How do some people dissociate their inner brain from risks? 
 
Isn’t that flight-freeze-fight response supposed to protect animals, including the human ones, from imminent dangers? So, what’s with tourists climbing active volcanoes during eruptions? Are their inner brains disconnected from their outer brains? Do their amygdalae not associate with their frontal cortexes? 
 
You can see on YouTube a number of videos of people standing near highly dangerous natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions. In spite of reported deaths of tourists who have gotten too close to a danger zone, tourists continue to risk their lives. Is it because they think they are watching a show? Is it because they believe they are invulnerable? 
 
Is it possible that after more than a century of movies and videos, that humans are devolving that survival mechanism? Of course, that would be a Lamarckian evolution if it were true, so, no, individual humans probably aren’t devolving a reaction to threats by their amygdalae. Species, as biologists tell us, and not individuals, biochemically evolve. 
 
Yet, we know that we can train ourselves to ignore threats. Firemen do it; police, also; soldiers, too. I suppose we can convince ourselves to ignore any potential danger; otherwise, no one would take that first ride on a powerful horse or in a powerful racecar. 
 
But volcanoes? Come on, now, there’s certainly some unreality that pushes that inner brain response into those shadows of ineffectiveness. Could it be that the virtual world of pretend dangers with no physical consequences has trained modern brains to ignore actual dangers that pose undeniable physical threats? 
 
During this March, 2021, Fuego has been highly active, but its threats have not chased away tourists. Instead, people climb to see eruptions and shout “ooh” and “aw” when the Guatemalan volcano throws ash and lava. They even video the experience. 
 
Did none of them learn of the dangers that andesitic/rhyolitic stratovolcanoes pose? Did none of them hear of the 28,000 who died when Mt. Pelée erupted in 1902? Did they never hear of Mt. St. Helens? Of Vesuvius? Goodness! Who needs a list? That some have died because they were in the vicinity of a single violent eruption should be enough for any inner brain to caution the rational outer brain against approaching an actively erupting volcano.
 
Have modern brains fed by virtual reality become dissociated from actual reality? I suspect that that is what has happened to the affluent travelers who risk their lives unnecessarily. Used to seeing virtual life but seeking the thrill of real life, they put themselves in danger to see closeup nature display its power. There’s pride in there somewhere, that is, there’s the notion of invulnerable superiority that cloaks the warning system, that, as I say, disconnects amygdalae from frontal cortex.  
 
Seems that a half billion years of brain evolution has been undone in little more than a century of entertaining virtual experiences in theaters, on TV, and on gaming or computer monitors. Although I have stood on dormant volcanoes, I have done so when there is no threat, no associated seismic activity, no harmonic tremors that indicate an impending eruption. As for watching an active volcano erupt, I prefer those videos that others risk their lives to take. I’ll live in a virtual world when the real one poses an imminent danger. Sure, the amygdalae can get us into trouble when we decide to fight over mere emotional triggers, but darn if they aren’t useful in protecting us from foolish risks and real dangers. It’s the inner brain that tells us the best place to be when a volcano is erupting. Where? That primitive brain keeps it simple. Be elsewhere.
 
This is not your practice life. If your outer brain can’t recognize that reality, pay attention to the part of your brain that does.      

Have we witnessed the death of psychology? Is today the moment when no new psychological insights can further explain human interactions? 
 
Sure, we have the potential for neologisms, but aren’t such terms just reinventions of the psychological wheel? Words—just semantics—don’t guarantee any novelty of understanding though they change the familiar metaphors. We can easily argue that the DSM in all its variations is superior to Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut. Yes, that’s long title, and if you read through the work, you might be convinced, even with your present knowledge embedded with Freudian, Jungian, Structuralist, Functionalist, Behaviorist, Gestaltist, or sundry other psychologies, that Burton is onto something that makes sense. You might argue that, think about it, the DSM has clinical analysis and synthesis behind it. Behaviors once thought to be diseases of the mind or psyche are now the subject to rationally devised therapies or to plain dismissal as “normal” behavior.
 
The question stands: Is psychology dead? 
 
What is the counterargument? That various psychological systems achieve demonstrable effects? But, given Burton’s work, could not demonstrable effects arise in interactions between some practitioner of Burton’s “cures” and the melancholic? Remember, at the time of Burton and both before and after, the populace believed melancholy was THE identifiable malady that motivated its associated behaviors. There was no such verbal entity or description, such as “manic-depressive,” in Burton’s time. For Burton, “…from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free…Melancholy…is a habit, a serious ailment….”
 
But then again, why dismiss the potential for a new psychology to someday engender new insights and a new way of understanding human interactions. Are there ways that explain our species that we have not yet imagined or discovered? Is there some parallel in how we understand the Standard Model of physics? After all, isn’t the DSM the psychological equivalent of a “Standard Model”?
 
If the physicists are willing to explore the subatomic world in search of a new particle that might overturn the Standard Model or at least revise it, shouldn’t we look for some human “particle” in our interactions that might overturn the DSM or any of the standardized psychological systems? Not a physical particle, of course, but some as yet undetected mechanism that drives us to think what we think and behave as we do. 
 
Is humility necessary for any endeavor aimed at overturning current understanding? The physicists acknowledge that the Standard Model cannot explain Dark Matter or Dark Energy. Something’s amiss. So, they keep looking in their own clinic of experimentation, the Large Hadron Collider. Bottom quarks, aka Beauty Quarks, rammed in collisions in the LHC have produced in their breakdown more electrons than muons, a result not expected under the Standard Model.
 
The Ins and Outs of psychology: The new DSM, that is, DSM-5, excludes bereavement from depression. Okay, sure, why not? Bereavement is a, to borrow from Burton, a form of melancholy, a “malady” he includes because all melancholy stems from our mortality. In DSM-5, “gender disorder” is now “gender dysphoria” because the term is “less pejorative,” and it probably qualifies a person for insurance-paid treatment. The Standard Model of human psychology incorporates other changes, many of them reflective of the times. 
 
So, that raises yet another question. Will DSM-6 reflect the next generation’s culture just as DSM-5 reflects the culture of the recent past and The Anatomy of Melancholy reflected the culture of the seventeenth century? 
 
