A Problem in Time

We are scripted to think of time according to the representations that our cultures employ in order to flatten, regularize and utilize the result. But these ideas have nearly nothing to do with the nature of time, and over the past four years (at least) there have been monumental disturbances in the living temporalities that our lives and minds arise within.

But no one is talking about it.

This is partly due to the compelling derivations our cultures have made of it… and partly due to the fact that we lack language and ideas that would enable us to sense and respond to temporal situations that lie far beyond the meager concepts that our modern concepts of time enforce on our awareness, contemplation… and bodies.

About five years ago now, I began to sense something nonordinary, and it was deeply disturbing. At the time, I had no idea what was happening or what it portended. A small number of my more sensitive friends reported something similar. A sense of impending doom. One of these friends, when I questioned him about it, reported that he “lost his sense of the future”. This was important, because it resembled the half-formed concerns and reservations that I had experienced. But those were early days. We are now long past the event horizon of whatever it is that may be afoot. And it is dire. But it is not merely dire…

In the Botanical Gardens one day, I wandered near a conversation between a 7-year-old boy and his mother. The boy was sitting next to his ostensible sister — or perhaps it was the child of the mother’s friend. He said that something had gone wrong with his dreaming. The mother brushed this off with commonplace reassurances, but the child became insistent. He said that his dreaming was broken. The mother again tried to dismiss his concerns.

It was then that he said something truly surprising: “Mom, it’s been the same day now for three days and none of the adults have noticed!”

This is the kind of thing I pay much closer attention to these days than I might have a few years ago… before The Event.

Consider with me for a moment the myriad ‘little streams’ of temporality that combine to form our daily experience… embodied, conscious, and… all that doesn’t fit in the neat frames our common thinking about time excludes. Your heartbeat. Breathing. Digestion. When you eat, and when you sleep. When and how you dream. Your eyeblinks. The tempo and tenor of voices. Daybreak, dawn, mid-day, dusk, nightfall. The transits of the sun… the cycles hiding within the phases of the moon. Birdsong. Heat. Cold. Rain. Wind. The insects and plants and animals in their life-phases and relationships.

If we take only these, it is obvious that we arise and transform along with a symphony of relational temporalities. In Nature, everything hitchhikes on everything else. Relationships and rhythms.

Organisms generally hitchhike on heat gradients due to their capacity to absorb energy from them. But they also hitchhike on behavior. Their biology is ceaselessly taking readings from everything around and within them. They are not merely observing all the other forms of life in their minds, their bodies are bonded directly to the temporalities implicit in endless relationships… from the local to the distributed… and beyond.

There is no such thing as flat time in Nature. Nothing like it. It literally doesn’t exist because to get that, you’d have to have a single organism, completely distinct from other organisms and the environment. The ways we commonly think about time are not only wrong, they are impossible. Except in a representational overlay. And that’s what we are trained to think about… the representations… when we think about time.

In Nature, time is a matter of endlessly intimate synchronizations. All the beings, living places and relationships are married to and modulating these incredibly complex fields of time… together. With and for each other.

Rather than a flat terrain of measured intervals that emerge in perfect mechanical linearity, we have intersecting manifolds of endless dimensionality forged by relationships and memory. Each relationship invents new dimensions. New forms of time. These histories and intimacies become memories. These dimensions contribute to complexity, opportunity… or, when they clash… hardship for living beings.

You will see this synchronization in the transits of sperm as they draft on each other’s efforts to locate and impregnate an egg cell. Or the patterns birds make together. Those of fish, locusts… and pods of dolphins. Even bicyclists in a race.

They synchronize. Almost always. And thus “share the benefit” of the effort of every participant. Until and unless… something… introduces disruption.

In our day-to-day lives (which may end at any moment), we take the streams for granted. We synchronize … to whatever degree we are able, to these invisible pulses in the living planet and everything around us. Including machines.

For thousands or millions of years… and infinities of living time… the complexity of the living environment hereabouts provided a seemingly endless domain of opportunity and stability. Billions of forms of life were weaving a symphony together. Employing synchronization to resist damage and entropy. Like a shield. But damage to the relational infrastructure of life on Earth, especially the damage caused by machines can overcome the benefits of organismal synch. Humans have, over the past 200 or so years, suddenly introduced an entirely new form of time. Dead time. Mechanical time. And the modes of time endemic to machines.

