Time-Binding

Discussion

What makes humans human? Time-binding

Ric Ammurio (summarizing Korzybski):

Plants as Chemistry-binders

“Plants absorb, or bind, specific chemicals in their immediate environment. They reproduce cells and produce growth. Growth and reproduction are influenced by other environmental factors such as climate, gravity, and (of course) plant-eating animals and pollinating insects.

Animals as Space-binders

Animals possess (to varying degrees) the ability to move about in their environment. If the source of its food or water depletes, an animal can move to another place. Korzybski referred to animals as space-binders in that they ‘bind’ the spaces within their living territory.

Humans as Time-binders

The most critical difference between humans and animals is our ability to create, manipulate, record, and transform symbols. The ability to transfer knowledge from human to human, within and across generations, is called time-binding. Languages and other symbol systems provide humans with the means to document experiences, observations, tips, descriptions. Knowledge among the human species can therefore accumulate and advance as a body, not as random lessons taught and learned by copying, mimicking, or experience. All human achievements are cumulative; no one of us can claim any achievement exclusively as his own.

We all must use consciously or unconsciously the achievements of others, some of them living but most of them dead, to do greater things by help of things already done by others. It is this ability to ‘bind’ time that makes humans human, and is the defining capability of human time-binders. The capacity for accumulating experience, enlarging it, and transmitting it for future expansion is the peculiar power, the characteristic energy, the definitive nature, the defining mark, of man.”

(https://ramurrio.medium.com/map-and-territory-e9f7c42e6196)

More information

From the same author: Maps vs Territory