Re: DCI Tokyo #3 (March, 2018) Video

[James Coplien]

The Tokyo Multiparadigm Design / DCI group organized another evening seminar about DCI last week. I started by talking about our confusion between abstract data types and object oriented programming in the early days, and ended with DCI and a discussion of the Japanese concept of 間 (about the relationship between space and time). Hiroyuki Hanai-san has shared videos of this seminar on YouTube. Please find the links to them below.

Thanks again, Japanese friends!

— Cope

On 30 Mar 2018, at 03.42, hiroyuki hanai <hiroyuk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Cope-san

. . . .

first half

https://youtu.be/4rgPBzR8nVg

https://youtu.be/XtlPEnr77us

latter half

https://youtu.be/Gfw2SEpx62E

https://youtu.be/QNVmbzXlN0I

extra conversation

https://youtu.be/CDY-h4QBlVc

[héctor]

It's great to see how much awareness emerges on one's binding into different cultures.

Just a few questions. Could be 間 an appraisal to anticipate the occurrence of certain phenomena given spatial considerations? Or should I say time-spatial consideration? Does 間 relate to programming because of the anticipation of occurrence?

Thinking on 間 helped me to see that space sets the chances of something to occur when there's a possibility of interaction. What I can't still do is to see space-time as a unity. I see one dimension resting on the other, depending on the situation. Sometimes, the consideration of time depends on space, and sometimes the consideration of space depends on time. From what I see on the videos, 間 is present in different contexts without changing too much its meaning, it seems that Japanese people easily identify it, then it might be part of a wider context.

I haven't seen the conversation part yet.
Thanks for sharing the videos.

Héctor

[Matthew Browne]

This is not a direct reply about programming or Cope's video specifically (for one thing, I don't speak Japanese), but this reminds me of a book I was reading recently that seems very relevant. The book is The Power of Time Perception by Jean Paul Zogby. Below are some quotes...perhaps the most pertinent sentence is:

"We cannot think of time without thinking of space and distance, which is a further indication that time itself is not a property of the empirical world."

---

p. 38:

Space and Time: Perceiving the Past and Future

Our awareness of time in the past and future starts early on in life and comes in two forms; as a cycle and as a line. As we grow up we slowly develop consciousness of the world in the cyclic pace of seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. The school bell rings every hour, supper is served every evening, sunrises and sunsets recur each day, the seasons take turns every few months, birthdays repeat every year. Time is perceived as a set of cycles which form the basis of our ability to predict the future. Yet we also know that time is linear; it starts with a beginning in birth and an ending in death. In our mind, we place important events in our life on a timeline. If you speak a language that is written from left to right, such as English or French, you will tend to think of the past as something to the left while the future is something to the right. Most English speakers plot timelines from left to right. On the other hand, people whose native languages are Arabic or Hebrew, plot timelines the other way round. Because these languages are written from right to left, they tend to think of the past as something on the right and the future as something on the left. As we shall see shortly, Mandarin is written vertically, which explains why Chinese think of the future as something that is below! Interestingly, bilingual people tend to place the past and future in either position depending on what dominant language is used in formulating their thoughts.

Our sense of time is a fabrication of our brain to make sense of the events happening in our world. Since it is not a material object of the world, our brains cannot comprehend time without using physical notions such as distance and space. In English, for example, we talk about things taking a ‘long’ time, like a ‘long’ vacation or a ‘short’ movie. We say Christmas is fast ‘approaching’, the deadline is ‘near’, or the weekend is still ‘far’ off. We are looking ‘forward’ to meet someone or putting the past ‘behind’ us. We cannot think of time without thinking of space and distance, which is a further indication that time itself is not a property of the empirical world.

One significant aspect of this space-time relationship is the fact that our brains perceive the ‘motion’ of temporal events in the same way as it perceives the motion of physical objects. Any physical object can be easily identified within a certain space, but time is more abstract and needs to be imagined using space concepts. Consider, for example, these two sentences: (a) I moved my car forward two meters or (b) I moved the 3: 00 p.m. meeting forward two hours. The car in the first sentence is a physical object that can travel through space and whose motion we can easily perceive. By contrast, there is no way we can experience the meeting’s ‘motion’ through time using our senses. We just have to imagine it ‘moving forward’ in an abstract way. [...]

p. 45:

From an evolutionary point of view, one of the main reasons for our brain is not to help us think, feel, or create nice art, but actually to control the movement of our body. According to neuroscientists, a brain is useless in an organism that does not move.

[James Coplien]

Héctor,

> Den 5. apr. 2018 kl. 17.56 skrev héctor <hvalde...@gmail.com>:
>
> It's great to see how much awareness emerges on one's binding into different cultures.
>
> Just a few questions. Could be 間 an appraisal to anticipate the occurrence of certain phenomena given spatial considerations? Or should I say time-spatial consideration? Does 間 relate to programming because of the anticipation of occurrence?

Maybe.

But in aikido — as well as in kabuki and other contexts — it is a proper spacing between people at a proper time or for a proper interval. There is no before or after: one the spatial part, and the other the time part, of the same. Both the words “space” and “time” in Japanese include the 間 kanji.

I think 間 probably links closely to Alexander’s notion of patterns, which are about how configurations in space relate to patterns of events in time. There is no separating them.

That, in turn, relates to temporal symmetry-breaking in physics, which violates Newtonian laws of causality. So there can be no sense of “anticipation”...

> Thinking on 間 helped me to see that space sets the chances of something to occur when there's a possibility of interaction. What I can't still do is to see space-time as a unity.

It’s hard and took me a long time. Once you grok it, you get used to it.

> I see one dimension resting on the other, depending on the situation. Sometimes, the consideration of time depends on space, and sometimes the consideration of space depends on time. From what I see on the videos, 間 is present in different contexts without changing too much its meaning, it seems that Japanese people easily identify it, then it might be part of a wider context.

Yup.