By synchronizing, our bodies and all organisms on Earth conserve and amplify the efforts of other beings and generations. A failure here… quickly proves catastrophic, because when synchronization fails, the magical buffer disappears. Slowly at first, and then rapidly as desynchronization proceeds. Anyone with a heart ailment understands this physically.

The ecologies of earth, then, are the local sources of such protections as have, for aeons, ensured the not merely the survival of life on Earth… but the survival of extremely complex, well-adapted forms of life.

Until a very short time ago, at the scale of the planet as a whole. At that scale, a few seconds ago… something began to go wrong… in time. And relation. Particularly, the relation between homo sapiens… and the biosphere herself. The problem corresponds to the beginnings of huge human settlements, toolmaking, and machines.

Organisms are to Time as Stars are to Light

There’s no such thing as a flat ‘year’ on Earth. In fact, any year is a unique year for every organism. So if we take a planet with one human on it, and spin it around a sun once, we get one human life-year. With two, we get two human life-years and the relationship-time between them. A third domain of time. The between of living beings. Nothing in our common thought resembles this, and yet it’s obvious. In a single year on Earth, we experience 7.8 billion human life years. This is half the age of the universe in ‘flat time’. We were trained to conceive of time as if there’s only a single human person on Earth.

And there never was. The actual nature of temporality cannot be like this. Ever. Time, it turns out, is both relational… fundamentally, and, for us, organismal. Two organisms comprise a different kind of time than one. And two different organisms… more so. Whatever timespace may be, it is not merely emptiness. Organism are modes of the expression of the nature and character of timespace itself. There is literally no other possibility.

Organisms are to time as stars are to light. They literally invent unique forms of time and modes of temporality by existing in relation. Whatever we think of space, we can immediately see that the same thing is true there. The space occupied by atmosphere is not the same mode of space occupied by a stone, a hammer… or a preying mantis. An oak tree. A mouse. A whale.

Your body contains something on the order of 53 trillion cells. Smaller life forms, it turns out, embody temporality at a variety of rates that differ from those of larger, complex animals. Technically, imagine that each form of organism has a clock rate, in effect, how much local (and relational) time happens over say… a second. The context of the rate is crucial here: it is the entire history and future of Life on Earth. This is what the rate is some ratio of.

In computing, the clock rate or clock speed typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses, which are used to synchronize the operations of its components,[1] and is used as an indicator of the processor’s speed. It is measured in the SI unit of frequency hertz (Hz). — Wikipedia

A fruit fly may proceed through all of its life-phases in perhaps 30 days. A human may (at 70 years) live 25,550 days. Imagine then, that the fruit fly is in time differently than the human is. A lot differently.

Each form of matter can be understood as a unique mode of spacetime. But organisms are fundamentally unusual in this regard. They hide entropy in time. This is their most astonishing feature… and its the fact of their actual nature. It’s the source of their seemingly impossible negentropic relationship with timespace itself. This is partly accomplished in two ways: numbers and synchronization.

For the sake of a thought experiment, let us suppose that size and time are fundamentally related. This seems clear even if we are thinking about time at the scale of the cell or molecule, vs time at the scale of an insect and animal. The fruit fly experiences its entire lifespan in 0.00117 human lifespans. But the fruit fly has another feature worth noting: numbers. At any given time there are probably 10 times the human population in fruit flies alone. Let’s say there are 100 billion of them. If we do the math, we will find that in ‘fruit fly time’, 1 day is probably equivalent to millions of years of time at the fruit fly clock rate.

Now think about your own body’s ±53 trillion cells. About 47% are bacterial. What is time to a cell or bacteria? And what is the approximate adjustment to rate that is proper to say, a single bacterium? Taking liberties, if an hour to a bacteria or single cell is approximately equivalent to a month of human time… then 24 hrs is around 106 trillion cell-years. And to this we must add the relational time between these cells. This is impossible to account for due to its complexity. Each cohort of cells would create a fold in the manifold of time, and the number of these is incalculable.

