Robert Grudin: space-time perception

II.21

"We cannot project space-time into psychological experience without profound changes in perception and comprehension.  By fiat of four-dimensionality, "what" becomes "what/when,"  "who" becomes "who/when,"  "you" and "I" and everything undergo similar transformations.  A challenging idea, implying that identities and relationships are always in motion; that attempts to codify them in static, absolute terms are at very best relative and approximate.  To some observers this might suggest absolute relativism, loss of identity, chaos.  But this extreme hypothesis seems to be true neither in science nor in human affairs.  Things may change;  but they change at characteristic rates and in characteristic ways, recognizable and natural.  We search for character, value, truth, not so much like pilgrims seeking a marble shrine, as like listeners perceiving, in different musical instruments at different times, recurring themes and rhythms.  Thus a kind of stability-- perhaps the only real stability--exists in space-time, and our ability to recognize this mobile truth bears the same proportion to normal common sense as physics bears to solid geometry."  

 -- Robert Grudin --
from Time and the Art of Living


An interesting concept.  When I think of a person or object, I shouldn't see this person or object as static and concrete, but I should perceive them as being in motion and liable to change.  My perception of them would then include the notion of change, of some sort of flux.  How would this change my relationship to them?   What would be the effect on me of actually seeing them this way?