Re: Joel's Physical time vs. Psychological time

Joel mentioned three different dimensions of psychological time. Each person either is past oriented, present oriented or future oriented. What he may not know is that these are actually archetypes of happiness.

Those who dawn on the past are known as nihilists. There is a blurry line between psychological nihilism and philosophical nihilism. This is mostly due to the fact that there are many different definitions of nihilism. In philosophy, it could be the thought of nothingness; nothing is of value or matters and there is no comprehensible truth. In psychiatry, it can be a delusion in which the person feels like their own existence isn't real. Nihilists in this sense, can't get over their past and feel that no matter what they do, their life is never going to get any better. Behaviorists refer to this as "learned helplessness."


Those who are present oriented are called hedonists. In philosophy as well as psychology, a hedonist is someone who focuses on the here-and-now, they are pleasure seekers and don't care about the future consequences. A psychological hedonist flees from what causes them pain (Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan"). These people are damned because they will end up in debt, jobless, or other significant societal problems.

Those who are future oriented are known as rat racers. I'm not sure if philosophy has an equivalent term. The rat racer is always focusing on the future, and puts them self through pain now so that they will be happy in the future. When they achieve a goal there is only a little happiness, and then they are on to the next. In this process, they have little fun.

There is also a fourth archetype called the happiness archetype. Although you may think that this archetype is just in between a hedonist and a rat racer, it isn't. This doesn't make you happier because given a situation, you have to choose whether to be happy now or in the future. This archetype focuses on having pleasure now and in the future. For example say someone decided to go on a diet. The hedonist would give up right away; the rat racer would eat food that they hated, but was healthy; and the"happier" would eat the fattening food they liked in moderation. An other, probably better example, is that of musicians. Yes, scales and repeating a passage over and over again can be tedious, but they are still having fun and getting quick gratification by getting that passage right after a few minute while also making themselves better musicians.

At the end of his post Joel asked, "what would reality look like without the institution of time?"

Psychologically, time effects us in so many ways, even in ways that you would not think of like happiness mentioned above. Yet, If we had no sense of the past or present our minds might would kind of work like the way they do when we are under certain aesthetics. There is a certain type of aesthetic (I'm not sure which one) which works in a way that you are conscious, but you can't feel pain because the moment the signal gets to your brain, your focus is on the present. So your thought process is literally, "wait, what just happened?" If you got smacked in the face and fell to the ground you wouldn't feel the pain, you would just wonder why you were on the ground.

Time is an evolutionary development that is required for our survival. Even animals have a sense of psychological time. If we had no conception of the past, we would not be able to progress in anything. With no capacity to remember what we learned previous to any given moment we wouldn't have memories. And if it wasn't for memories we wouldn't be able to read, talk, or even walk. If we couldn't walk, we wouldn't be here. Therefore, memories, and a sense of time is necessary for our existence.

How do radial constructivists' view time?