There’s a joke from the end of the twentieth century about the proliferation of lawyers. Essentially, it’s that if the proliferation continues, every other person on the planet will be a lawyer. Could we make a similar joke about the standard models of psychology? Could we surmise that DSM-20 will be as unrecognizable to today’s psychologists as Burton’s analysis of  Melancholy? Or, if psychology isn’t really dead, will it metamorphose into a permanent model of humanity that ultimately elucidates what we are and why we act as we do? Is there an explanation awaiting the discovery of a bottom quirk that breaks down to become all the various quirks of human behavior?  

I know John Keats has said it’s so,
Romanticist, you’d think he’d know.
The nightingale just sings a tune
He sang before, as in last June.
In his famous “Ode,” he claims
Old kings had heard the same refrains,
That birds had sung in ancient song
They sing today. He could be wrong.
Some say the birds sing different notes,
With changes smaller than the motes
That on their feathers cling unseen,
Impossible for birds to preen.
Slight changes in the tune we hear
Will go unnoticed year to year,
Much as each culture subtly moved,
Rejecting what it once approved.
The values sung in ancient songs
As worth our praise are now deemed wrongs.
As offspring change a note or two,
The old ways slowly change to new.
The birds appear to look and sing
As they once did for ancient king,
But now you know the truth at last 
That nothing in a culture’s past
Is just the same as it had been.
The present time is no past’s twin.
Thus, in your time you, too, have made
A subtle change in what you played.
Your song today will slightly vary
From the tune you used to carry.
Now add your changes to the others’;
That’s all your sisters and your brothers. 
The sum of all is a mutation
To any culture or a nation.
And once the singers changed their tunes,
Those songs they sang in former Junes,
Just like the sounds the old kings heard
Are not those sung by modern bird. 

Tell me now, are you a worrier? 
 
Really? I thought you were over that; I thought you said worry never did anything other than make your heart race. And yet, here you are, still occasionally pumping blood at a rate unnecessary for your current physical needs. Sitting with a racing heart? Cow! Holy or otherwise; it makes little sense in a finite existence to spend time fretting over that which only might occur, like that potential wreck at the onramp or that, or dare I mention it, that distant celestial object that might fall into the well of Earth’s gravity.
 
Could there be a more appropriate argument against your continued worry than Mark Twain’s “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”? You might not be an “old man” or an “old woman,” but you are certainly old enough to recall many of those “troubles” you never had. 
 
Worry, no. Anticipation, yes. Worry is anticipation without preparation. Anticipation prepares. Anticipation assesses. Anticipation runs the numbers. Sure, rain might fall on your picnic, but nothing prevents you from finding potential shelters beforehand or from taking an umbrella. And as for that day when the chance of rain is 30%, you can start making the casseroles and buying the plastic forks. That’s a 30% chance for your area. Sure, it could rain, but there’s a 70% chance it won’t, that 70% of your area will be bone dry. Which makes your heart beat faster, the statement that you have a 1 in 3 chance of being rained on or a 2 in 3 chance of not being rained on? Every possible event has some probability of happening, of course, but probability, even high probability, is an as-yet-unfulfilled reality.   
 
Ever been to one of those affairs when the microphone or speaker system is inadequate or turned off? Isn’t that why we hear the familiar “Testing, testing, testing”? Though not a guarantee against a possible failure, the test is an example of prudent anticipation.
 
Oh! And that football-field sized asteroid called Apophis that was supposed to hit the planet if not in 2029, just eight years from this writing, then in 2068? Well, it turns out that, Whew! No worries, but good news for celestial viewing. It will come close enough to see with modest telescopes, but it will miss. Fortunately, in the spirit of anticipation, some folks at the Jet Propulsion Lab checked out the asteroid’s orbit with some powerful radio telescopes and discovered we’re in no danger. * 
 
However—or should I say a louder “HOWEVER”?—you will no doubt see in 2028 the headline “Asteroid to Hit Earth Next Year” or some tabloid story on aliens riding rocks. And then there will be a run on toilet paper and canned goods. Panic will set in. Worry will rise. Someone or some group like the late Heaven’s Gate will commit suicide, and there’ll be a bunch of looting. Might even hear of a rush to build bomb shelters: “Why are John and Thelma carrying buckets of dirt out of their house?” 
 
Remember Y2K? Remember all those recent “end of the world” predictions” by people like David Meade (2017), Ronald Weinland (2019), and Jeane Dixon (2020) that didn’t come true? 
 
Are you a worrier? Say after me—or rather after Mark Twain—“I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”; “I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”; I have known a great many troubles, but most of them…”
 
*Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA analysis: Earth is save from asteroid Apophis for 100-plus years. Phys.org. 26 Mar 2021. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-03-nasa-analysis-earth-safe-asteroid.html   Accessed March 27, 2021.

How do you win an intellectual conflict?
 
I suppose the common advice debaters might hear centers on logical fallacies to avoid and methods of argumentation to adopt. Not bad advice, but let me add something.  
 
Armies have secretly devised new weapons since the Sumerians forged bronze and the Hyksos invented the chariot. Of course, once an enemy sees new weapons in battle, any secrecy is exposed and such weapons become common to both sides of a conflict. But at first use, a new weapon unknown to an opponent is definitely an advantage that assures at least a temporary, if even a small, victory. And there’s been no change in military thinking since the Bronze Age.  Advantage goes to the side that possesses a weapon the other side does not have, such as stealth F-22s, F-35s, and hypersonic bombs. But what is the nature of the advantage? Is it just a matter of overwhelming the enemy with a technology it doesn’t possess? Yes, that’s part of it, but the other part is the surprise because ignorance isn’t a defense in battle. New weapons confuse as well as overwhelm, and few of us can act in our own best interests when we are confused and surprised.
 
One of the reasons that new weapons can be effective is that momentary confusion they cause in the enemy. Take the story of G. I. Rocky Blunt, who served with the 84th Infantry Division during World War II. During his unit’s advance on Geilenkirchen, Germany, Blunt had to run through a minefield into the town where German soldiers hid in houses. Blunt entered a building, and hearing the voices of enemy soldiers, he said in German, “Komm mit dem Händen nach oben” (“Come [out] with your hands up”). Blunt was holding a mine detector, that is, a magnetometer, that the German soldiers had never seen. They thought he had some secret weapon. Eighteen soldiers came out of the buildings with their hands up. When MP asked Blunt how he had captured so many, he said, “I used my mine detector.”* It was Blunt’s first day of combat.
 
I suppose the secret to many victories in conflicts might have an element of Blunt’s story in them. And maybe that’s what you might want to apply the next time you are in a philosophical argument with someone. Not a mine detector, but rather a mind detector. You always have an advantage when you have something the other side doesn’t have and when you know what intellectual weapons your opponent uses. 
 