It turns out that when we examine the actual nature of time as relation… an unexpected universe emerges to our thought and consideration. One that shatters the common ideas and models of most of time as we moderns conceive of it.

But it relies, fundamentally on synchronization. Organisms evolve to take copious advantage of this. But, around here, the humans have another idea. They call it machines. And those objects are not in time in the same way organisms are. In fact, most of them are purposed with skipping time. And if time is, fundamentally relation…

There’s too much to tell you and too little time. So what I am trying to do is give you some hints, that, if you take them seriously, will enable you to see both the traps and the opportunities. Zoom out, in your imagination, from the local temporality of your current situation, and see the situation from above. See the incredible networks of living relation that are the fabric of time on Earth. And realize that they are delicate. The astonishing breadth and depth of the organisms on Earth are the makers of this fabric. And they are resilient, but only to a point. Our own ‘individual’ bodies are thus. We depend, each upon the other, first, beyond all ideas. As the humans tear down the anciently conserved ecologies for the sake of objects and machines… changing the into commodities… we are ripping the living tapestry of relationships and synchronization apart. It’s truly dire to consider. Our species has become fascinated with dead time. Images on screens in houses that are dead inside. We’re literally trying to kill time. And succeeding.

The refrigerator slows time down. The oven speeds it up. The computer creates a new arbiter of temporality whose aegis is far broader than is merited. New forms of ‘connection’ turn out to impose new forms of exclusion, separation, observation (by machines or ‘authorities’) and isolation. What is so valuable that we should dispose of our interiority, our relationships… our physical health and our dreams… for the sake of advancing it. What is this ‘it’? Is it dead time?

Boredom is the result of interacting with stimuli that are insufficiently vital or alive to produce joy. Wonder. Awe. Fascination. Isn’t most of the modern world comprised of just such experiences and relationships? Time is breaking down. It’s shattering. And the flows upon which we previously depended, not merely for well-being, but survival… are being ‘artificially’ altered in ways that are creating the opposite of harmony. Desynchronization. From the cell… to the society. And much of the problem… is machines. It turns out that machines, too, are a mode of timespace, but a mode that introduces entropy and desynchronization… rather than buffering it.

As ecologies and organisms do.

As living worlds naturally do.

Exploration

If organisms are unique modes of timespace (and I say they are), I want us to think about this a bit together. We were trained to think in ways that are fundamentally unlike our own intelligence and the situation in nature. So I want to pose some riddles, not necessarily so that we can solve them together, but, again, in the form of hints.

What produces organisms in timespace? Or human minds? Something is producing these. It isn’t the Earth.

A thought experiment: I find a glass of water on my kitchen table. I leave it there for some weeks. Over time the water slowly evaporates and in the bottom I find some crystals. I taste them. They are salty. I test them and find these are actually crystals of sodium chloride. I conclude that the water was salty.

Consider this as an analogy of the Earth. There is a planet, in timespace. Orbiting the sun. Orbited by the moon. And, over time, something appears there. Organisms. Of incredible complexity and intelligence. They make symphonies in time that buffer various modes of threat and entropy. What are these organisms? They are expressions of the nature and character … the embodiment of timespace itself. They form hyperstructures of relation over time. And minds emerge within…

You have hands because the nature of timespace produces them as an expression of its actual physical nature. So, too, eyes. And hearts, and minds… you will never see an instance of any organic form on earth that does not have this property.

And I think, unlike many of my fellow homo sapiens, that the earth is doing something. In concert with timespace itself, the sun, the planets and the moon. The Earth is doing something so astonishing that it produces organisms and minds as a side-effect of its activity. And that something is important. More important than anything it is possible to think.

But I want us to entertain this idea. Even if we cannot encompass it. The future of our species may well depend on our ability to see in this way. In fact, I think it does.

Living worlds like ours are members of a network. That network is alive. It is entirely transcendental to our common ideas and models of ‘reality’. If we intentionally oppose this, as a species, if we tear down the living elements in that network and replace them with machines… dead objects, and cash, we will be be violating our own actual nature, potential… and the entire history not merely of our species, but of life on Earth (past, present and future). What could possibly compel us to such hubris?

