Neural Networks, Human Time, and the Soul

Abstract

The study of time is seductive, and like most seductions, confusing. Despite the fact that we cannot ‘cut time’ into pieces, we establish and fix units like seconds, minutes, and hours or years. We measure time; we lose time; we kill time; we waste and fill time up as though it were quantifiable, able to be contained or a container able to be filled. As Augustine said: ‘It is not the past, present, and future], which now are not, that I measure, but something in my memory, which there remains fixed. It is in…my mind that I measure times.’2 It is as though time were a completely interior process, a product purely of human thinking and feeling.

The human soul understands itself by its own understanding,

which is its proper act, perfectly showing its power and nature.¹

Thomas Aquinas