To disarm an opponent of any surprises in legal cases, lawyers use depositions to discover secrets so that nothing new like Blunt’s mine detector catches them unprepared or off guard. But lawyers have the right to depose under law. In any philosophical argument, no authority gives one the right to know beforehand what kinds of arguments an opponent might make. Taking away any advantage an opponent might have requires a mind detector. 
 
If you want to be successful at a philosophical argument, you need to disarm your opponent by knowing what kinds of assumptions underlie the arguments and what mental steps he or she might take. And that disarming has to start with your ability to cross the mine field of intellectual traps that blow up your own argument. That means applying the mine detector, or the mind detector, to the path you intend to follow. Both mines and minds are difficult to detect, but a careful sweep of an actual field or an intellectual field exposes both. 
 
The arguments an opponent has are initially hidden like those German soldiers in the basement of the house in Geilenkirchen. You can, however, get them to come out mit dem Händen nach oben by doing what Blunt did. First, be forceful and confident. Second, don’t fear doing the unexpected or trying a direct approach (Come out with your hands up). Third, have that surprise weapon the opponent has not seen or considered. As the story of Rocky Blunt reveals, that weapon doesn’t even have to be a weapon.    
 

*Blunt tells his story to the producers of the series WWII in HD, in Season 1, Episode 8, starting at 25:12.

Two Headlines: “Indonesia Floats Idea of Garuda-Shaped Palace as It Revives Capital City Move”* and “Indonesian Police Say New Cell Islamic Militant Group Was Recruiting, Training.” **

​What do you make of them?
 
Here’s what I see. Indomitable hope is a bird that flies over islands of inevitable, ineluctable, and ever-renewing evil. 
 
Garuda, in case you aren’t up on your study of Indonesian symbolism, is a bird. Not just any bird, however. Although some Indonesians might associate Leptoptilos dubius, the greater adjutant Stork, with Garuda, the gilded bird known as Garuda Pancasila is more familiar as a stylized national emblem on the Indonesian flag. It’s a symbol for the Indonesian Air Force, and the national airline is called Garuda Indonesia. Garuda appears in many forms in different countries, and it derives from a figure in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain faiths. That it symbolizes a mostly Muslim country is testimony to its widespread significance, especially so in light of a plan to shape a national palace in its form. Lest you think that Garuda is all lightness wafted on gentle breezes, you should know that it often represents the violence that forces of “Good,” such as military units like those of India and Indonesia, can inflict on the forces of “Evil,” as sometimes symbolized by the cobra-like and potentially dangerous Nagas of the netherworld.***
 
Having weathered the economic ravages of COVID in 2020 and still weathering a slow recovery under attempts to vaccinate a large population, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo (aka Jokowi) has restarted plans to move the capital city to Borneo. And at the same time, Indonesian counterterrorism police have been rounding up terrorists, so far about two dozen of them who belong to the banned Jemaah Islamiyah militant group associated with al-Qaida, a group responsible for the bombings in 2002 in Bali. Indonesia’s counterterrorism squads are the foils to its modern day potentially dangerous terrorist Nagas. 
 
That a country can weather a pandemic and terrorism and still plan to build a palace in the shape of a golden bird, reflects a little verse by Emily Dickinson about indomitable hope. In the second stanza, Emily writes:
 
            And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard-
            And sore must be the storm-
            That could abash the little Bird
            That kept so many warm- ****
 
Garuda isn’t the “little bird,” but is, rather, a defender of imposing strength. But Emily makes a point that conveys the same meaning as the symbolic Garuda, that it takes a “sore” storm to abash the bird of hope. The “thing with feathers” sings its tune of hope even in gales. We hear its tune over the raging winds. The bird flies and sings regardless of the storms that persistent Evil sends our way. 
 
Think, the next time you find yourself confronted by Evil or dire circumstances, of that bird because, as Emily writes in her first stanza, hope “perches in the soul,” your soul, your indomitable soul. Yes, sometimes you have to act with the violence represented by Garuda in its fight against Nagas, but you can with constant awareness, quash the forces of ever-present Evil to build your own Garuda-shaped palace. 
 
 
*Gayatri Suroyo. Reuters, Wire Service Content. US News. 25 Mar 2021. Online at https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-03-25/indonesia-floats-idea-of-garuda-shaped-palace-as-it-revives-capital-city-move  Accessed March 25, 2021.
 
**Andi Jatmiko and Niniek Karmini. Associated Press, Stars and Stripes. 19 Mar 2021. Online at 
https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/indonesian-police-say-new-cell-islamic-militant-group-was-recruiting-training-1.666465   Accessed March 25, 2021.
 
***Just a little etymological note: See any cognate resemblance between “naga” and “snake”? Ah! The connections of languages derived from Indo-European!
 
**** “Hope” is the thing with feathers [Yes, that’s how Emily entitled it, with quotation marks around hope; she also seemed to love hyphens and dashes]
 
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Thinking about environmental regulations one day, Bill says to Marlene, “As the United States and state government agencies impose an exponential increase in regulations, all, of course, well-intended by compassionate bureaucrats trying desperately to save Something, Anything, Most Things, All Things, well, as I was saying, as the exponentially increasing agencies exponentially increase regulations, they will also increase their policing force to catch violaters.”
 
Marlene, no intellectual slouch has a degree in environmental science, so she responds, “Now, that’s a pessimistic view. What would happen if there were no oversight agencies? Imagine the chaos, the exploitation, the unbridled rape of the land—not to mention the increase in anthropogenic hazards. Look what happened before the Montreal Protocol. Runaway ozone destruction. If the governments hadn’t stopped uses of CFCs, we’d all be toast. Really, UV toast. No protective ozone layer. I’ll bet some of those CFCs are still up there destroying ozone, but not as many molecules now as before. So, stop complaining. You can go outside because agencies stopped the destruction of the ozone layer.”
 
Bill replies, “I’ll give you that, and I will admit that the air way back in the twentieth century was hazardous without the regulations. Jeez, I grew up in coal country when there were no scrubbers on the power plants, when cars burned leaded gasoline, when people heated their homes with coal, and when no one was paying attention to air pollution. So, yeah, you have a point. But then, as in all things, there comes a point that is the fulcrum of change, when the seasaw tips in the other direction so much that it touches the ground. A time’s coming when there will be more regulators on one side of the board than there are citizens on the other side, the government bureaucrats outweighing everyone else.”
 
