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Bad Timing
The following is a response to this line of questioning at Charles's site:
Time and space are really nothing more than theoretical constructs and as such do not have economic costs, per se. The four dimensions (along with all the classical thermodynamic quantities like mass, entropy, internal engergy, etc. and the complex number system, as examples) are reductive analytical tools for performing thought experiments that map loosely onto real objects existing in some event sequence. Basically, these constructs are mental proxies for the real thing -- a smearing over of discrete empirical observations into beautiful, simple continuums that behave nicely on paper and obey the rules of Calculus. Empirical objects and events may have economic opportunity costs attached to them, but the fake continuum stage that man has conveniently rigged for them do not.
So, in other words: Arley and Charles and Cote are all right, you're just confusing a theoretical concept (time) with empirical reality (stuff happening in sequence). What gets lost in translation is the finite/infinite dichotomy, and with it, opportunity cost. Cote is focused on "existence," or rather his life's sequence of events and all the objects he needs to survive, all of which cost him something, as they are clearly finite with opportunity costs. Charles is perhaps thinking about the fake, infinite clotheslines of time and space themselves upon which all these costly objects and events can be thought to hang and thinks: "Goddamn, no one is charging me for these clotheslines!"
Animals and rocks and space aliens may not share with humans our agreed-on theoretical model of time. They all probably have to deal with objects and sequences of events, but whether they set up the weird finite/infinite duality between their empirical and theoretical domains is, to me at least, unknown.
To the holdouts, ask yourselves this: how would you measure the cost of a given interval of time? You first have to measure time itself, which can only be "approximated" (Ha!) by the sequence of discrete physical events (gears turning, atoms decaying, whatever). And how am I to charge wholesale (as it were) for the concepts of time or space, given that they are defined as infinite? I mean, how can I have an opportunity cost for something that's unlimited? No, the _concept_ or construct of time itself has no cost, but the stuff happening within (your existence, my existence, the rock sitting there on the ground) does.
From an existential point of view, as a human, you may as well ditch the whole fake simplistic concept of time as a continuum and just "time" your life by the passing of significant events. That's where the real opportunities come and go, anyway, where you write that big mortgage check and breathe that expensive air-conditioned air and devour that plate of shitake enchiladas at Mother's Kitchen.
I think, in practice, that's where most of us end up, really. We tend to purchase homes with square footage and block out chunks of time based on what we think we can accomplish with them. That living room is large enough to hold a sofa, a loveseat, and five really good friends. Two hours should be enough time to drink beers and play some disc with Cote at Pease. A 40hr/week job at X dollars a year should allow me to do and acquire all these things. And so on.
By the way, isn't it bizarre that we as a species -- a collection of microscopic cellular events -- can even conceive of the concept of a continuum? It just seems so outside of our system of existence. Perhaps that's why we're only able to grasp it (when learning Calculus, for example) in terms of a collection of discrete distances and events taken in the limit of an impossibly collapsed infinitesimal.
Now, particle-wave duality (enter Herr Heisenberg) suggests that neither a discrete nor a continuous view of nature cuts it in terms of modeling observable reality (at least, not at the microscopic level). I guess there's a Zen thing too along those lines. So I admit that my parsing of the “time” question along these lines doesn’t elegantly “nail it” the way a nice one-line physics equation would. But at least it gets me thinking, which is more than half the battle.
I think.
:-)
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