An accident, really. A sort of warp in the weave of our minds. Emerging from our ability to form a specific kind of memory. The kind that makes representations of things, beings and relationships. And then… begins to prefer them to the real.

From one important perspective, the Earth, in timespace, can be visualized as an ecstatically beautiful ‘flower’ of relational temporalities. This can be understood to ‘make time’ but also encharacter this time. Heroically. One small world, seemingly alone, in spacetime. The combined symphony of every organism that ever arose and lived here. Infinitely dimensional. And if we color each dimension of this flower… infinitely beautiful.

But the flower now has a cancer. Something that attacks time in the past, present and future. Machines.

One more question, though, before I branch again.

As bees are to flowers and honey…

X is to Living Worlds and Y.

This X exists. And so, too, this Y.

But Back to The Problem

If I have done well, I have given you some hints that may prove valuable in coming days. But let us return to the central topic. Something is wrong in time. And I don’t have time to explain the intricacies of temporality. So let me introduce some German terms. Zeitgeber and Zeitstorer.

I began by speaking about synchronization. These words refer to stimuli that contribute to or detract form synch. The former aids synch, the latter interferes with it. This is not an explicit distinction, some zeitgebers are zeitstorers as well, and vice versa. But the concept is lacking in English. It references experiences that either contribute to or detract from synch. Blue light is both. At the wrong time, it’s a Zs. At a harmonious time it’s a Zg.

Consider the blueish tint of the morning sun at sunrise. Oppose to this the phone, tv or computer monitor at 12 am.

The way we are trained to think about this is local to a person. We imagine that if Jane gets too much blue light near bed time, desynch happens. While not entirely untrue, the nature of humans is to somehow share experience across the boundary we imagine to comprise ‘an individual’. Indeed, we will see that vast populations adopt behavior that, for example, exposes them to long periods of mechanical blue light prior to sleep, and if we looked closely we would see a ‘cohort effect’, where the humans actually synchronize together to desynchronizing activites.

But the humans are, unbeknownst to them, expressing something in this behavior. What is it? Why would we depart, almost as a species from the synchronies and relationships from which our own bodies and minds arise?

Hints.

And representations.

Importing Entropy

These questions are resolvable. But not in small chunks of word-time. Not here. We have to explore and resolve them together. With and for each other. With and for the history and future not merely of our ancestors and progeny… but with and for all of life on Earth — and in the sky. This world is delicate. And profound in ways we have not yet begun to imagine, in modern thought at least.

For the past 5 years I have been trying to understand… questing, really, to see… something of what underlies the present disruptions in the felt sense of time for those I know. And they are enormous. The daily lives, sleep, dreaming, eating, digestion… and rhythms of the lives of many of my friends have become incoherent. And they are suffering. And, as I said, no one is talking about this. We don’t have language or concepts that we authorize enough to make meaningful conversation on such topics. But we can develop them. And we must. Because something has gone, and is going, completely sideways in the present situation on Earth. And it’s not limited to the humans.

The ecologies are desynchronizing under extinction threat. Meanwhile, the dreaming of the humans is deeply disturbed. Not every human… our species is a topology… the more sensitive are more profoundly affected. But everyone is affected. And it’s not Covid-19, though that development is temporally significant. And changes time for humans in a variety of complex ways. A lethally dangerous and confusing zeitstorer.

Many, perhaps nearly all indigenous peoples thought of the sky as something like ‘the origin-waters’. This was not because they were simpletons or superstitious. They understood fundamental features of nature and relation that we have yet to approach, let alone consider. Suppose with me that as the sun is dragging the planets through interstellar space, the waters of the sky are like those of a river. That there are places where there are rapids. Others where the waters pool and are still. And others where the water flows backwards.

Hints.

The Earth is doing something… and nearly all of life on Earth is heroically giving everything they are to this something. Except us. We’re making dead time. And we call this.

Machines.

I am still pursuing the case. But I have made progress I cannot here detail. Time, you see. It’s ‘running out’.

And if you’re of a curious bent… and you are trying to understand what’s going on, too… get in touch. We’ll use the ancient network to inquire. And in that network, a noble purpose is the key to open the libraries in the sky.