Marlene, unable to yield, argues, “Without those regulators there would be more deaths from polluted water and air, more ecological destruction, and more…uh, uh, well just more hazards. Just because you grew up with pollution doesn’t mean that kids today have to. Think of all the particles you breathed; think of the smog.”
 
Unable to stop himself and willing to extend a conversation into the realm of argument, Bill says, “Marlene, I’ll grant you that some things are better now, that people saved the ozone layer they were destroying, though remember that it does fluctuate in natural cycles, but how much of living do you want to place in the hands of bureaucrats who have no personal accountability? I just read that the small pollutants that cars give off don’t account for all the so-called PM 2.5s, the particles smaller than 2.5 microns. Guess what? Trees emit them. Yeah, your beloved trees. Turns out that some scientists think that about a quarter of the PM 2.5s in the Los Angeles Basin come from 18 million local trees. * Trees, Marlene, trees. Not all kinds of trees, but certain trees. So, what’s next, tree police showing up at someone’s door saying her tree has to go because it’s the wrong species, that it’s in violation of air pollution standards, that it’s a menance to the community?”
 
The now agitated Marlene responds, “I don’t think first of all that you understand the dangers of breathing particulate matter that is smaller than what you can see. Two point five microns. That’s millionths of a meter. You don’t see them, but your lungs do. Leave it to you to think only of the big macro stuff you can see. You think in terms of coal soot and black smoke erupting from chimneys during your youth. You probably don’t remember telling me one time that in your youth you thought most trees had black bark and were surprised when they somehow changed their color because of reduced coal pollution when people in your town went from coal-fired furnaces to natural gas. There, is that visible proof for you? Brown tree bark, not black. Makes me think of that study of moths in England.”
 
Trying to prove he is not unaware, he says, “I remember that study. Peppered moths, right? They survived by producing more dark offspring when the trees where covered in coal dust and then survived by offspring that were lighter colored when rains washed the trees of their soot as England used less coal to heat homes. Okay, I see that point. But still, think of where we’ll be. If, as Ronald Cohen, one of the scientists who did the study of the Los Angeles Basin says, oak trees and Mexican fan palms produce lots of VOCs and 2.5-micron particles, does that mean some agency will send out a crew to cut down those trees? Imagine Los Angeles losing a type of tree that is iconic for the city, those Mexican fan palms. And what about oaks? Mighty oaks? What if people start blaming oak trees in the East? What’s next. No more oak trees, no more oak floors, no more oak furniture, no more poems written under mighty oaks, no more analogies about little acorns growing into those trees, and no more stories about Chicken Little. Think of the kids deprived of that story or unable to understand it because they’ve never seen an acorn. And what do we do with those polluting trees? Do we burn them? Doesn’t that give off carbon dioxide? See what I mean. So many regulations and so many regulators that we’ll go from one extreme to the other, and the regulation extreme will make life miserable. Don’t you remember that I asked you to marry me by the big oak in the park? It’s still there, still polluting your disgusting little particulates. Is that what you were thinking when I proposed? Were you looking at me or at the tree, thinking this thing ought to come down. ‘I can’t breathe all these particles. What’s he saying? Oh! Yes, Bill, I will marry you. Sorry, I was lost in environmental thought.’ Is that why you took a minute to respond. I thought you were going to say ‘no.’”
 
“Don’t be silly, Bill. Of course, I was paying attention to you. I wasn’t even concerned that you might be giving me a blood diamond.”
 
“See, there we go. How was I supposed to know where the diamond came from? Let’s not get into that. I was talking trees and regulators. I was talking about the tipping point when there are more regulators than there are people and processes to regulate. I honestly don’t worry about tree pollution. It’s part of the planet. Trees have been around for hundreds of millions of years, so we invaded their space. Are we supposed to fault them because we have instruments so sensitive we can detect the smallest particles? You have to see where we’re headed. Sure, it was good to stop the CFC destruction of the ozone layer, but there has to be a limit on runaway regulation. I know that air pollution isn’t good, but it’s unavoidable in some forms. What’s the next target beyond 2.5-micron tree pollution? The 180 million tons of Sahara Desert dust that waft across the Atlantic from Africa to the Antilles and South America? I thought that dust was good because it enriches soils in Brazil’s declining rainforests. Oh! Wait. I get it. Stop the dust from Africa, and the trees in Brazil will die off naturally and eliminate the species that give off those 2.5 micron-size particles and the volatile organic compounds. I can’t wait to see the line of regulators standing between Sahara’s dust and the trees of the Americas. There will probably be some UN committee in charge, the International Panel on Dust Control. I can imagine a dust brigade armed with Swifters and another young Greta, this one carrying a nonaerosol can of Pledge and a dust cloth. Hmmn. Does Pledge give off volatile organic compounds? Okay, no pledge, just a dust cloth and maybe a vacuum sweeper.”
 
Marlene, wishing to end the conversation, says, “You always take things to the extremes. Pull in here, I need to pick up some bread, milk, and eggs.”
 
Bill, whose voice she hears fading as she walks away from the car, continues, “Sure, you’ll see. But don’t come to me when an army of regulators cuts down that big oak and denudes the town’s parks in the name of saving the planet. Might as well live in the Mojave, but then there’ll be that dust problem.”  
 
*Sanders, Robert. UC Berkeley. Phys.Org. 23 Mar 2021. Clara M. Nussbaumer et al., Impact of OA on the Temperature Dependence of PM 2.5 in the Los Angeles Basin, Environmental Science & Technology (2021) DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c07144  Sanders online at https://phys.org/news/2021-03-la-vehicular-aerosol-pollution-vegetation.html    Accessed March 24, 2021.

Are you inclined to accept essences as entities of substance? Or are you one of those down-to-earth materialists who spurns talk of generalities, essences, intangibles, Ideas, and Ideals?  
 
Just wondering here: Is the idea of Ideas inextricably embedded in human nature? Or did the idea of Ideas spring from the heads of Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers the way Athena emerged from the head of Zeus? Sure, there’s no doubt humans had ideas long before young Greeks donned their first sandals to walk to Athena’s olive grove in her namesake city, where Plato lectured, or to Aristotle’s Lyceum to learn about or discuss the idea of Ideas. Ancient humans going way back probably before Homo habilis probably had ideas. Otherwise, that ancestor specifically and possibly more ancient hominids between us and them wouldn’t have made tools. Aren’t tools physical manifestations of ideas? But did those ancient humans, if not habilis, then some other hominid species prior to sapiens have ideas about Ideas? Did they distinguish between what philosophers call essence and accident? Think tool manifested in hammer and philosopher manifested in Plato. Heck, think writer manifested in Donald.   
 
