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A person's identity is defined by the ways in which he or she is similar to and different from other persons in body, conduct, and thought. The identity of a tribe, nation or civilization is also defined by the ways in which it is similar to and is different from other social groups of its kind. A peculiar difficulty arises when the identity sought is that of a globalized mankind because there are no other mankinds with respect to which ours could establish its hallmarks of similarities and differences. A global society is a one-and-only system of its kind, as unique as is the object we call the universe or the idea of God, in monotheistic religions. To get around the difficulties posed by this uniqueness, the paper notes that all identities must include references to intentional conduct and hence to time. It then takes advantage of this necessary relationship and discusses some representative issues unique to a globalized mankind.

The human experience of time is that of an ever-changing present in which the future becomes past. By sharp contrast, the laws that govern the physical world do not allow any meaning to be assigned to a present. Since future and past, and the metaphor of time's flow make sense only with reference to a now, physical processes cannot, and do not, provide for a preferential direction of change. This paper shows how the undirected time of the physical world and the directed temporalities of life and of conscious experience may nevertheless be accommodated within a natural philosophy of time.

This chapter sketches some of the considerations that led to the formulation of the theory of time as conflict, outlines the major features of that theory, articulates its assumptions, and defines its vocabulary.

The human need to admire and create beautiful objects, events, and utterances is as ancient as the mind, as ubiquitous as language, and as intimate as selfhood. But there is no such thing as a uniformity of taste. On the contrary, the spectrum of what has been judged beautiful at different epochs and places is immensely wide. The non-uniformity of aesthetic judgment is much more impressive than are specific rules that might have guided peoples’ tastes.

The umwelt of an animal comprises outward projections of organized, elementary sensations. The aggregates of signs and signals within the organism which determine this Umwelt form an internal chart of reality. In the case of man, the most significant such chart is what I have called the internal map of the mind. Regardless of the sophistication of this internal map, however, its contents may be conveniently thought of as a store of knowledge. Knowledge, so understood, is identifiable through behavior and, in the case of man, through language.

Living Matter is controlled by the laws of the physical world, as are volcanoes or rolling stones; organisms are so true to their environment that they even model geophysical periodicities, such as that of the rising and setting sun. Yet there is something peculiar to life which, in some subtle and some coarse ways, is expressed by all things alive. The moon, for instance, is a dog’s senior in age by ten orders of magnitude and more massive than any canine by some twenty-three orders of magnitude. Yet, when the dog bays at the full moon with fury and fear, its motion and its attitude express a restlessness and striving which makes that inconsequential mass of fur and noise substantially superior in sophistication and autonomy to that pale-faced heavenly body. How did such a state of affairs come about?

From platonic idealism until jamesian pragmatism, the intellectual winds of the West blew much, both hot and cold. The history of ideas is replete with headshaking and bloodshed, as man was moved from the center of the world to a small planet by the Copernican revolution, and from a station apart from nature into a position as a part of nature by the Darwinian revolution. Yet, from the privilege of retrospect, the world of physics from Aristotle to Newton may still be described as comfortable. By this I mean that the material which was to be explained, or explained away, was almost entirely that obtained by the biological, endoso-matic senses of man. Only when the power of our native biological instruments came to be enlarged through the power of the exosomatic instruments made by a sophisticated artisanry, and only, with the cumulatively growing force of quantified knowledge (perhaps from the turn of the 18th century) could certain uncomfortable suspicions arise. Physics began to ask questions that would have been unthinkable to the best of classical scientific minds.

A paradox is a statement which appears as self-evidently true and without contradictions, but from which, by apprently faultless reasoning, at least two mutually exclusive conclusions may be drawn. At least since the Presocratic thinkers, many ideas connected with time have been recognized as paradoxical. Subsequent generations have slowly elaborated many of these ideas in terms of their preferred modes of explanations, yet some of the classical problems have not lost their paradoxical character. We are not interested here in historical interpretations. Instead, I shall try to state the issues briefly and clearly in ways that are acceptable in our epoch, and intend to show that the sources of some of the famous paradoxes are in the confusion that results when the hierarchical nature of time is neglected.

Ideas of good and evil express communal preferences for praiseworthy conduct. Although, with such a general formulation, good and evil could be defined for social animals in general, our concern is man. For him, the instructions of his collectives take the form of selection rules, designed to help him choose a path of action among the many that his imagination can conjure up. The foremost arbiters of preferred behavior have been religious and political visions, so it is these that we shall consider first. Our findings will suggest that the evolutionary office of morals is the creation and maintenance of disequilibria, or conflicts of certain type, and the control of their resolutions. I shall conclude by using these ideas, and try to elucidate somewhat the crisis of meta-stability that characterizes the world community of our age.

During the period of history just preceding our epoch, much ingenuity was expanded on divising a means of checks and balances whereby the often opposing interests of the individual and society could be continuously reconciled. This mode of reconciliation is now under attack by doctrines which define the individual entirely in terms of its position within the collective. As a result, we are witnessing a crisis in the dialectic between the individual and the collective identities of man.