Both standard metaphors for time-as-motion inadequately capture complexity reduction.

Evidence

Thus, time may also be understood as reduction of complexity – whether the present is regarded as the standpoint, continually advancing into the future, from which experience is subjectively selected, or whether it is seen as a stationary filter built into the ‘river of time’, transforming the possible into the actual. We now know that both images of motion are inadequate metaphors for that process of mediation between the complexity of the world and the actuality of experience to which we give the name reduction. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 127

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”