The question about the idea of Ideas is not centered on who might first have had specific ideas, such as in “I have an idea; let’s throw a party; I’ll grill some mammoth mastodon burgers over the cave-entrance fire.” Neither is the question centered on ideas as Michael Keaton uses the term in the film Nightshift, when he says to Henry Winkler, “I’m an idea man, Chuck. I get ideas all day long I can’t control…Tuna fish. What if you mix mayonnaise in the can right with the tuna? Hold it, hold it, wait a minute, Chuck. Take live tuna fish, and feed them mayonnaise. Oh! This is good. Call Starkist.” 
 
Think not of someone’s getting an idea for a party or for feeding mayonnaise to live tuna. Think instead of how you define Idea in and of itself, as though Idea with a capital “I” differs from idea with a lower case “i.” Is there a capital “I” Idea that has an independent existence unrelated to an individual human mind? Maybe an example is worth examining. Take any capital letter “I” Idea, such as “nature of humanity.” 
 
Is “Nature of Humanity” real in any sense other than being a mental construct, that which Merriam-Webster defines as a “theoretical entity”? Watch yourself here. You and I are walking a path of broken rocks. It’s easy to slip and fall on shifting footing when one climbs the talus of meaning to reach a mountaintop composed of such theoretical entities. “Nature of Humanity”? Is that a theoretical entity? Does either Nature or Humanity have an existence outside the mind, your mind, for example? 
 
Is capital “N” Nature an independent reality or an idea that we impose on everything that is not us? What, also, of Humanity with or without a capital “H”? Is there such a theoretical entity sans your thinking about it? If on a given day no one thought of the term “Nature of Humanity,” or of the separate words Nature or Humanity, would each still exist? That’s that independent existence I asked about earlier. 
 
Whoa! Are you and I discussing words or what the words represent? Is this a frivolous discussion about generalities and specifics, the difference, say, between fish generally and bluefin tuna specifically? Is this one of those go-nowhere discussions that mimics arguments made by the greatest philosophical minds? Let’s see.  
 
Break down “Nature of Humanity” to its component terms. Read through writings on aesthetics, science, and philosophy, and you’ll encounter the word nature. Sometimes it will be Nature, its capital letter somehow conveying all that is not human, both that which lives and that which does not: Earth, air, fire, water, the fundamental elements of the Greeks and all those creatures large and small that are not human. Of course, to exclude humans is to ignore that humans are as natural as any other life-form on the planet, as natural as elements in Greek philosophy or in modern chemistry, like those six elements so essential to life: Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous. When we exclude ourselves from Nature are we not just Venn-diagramming the universe to prove a distinction that a different Venn diagram would contradict? Does our exclusion show up on either a cladogram or Tree of Life? Should we argue instead that Cytochrome C essential to apoptosis in cells from microorganisms through plants and animals, including human animals, binds us undeniably to living “Nature”? 
 
As for Humanity, is it something real and independent of the human mind? You have used the word. What did you mean by it? What is its manifestation? Let me belabor the questions with some semantic pendantics. Merriam-Webster gives a three-part definition of the word: 1) “the quality of state of being humane”; 2) “the quality or state of being human”; and 3) “the totality of humankind,” meaning everybody. Does this breed yet another question, one about what a “quality” is? Oh! Yes, and there’s another meaning that echoes through academia’s hallowed halls, as in “I’m majoring in the humanities,” always used in the plural unless by a psychology or philosophy professor who says in a double entendre, “I teach humanity.” 
 
Remember that upslope path over talus? We’re on it now. Are we looking for stable footing in words or in what they generally represent? We know we can discuss many ideas to arrive at a shared, understanding of them, plastically understood in ideas like “Let’s throw a party” that might or might not include a beer bong, or rigidly understood in an idea like “Let’s feed mayonnaise to bluefin tuna.” We can both envision and understand feeding mayonnaise to tuna regardless of Michael Keaton’s misguided and comedic logic. I can’t imagine, however, our reaching a definitive understanding and agreement on the idea of Ideas.   
 
When you encountered the words nature and humanity above, did you understand both immediately, even though, if hard pressed for an on-the-spot, specific definition of either or both together, you might struggle. With so many meanings for humanity, a word that does not refer to a namable, specific human but that can be ascribed to one and to all as an inclusive category. Is “humanity” both essence and its manifestation, both Ideal Form and behavioral manifestation, the latter being a so-called accident? If humanity is a characteristic quality endemic to all members of the species, to the collective of individuals not only past but also present, is it also applicable to the collective of our close but defunct relatives the Neanderthals and Denisovans? Again, you’ve used the word humanity. What did you mean by it? 
 
You might argue, that there is no independently existing “humanity” while accepting in the Holocaust or in slavery the existence of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Does that mean the word is meaningless outside the context of individual or group actions and that it has no independent existence? 
 
“What’s this?”you ask. “Are you asking yet another question because you don’t have any answers for me, your reader? You want me to continue reading this, but you haven’t thoroughly answered the very first question about the idea of Ideas, about whether or not ancient humans thought about theoretical entities, and now you are throwing another question at me. It’s easy to ask questions like these, Donald, but much harder to answer them, especially when those questions are only vaguely understood or questions we’ve been asking since Plato walked and lectured in that olive grove.”
 
Let’s go back to the idea of Ideas, those perfect, unimaginable Forms of which Plato spoke, like the Ideal Tree. You cannot, of course, think of “Tree” without somehow applying some specificity. Oak? Red oak? Pin oak? Some other tree species, a conifer perhaps? Maybe only the late Bob Ross could paint an Ideal Tree, no doubt a “happy” one clinging to an Ideal Mountain above an Ideal Lake on the Ideal Summer’s Day. Bob, however, would be challenged if he tried to paint humanity. Leave nature painting to Bob and assign the task of painting humanity to Norman Rockwell. To capture “humanity,” would Norman offer one of his covers for the Saturday Evening Post or a new painting showing Earth’s current seven billion human inhabitants in some imitation of Signorelli’s The Damned Cast into Hell? Would he cram the canvas with images of the 100 billion past members of the species and images of those not yet born? Rockwell might ask for that indefinite list of characteristics you keep in mind and assocate with humanity. In collaboration, would artists Bob and Norman paint happy humanity walking up the talus slope of Mount Meaning? Is humanity an Idea without form? Is it paintable? I wish both painters were alive today so that we could ask.
 
