is no knife edge, but it is a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own, upon which we sit perched, and from which we look into two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were -- a rearward and a forward-looking end" (11).

Never explicitly stated, but safe to assume, is the rough equivalence of the specious present, as James describes it, with that of Russell's individual sensory datum, persisting in the "specious present" as something to which the recipient has direct access, even as time passes, for a definite but finite interval.

James' ideas, old as they are, do not appear to have originated completely with his thought. They seem to have been built on an earlier model, published pseudonymously, under the name "Mr. E.R. Clay" (12). With whomever it originated, the thinker manages to resolve the paradox of being able to explain seeing something in motion, despite the fact that motion occurs over a spatio-temporal interval, and despite the fact that human beings generally like to slice up time, with "the present" being something like a single instantaneous frame in an old celluloid filmstrip, all without treating instantaneity as though it were entirely cut off from history. We can construct a plausible proof.

P1: What we conceive of in our minds via sense data, we conceive of as the present
P2: We conceive of objects moving.
P3: Objects move through time, as well as space.
...: What we conceive of as the present is actually composed of an interval, containing elements of the past.

Despite the inherent difficulties, James makes an attempt to well-define the specious present in physical terms, understandable to a general population.

"The specious present has... a vaguely vanishing backward and forward fringe; but its nucleus is probably the dozen seconds, or less, that have just elapsed... The smallest figure experimentally ascertained was by Exner, who distinctly heard the doubleness of two successive clicks of a Savart's wheel, and two successive snaps of an electric spark, where their interval was made as small as about (1/500) of a second" (13).

Here he does something particularly notable: he differentiates between the limitations of sensing duration via sight as opposed to sound. "With the eye, perception is less delicate," he declares. "Two sparks made to fall beside each other in rapid succession on the center of the retina ceased to be recognized as successive... when their interval fell below 0.044" (14).

We have drawn an important distinction between what we will now call the James-Russell theory of time, and the growing block theory, which is reconciled here. If Russell makes any modification to James' theory of temporal awareness, it is in placing the observer slightly closer to the front of the interval. James may have been riding a saddle, but Russell was riding the nose of a surfboard, watching evental objects instantiate in real time. The interval to which Russell claimed access to newly concretized objects was almost entirely in the very recent past, where they were soon to drop off, making way for an endless procession of new ones. Like growing block theorists, the past contains concrete objects, but unlike them, the objects do not remain accessible forever. The subject does not have direct access, in the James-Russell theory, to objects in the past or the future; but, the subject does have direct access to objects in the James-Russell specious present.

Ambiguity and Errata

At least two immediate problems arise in the attempt to rigorously define Russell's theory of temporal awareness. In the first place, there is a difference between what any human subject perceives as instantaneity, and the duration of his memory as he parses English sentences. This fact is evident in the subtext of Russell’s argument itself (he wouldn’t have to point out the akoluthic sensation of ‘Brutus’ as extant into the end of the sentence otherwise.) If we hear the angelus bells at church, we capture and experience the instantaneous at the playing of a single note. Human beings do not tend to think of past notes as existing in the specious present, except as a convoluted mental exercise in an attempt to explain questions like the ones posed to James and Russell.

An identical visual illustration can be used to illustrate a problem Russell was surely aware of. When schoolchildren learn about “an instantaneous rate of change” in their freshman math courses, they know and understand one application instantly: the problem of perceiving the motion of a physical object. Children learn to find the first derivative of a continuous function, and their associated daydreams often involve finding the precise acceleration of a rocket ship as it moves toward its destination. The calculus of the real numbers is useful because human beings have the experience of seeing accelerating bodies moving through physical space constantly, with no way to accurately judge the rate of change of acceleration visually -- which they would have if the James-Russell theory was an accurate phenomenological model.

When the (sober) human subject views a rocket ship accelerating from the launch pad, his visual sensations do not include seeing, along with the present picture of the rocket, earlier “tracers” of the rocket ship, that fade away gradually, as they pass from the specious present into the past. The rocket does not have a trail of earlier images in the mind of the viewer, fading into obscurity gradually. Without hallucinogens, the James-Russell theory fails to provide an accurate picture of the standard phenomenon of perceiving motion.

In the second place, there is the subjectivity of the experience itself. Double-blind studies suggest that the phenomenology of temporal awareness is mutable, based upon drug use and withdrawal (15). The perception of duration appears to be an unfalsifiable neurological process that resists any attempts to test its accuracy from one person to the next. Attempts to do so, at best, reveal a degeneration or alteration in the faculty, with evidence that while one’s perception of time can not accurately be measured as reliable, it can be tampered with through pharmacology. Every human being would agree that he can perceive the passage of time, but no one has an objective baseline with which to compare his own unique experience.

Not only is the experience of the passage of time subjective and unfalsifiable, we have already seen that it seems also to change when tracking different types of events (16). The aforementioned math student who decides to watch a rocket launch in person will find that the entire show, from liftoff to disappearance, will be about 45 seconds. Despite that interval, after the event, he will generally be able to recall the point of liftoff, and describe what the rocket looked like before ignition. The same person will have a hard time recalling a sequence of names in a sentence after 45 seconds.

Conclusion

We have seen that despite his reticence to devote an entire paper to the topic, Russell did have a coherent theory of the phenomenology of the passage of time. We have also seen that it originates in a surprising place. The sympathies that Bertrand Russell appears to show for the James’ philosophy of time runs counter both to his place in the neopositivist movement and to his antipathy for pragmatism, which he felt brought philosophy “back into the marketplace” (17). Russell never, unfortunately, gives a holistic analysis of how the human subject has direct access to newly concretized objects, as they pass slowly out of the specious present, nor does he build any epistemological theories as to how or why we are able to access them here. While these are problems that are beyond the scope of this paper, the overall effectiveness of the theory and its applications throughout Russell’s related works speaks to his open-mindedness and his pragmatic (sorry) approach to accepting the worthwhile facets of other thinkers, even in those cases where he is generally opposed to the totality of their thought.

Bibliography

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