TIME BINDING
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 3555 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Human sciences, Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
Ability of a system. to maintain the memory of past situations, to connect it for use in present action and use it to imagine future possible situations, and make plans to try to control these when arising.
The concept was introduced around l920 by the Polish — American semanticist A. KORZYBSKI (1950a, b).
The time binding capacity grew continuously during the global evolution, as the brain became more differentiated. With man, endowed with a very complex encephalon this mechanism of preservation of cognitive maps acquired an absolutely crucial importance:
- psychologically, because it introduces a permanent coherence in behavior sequences, possible only within the time dimension;
- socially, because it introduces the possibility of institutionalization and prediction
Moreover, through technical means (language, writing, printing and nowadays all the new media for transmission and storage of information) time binding is transforming the human species into a global entity, endowed as a whole with memory and forecasting capacity.
More generally, time binding is obviously related to the self-replicative capacity of complex systems. Replication implies the existence of somehow stored information, needed to reproduce components and their correct interrelations (organizational closure).
Biological time, as well as psychological and cultural time seems to depend on the speed of the the replication process.
Time binding capacity also seems to increase with the degree of complexity of systems. As shown by V. CSANYI, once the replicative and organizational process is launched in human groups, the trend to increasing complexity seems an inevitable result (1993, p.268).