This is where you inject the idea that Bob painted Nature and that looking at one of his paintings is like looking at Ideal Nature or the Idea of Nature. You might go further to say that actually standing in a meadow, or in the woods, or on a mountain, or by a waterfall is also a way to “see” Nature. Bob might say that in trying to define the general you simply go from looking at one “natural” object to looking at another and that with so many components of Nature, you have no choice but to generalize a larger view with “idealized” individual trees.  With dual meaning, Nature with a capital “N” is the encompassing Idea, but it is not an indivisible whole. You watch the sun rise, and exclaim, “Isn’t Nature wonderful! I wish I could capture this moment like Bob. Where’s my camera?” But when you show someone your photo and painting as a representation of “Nature,” you will probably be disappointed by the reaction. “Yeah. Nice pic. Look at the one I took of a squirrel in my backyard.” 
 
Why should I lead you up a path of loose stone in search of ideas, Ideals, and universals? My motivation comes from two sentences in Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Psychology Classics. * In his chapter summarizing the work of Viktor Frankl, the author writes, “We live in an age of relativism, which waters down real values and meaning that exist independent of our judgments. But by choosing to be fee of such universals, over time we paradoxically hem in our own freedoms.” (102) 
 
Do you accept “universals” and “real values” or reject them in favor of specifics? “I can accept both,” you say. “Doesn’t everyone?” you ask.  
 
Are there theoretical universals or only relative and specific entities that are real? We know that we cannot envision Plato’s Ideal Tree. We can speak of it, but cannot point to or paint it. Is the “Nature of Humanity” the same? Are we equally at a loss with either or both of its terms? Would you argue that you can use the words nature and humanity or the expression “nature of humanity” with sufficient meaning that others would know what you mean? And if you do argue that such terms have meaning, then would you also argue that you accept universals of various kinds, like “real values”? Like “Good” or “Evil,” also. Beware contradictions that lurk in the reasoning, beware the treacherous footing; and especially beware the vaguely understood. 
 
What of moral or ethical universals? Are Frankl and Butler-Bowdon correct in saying we live in an age of relativism? Was there really any age when universals prevailed? Don’t today’s proponents of Far Left and Far Right philosophies accept universals that they use relatively for their own political purposes? Think of the recent rampage of ISIS terrorists beheading innocents simply because they belonged to a different faith and accepted a different set of capital “I” Ideas, a set that specifically included beheading as a manifestation of an idea in support of an Ideal. One could argue that Ideals are real because they spawn ideas with real consequences. But then, there’s that Platonic Ideal Form, that Tree that is not a tree as we know trees, unless, of course, such an Ideal Tree appears in a Bob Ross painting.
 
Obviously, humans accept the idea of Ideas and Universals. Evidence lies in the acts motivated by such acceptance. But that also means that we accept much that we only vaguely share or understand, some sketchy commonality that is more like Bob Ross’s happy trees than like Rockwell’s 323 gritty covers for the Saturday Evening Post, which, in themselves, are depictions of stereotypes. 
 
There is no living representative of habilis, neanderthanlensis, or Denisovan that could speak about the idea of Ideas, about Ideals, or about Universals. Most of the 100 billion humans who walked the planet are also gone, taking with them knowledge about their acceptance of Ideals they might have turned into specific ideas. We will never really know when humans first thought of either Humanity or Nature, let alone the “Nature of Humanity.” 
 
Sorry to say, we twenty-first century humans are on our own, balancing on talus slopes in the climb toward Ideals. Any path that our ancestors made has disappeared as the talus slid under the gravity of specific ideas that every generation believes to be manifestations of Ideals. Sure, we have more sophisticated forms of communication than our ancient ancestors. We can read what humans wrote over the past five millennia, and now even can also listen to recordings or see videos our more immediate ancestors produced to record their idea of Ideas. In doing so, we have more recently closed the gap between past and present. So, what have we discovered?
 
Contrary to Viktor Frankl’s belief that “we” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have entered an age of relativism, humans have for millennia have been torn between Ideals and ideas, between Universals and specifics with successive generations never knowing whether their versions of Ideals and their ideas of Ideas are the same as the previous generation’s understanding except through interpretations that might or might not be arguable.
 
Can you foresee a time when there will be an Ideal that is indisputable and that has meaning outside its specific manifestations or outside its current milieu? President Gerald Ford once said, “Truth is the glue that holds government together.” I thought taxes were. President Woodrow Wilson said, “It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily, it is ideas. Ideas live, men die.” Need I comment more than to say World War I?       
 
 
*Tom Butler-Bowdon. 50 Psychology Classics, Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books. New York. MJF Books. 2007.
 
 
 
 

Long captivated by the idea of space travel, Arnie says, “Julia, did you ever think of living on a space station or on the moon.”
 
Julia, preparing supper while listening for sounds of fighting among the kids, replies, “No.”
 
Not content, Arnie continues, “Just ‘No.’ Think about it. Life in free-float, no stepping on the scale each morning and then saying, ‘I have to lose two pounds.’ Or life on the moon or Mars, where you would weigh only a small fraction of your weight, which, by the way, is fine with me. Don’t you wear the same size you wore last year?”
 
Hearing a louder clamor from the kids’ playroom, Julia says loudly, “Kids! Get ready for supper.”
 
“Think about it. You mean you have never wondered what it would be like to go to space? You’ve gone on a rollercoaster or two. Didn’t the thrill of the acceleration or the momentary microgravity ever make you wonder?”
 
“Not really. You know I’m not a fan of those rides, and I certainly didn’t go on Mission Space at Disney World last summer. I get motion sickness and dizzy. I close my eyes on most of those rides. So, I certainly wouldn’t want to keep my eyes closed for days or weeks or months or years. I just won’t have as much for supper tonight. My diet starts now.”
 
“Jules, you mean if I got a free ride to space, you wouldn’t go?”
 
“Don’t you remember those space ships that blew up? No, I’m certainly not going on one of those. And in spite of your thinking that I haven’t thought about it, I guess I can say I have for a moment, like when I stepped on the scale this morning two pounds more than I weighed yesterday. What did I eat? Anyway, no I don’t want to go to space. Where do those people pee? How do they enjoy a glass of wine? Do they even have windows? Certainly, they don’t go for a walk, well, I know they go for spacewalks, but they don’t go for walk-walks, you know, on their feet.”
 
“But just for a little trip, to be able to look back on Earth from space or from the moon. Think of the perspective, Jules. Think of what that view would do for the kids’ mental growth and maturity. They wouldn’t think that our little town is the center of the universe. They would see the silliness of pettiness.”
 
Now engaged, Julia says, “You’re living in some Star Trek world where people walk around in enormous spacecraft as though they are walking on Earth. I’ve read a little about your precious space travel. There are problems, different problems from the ones you face here. Kids! I said get ready for supper.”
 
“Sure, I’ll grant that wherever people go there are problems, but in going, you get to be part of a select society. The other people would be chosen because they are psychologically sound, bright, and unencumbered by pettiness. I mean, what woman would have to worry about her hairdo in a place where hair just floats on the head?”
 
“Arnie, you’re living a dream. There would be problems galore, especially that one about where to pee. Do you remember how hard potty-training was? You going to do that with pretoddlers and toddlers in space? No gravity. See that pot of boiling water over there on the stove? How do I do any homestyle cooking in space? Anyway, you think I haven’t given it any attention, this space travel stuff. No, I don’t watch Star Trek, as you know, but I occasionally read something about space travel, and it’s always got something off-putting about it. Just today I read that when people go into space for extended times, they begin to lose their ability to read other peoples' expressions. They see faces more negatively. Don’t look at me that way! I know you don’t think I know….”
 
“What way? I wasn’t….”
 
“That way. I know that look. You think you know more about everything. People in space for long periods could get into more fights because they misinterpret expressions. You know those tough-kid gangster or gunfight movies you like when the bad guy says ‘You lookin’ at me?’ to the innocent stranger? That’s you men on steroids in space. No thanks. We have enough of that here on Earth. Your peaceful village on Mars would be at war in months, maybe at war even before the people got to Mars. Kids! Supper is ready.”
 
Arnie, a bit befuddled, says, “I…I…Where did you hear that?”
 
“Hear what?”
 
“That stuff about reading faces in space.”
 
“I told you. I read. You know how I like to read psychology articles, studies about the brain and emotions. I do have a B.S. in psych, or did you forget where we met in college? I just happened to see an article pop up on my IPad, so I skimmed it. * It was about a study on how space travel would affect astronauts’ ability to read faces, to understand what emotions their facial expressions convey. So, you can take your space travel, your Star Trek, your Elon Musk dreams. Kids! Supper. I’ve got too many down-to-Earth problems to handle. What if I couldn’t correctly read the kids’ faces? What if I went to the grocery store and misread the look of someone in the checkout line? What if I took friendliness as unfriendliness in the look of a stranger? You think road rage is a problem now; imagine people driving around in their moon buggies and having road rage because they thought the other drivers were out to get them in some cruel bumper car scenario. Isn’t misreading faces one of the reasons strangers get into fights? No thanks on your trip to Mars. No thanks on your fun microgravity beyond that occasional rollercoaster ride I take for the kids’ sake. Kids! Supper.”
 
“Okay, okay. Just askin’. What are we having for supper? Kids! Your mother told you supper’s ready. Get in here. What are you fighting about anyway?”
 
“Johnny’s making faces at me.”
 
“No, I wasn’t. She’s making faces at me. She stuck out her tongue.”
 
“Sit down.”
 
Julia can’t help herself in making a final comment. “I think I made my point.”
 
 
* “Continuous and Intermittent Artificial Gravity as a Countermeasure to the Cognitive Effects of 60 Days of Head-Down Tilt Bed Rest” by Mathias Basner, David F. Dinges, Kia Howard, Tyler M. Moore, Ruben C. Gur, Christian Mühl and Alexander C. Stahn, 17 March 2021, Frontiers in Physiology. DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2021.643854

How do you reckon time?
 
When I first stood in a redwood forest, I was like so many before me awed by the breadth and height of the trees. In the East, the fattest tree I had ever encountered was an American beech in Yorktown, Virginia and the Angel Oak on Johns Island in South Carolina. Redwoods are “fatter” than that beech and have even greater diameters than that venerable live oak. Redwoods, as everyone knows, are also taller. Redwoods are significantly older than surviving American beech trees and live oaks, with some redwoods appearing as seedlings a couple of millennia ago. On the ground beside beech, live oak, and redwood, I found their dimensions overwhelmed objects of the mind and imagination with observable reality. 
 
The duration of growth in those old trees compared to the duration of my own growth isn’t observable in the sense that the size differences are observable. The trees’ lifetimes push my imagination and concept of time to their rather finite limits. Those limits are a wall that prevents full comprehension, that is, an understanding suffused with a “feel” for the time that passed since those old trees started growing.
 
Exceedingly long lives challenge my brain and maybe yours, also. So, when I first encountered a bristlecone pine and learned of its age, I found myself incapable of getting any “feel” for its lifespan. Sure, I can say the numbers, but…
 
You know that old expression about a watched pot of water never boiling? Bristlecones dilate time even more so. A watched bristlecone pine never grows. And yet, strangely, unwatched pots of water do come to a boil, and bristlecone pines do, in fact, grow. But, gosh, do they grow slowly. Without knowing all the variables, I assume the mountain air that envelops them and the thin soils and bare limestones to which they cling and to which they adapted over millennia slow their growth. For humans, their environment, if not altogether forbidding, fosters no permanent habitation. 
 
Bristlecones grow too slowly for the average human to notice. I suppose only dendrologists can closely track their growth with the finest of calipers or tree corers. Who among the ordinary visitor wants to stare at a tree that in some years doesn’t even produce a ring? Humans exist in a different time frame, a blink, so to speak, of the bristlecone’s eye. 
 
Is there any way to comprehend the 4,000 years of a bristlecone pine’s life? Let me rephrase: Don’t you have difficulty comprehending any past because of an uneven passage of time, the varying progression that passes quickly or almost not at all? Haven’t you said, “Wow! That roller coaster was fun; I wish it lasted longer” and “As I put on the brakes, I could see everything slow down right before the crash”? 
 
Personal time dilation is what we superimpose on the so-called objective calendar and clock time that we can scientifically apply to bristlecones’ growth rates. The clock time is irrelevant to our “feel” for such endurance. Should we press ourselves to imagine a montage film sequence of a bristlecone’s life or something akin to that technique used to show the passage of “time” in the movie version of The Time Machine? But were we to do so, would we see “time” or simply tangible or observable changes in the environment indicating time’s passage? We can model time and note what we call its effects, but as for actually seeing it, well, let’s just put it down as one of those inescapable intangibles that paradoxically produces tangible results. Is that a wrinkle developing on your brow? Hey, there’s another at the corner of your eye.
 
Dendrologists can examine bristlecones accurately enough to get a number like 4,000 years old, the clock or calendar time of the trees. But that is just a number to the psyche, and numbers, as we know aren’t whole brain entities. If they were, no one would gamble; no one would buy a lottery ticket. Numbers have meaning, but that meaning isn’t holistic when it comes to durations. And the numbers that mark an ancient bristlecone’s age carry little or nothing of a feel for the tree’s duration and survival through Earth’s vicissitudes. Don’t believe me? Try internalizing 4,000 years. 
 
Archaeologists and anthropologists assess entities even older than bristlecones. The pyramids, for example, are a millennium older than the current stand of trees. Göbekli Tepe is more than twice their age, and cave drawings take us back tens of millennia. And ancient ancestors Homo habilis and  Australopithecus afarensis predate the trees by two to four million years. Should we call that deep time? But even those ancestors’ lives are a blink relatively speaking. How so? Geologists dive down a deeper time well, one that goes back hundreds of millions to more than billion years. Astronomers, dive the deepest, going back to the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Bristlecones? Tah! They live fractions of a blink at best. 
 
Especially with regard to comprehending time, numbers that are intellectually meaningful can be personally meaningless. And big numbers and long durations need not apply. In what sense do you remember the time of your childhood? I’m not asking you to remember the number of years, but in a sense to comprehend them, to feel their passage? What was a watched pot of water seeming never to boil during some event during your youth, you now view as lasting that proverbial blink.
 
I suppose a philosopher might say I’m addressing the psychology of time rather than its philosophy. Okay, I’ll grant that. And physicists might jump into the conversation with statements about change and entropy, order vs. disorder, measurements on relative and absolute scales, and the “physical” beginning of time in the Big Bang or in some clashing of “branes” at a juncture of dimensions. But after all those books, papers, and discussions about the nature of time, have we extended our understanding by much? Do we still echo Augustine of Hippo’s comment that if no one asked him to define time he knew what it was, but if someone asked him, he was at a loss to explain it.
 
Sorry, philosophers and physicists. Time is of variable importance. It’s always important to humans in their present circumstances. But only in so far as individuals convince themselves by conscious effort or by a chance encounter does the duration of anything outside the boundaries of an individual life take on meaning. Interested in fossils? Then the time since their living forms succumbed to death is meaningful. Interested in old houses or antiques? Ditto. Capability for “feeling” Time’s passage for either relatively old fossils or relatively young antiques waxes and wanes with interest intensity. But even in the most personal attachment to Time, the passage of our own lives, we have difficulty trying to “feel” what we once felt about the duration of any moment. Remember that in the experience of any two people, the same event exists in a variable time frame. A batter hitting a ball perceives the moment differently from a fan observing the hit; an outfielder making a diving catch perceives time differently from a fan observing the catch. Same goes for crash victim and witness, drowning person and saving lifeguard, or even for a crew running a high-speed camera to capture a bullet hitting a pumpkin.
 
Am I a modern proponent of the Eleatic School? Am I Parmenides reborn? Am I arguing that Being is immutable and that Time is an illusion? No, I see an old living bristlecone, and I know it wasn’t born full grown. I see a dead one, and I know time has tangible effects. 
 
Sure, I have said elsewhere, notably on the frontispiece of this website, that time is of secondary importance to place. No universe, I argue, no time. No place for time, no time. Place, I argue is primary over time, and place sets up how we perceive time. Standing next to an old beech, redwood, or bristlecone becomes a frame for time that differs from standing next to a baby, near an ant hill, or on Broadway at lunchtime. So, yes, I prefer a view of time that emanates from the psyche and not from some number divided by the Planck constant or the speed of light. And yes, I prefer to think of what time is in relation to me rather than in relation to time as fixed by some dating method, such as relative dating by superposition of rocks, with older rocks underlying younger ones, or as absolute dating by measurements of uranium half-lives or carbon-14 analysis. Even the count of tree rings in an ancient bristlecone pine or in a younger redwood or beech, though intelligible markers of time’s passage, do not define time’s indefinable essence, to speak Neoplatonically. 
 
You know that you have yourself used a term like “time’s passage” or have spoken of “Time.” Yet, if I ask you whether time has an independent existence, that is, whether it exists outside of psyche or even outside matter, could you say anything more than what Augustine said in the fourth century? Would you argue Neoplatonically with Newton for an “Absolute Time” as either an Ideal or an Idea? In your attempt to answer that definitively, you’ll probably end up siding with Einstein and recognizing that time is not only variable, but it is even measurably variable, and that variability is the reason that the rate clocks tick on navigation satellites have to be adjusted for a different rate of ticking in “Earth-time” or those satellites will never direct us accurately from point A to point B.
 
But what, you might ask, do we do with an absolute like the age of the universe? Does it tell us nothing meaningful? Of course, such information does have meaning in showing how this place we call the Cosmos has rearranged itself from primordial plasma of inconceivable temperatures and unimaginable smallness to today’s Cosmos with a few imaginable temperatures, some relatively measurable distances, still many unimaginable temperatures, and a place of indefinite largeness. 
Sure, clocks and calendars are the meaningful stuff of the intellect. The frontal lobe knows what to do with them. The inner brain, however, is befuddled unless it’s involved in that unconscious tracking that enables you to wake for a meeting or in that release of hormones and in the death of cells and aging. But you notice here and above that I speak of reckoning time with no real understanding to impart to you. I have no diet for your mind with accompanying claim that if you ingest these thoughts for three months, you will be able to explain Time. With Time we are probably equally wise or equally ignorant. Augustine was a smart guy; all those other philosophers were smart, but pin any of them down to a question and answer session on Time, and you will get answers based on those tangible effects. Everyone, regardless of intellectual ability, can see wrinkles and fat trees.
 
Can you feel the duration of the Cosmos? Does it have personal meaning? Do you have a feel for the age of a bristlecone? How about for your own age and the passage of your youth? Remember, I’m not asking for the numbers, but for comprehension that is holistic.  
 
So, we’re back to my initial question. How do you reckon time?