Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Work in Progress II: The Time-Being


*&( .~o~. {]-


When you see women or children speaking in a higher pitch to animals, other children, or dolls or insects — do you think it is merely cute? If so, you’re sorely mistaken. What’s actually happening is that they are encoding more information per cycle of vibration than lower voiced signals do. Since smaller creatures (and cellular hyperstructures) are living at a faster rate of relational (and thus sonic) time, the creatures actually receive more information. To raise the pitch is to modulate time upward in speed. To lower it is to slow it. Earthquakes are speach. A dog’s bark is a complete sentence. The only reason you can’t understand them is that you’re listening at the wrong rate. Your cells can hear the smallest, fastest rate. Your ears can hear much of the rest, what is beyond your ears, your bodies themselves (being networks, and instances of networks) can hear the rest. All of language is yours, and your form is perfectly suited for this.

Laughter is when you suddenly — and usually happily — emit copious flows of information in spasms, and it is contagious. Crying is similar, but the heart moves usually in the opposite polarity. Sometimes laughter and crying come together. In a mixed emergence. All of these, like the infant’s cooing, the calls of birds, the speech of insects, and the very voice of the planet are discernable to you. You are made of them, how could it be otherwise? But the static language you use, and its presumptions, lie to you, putting you into a strange hypnotic state from which very few awaken. The reason they cannot awaken is simple: the fundamental definitions they use to identify things, beings and circumstances have been impoverished in ways invisible to those who have never played with similar cognitive assets not sharing this characteristic.

Listen to the sound of the laughter of the children. It contains pure information, unsullied by paradigm of its encoding, expression, or decoding. It is a gift beyond all price, and an asset beyond all value. It contains the answer to every question, every problem, every threat.

Listen to the sound of those crying for their lost loved ones. For their children, wives, parents, husbands, brothers, friends, sisters, teachers. For their pets. For their masters. Listen to the sound of their weeping, their hope for simple dignity, their dream of a better world.

Or listen to the dolphins. Or the whales. Listen, indeed, to the sky itself.

But Listen!


Temporal Linkages in Animalian Cognition


The experience of time is related to the flow of biocognition (organismal sensing, evaluation, response, communion) through, around, and within an organism, its constituents, and the groups and supergroups of which it is at once a member and an instance.

It is my experience that human models of time are completely misfounded. I’m not the only one with this idea, nor am I the first. The problem is serious, and deadly, and needed resolution long before Einstein began explaining that time and space were unified, and that our models were wrong. But it goes beyond that into the mechanization of our experience…

Some 50 years later, we have failed to integrate these understandings, let alone surpass them. This situation must change immediately since it comprises a serious threat to human safety and intelligence. It comprises a constant threat to the very basis of human intelligence.


“[“ .~o~. }[0I

A group of scientists led by Diana Freckman of Colorado State University occupy a research station near the permanently frozen Lake Hoare in the McMurdo Dry Valley. Studying the ecology of the area, they have discovered a curiously simple ecosystem within the soil. Though the land is frozen half a mile deep, it is covered by a thin dry soil eroded from the rocks by the scouring wind. This soil harbours frost-tolerant bacteria and algae which are grazed upon by one or two species of nematode worm, themselves the prey of a third species of worm. The worms are mostly present in the soil as desiccated husks. Only when a rare trickle of snow meltwater moistens the soil do the microbes and nematodes spring into activity, hurriedly grazing, eating, and reproducing before the freeze entombs them again.

—Johnjoe McFadden, Quantum Evolution, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2000, p.22


Day and night obey different clocks, and the one obeyed by night has little or nothing to do with timepieces. Many domains of temporal relation reliably exist, and nearly none of them are discussed either at the dinner table or the academy. During the night, time warps and distorts, freezing, stuttering, and speeding beyond the capacities of our measuring. Understanding anything about the actual nature of time requires a radical departure from the models nearly every authority will demand we obey. Though we need not discard them, we must utterly de-authorize them in order to gain direct experience that is unprogrammed by their implicit schemas. We have such experience all the time, we are simply hobbled by everything we are trained to observe, name, and experience.

Although we may apply mechanical models and measures to time for our own use, convenience, or the enforced slavery of self or others, Time is not so much a matter of mechanics as it is a matter of relation. Our terribly flat (monodimensional and relationally ignorant) ideas about these circumstances and their measure are crippling our intelligence, as well as our persons. This is something we must closely attend together and resolve, both for current and future generations.

Here on Earth, cells, organelles, insects, animals, plants, fungi and human beings have meaningful experience of the cycles of the orbital entities: the Sun, the Moon, and (the many) others.

Make no mistake; very tiny orbitals may loom large in the relational experience of terrestrial life-forms. An example would be any object which is either closely approaching, impacting, or sending particles of itself down into the atmosphere of Earth. There are other forms of effect far more cryptic as the practice of astrology and other mantic arts implies.

In case you doubt that new or untracked orbitals commonly have significant effect on terrestrial experience or the planet herself, avail yourself of research on the crater we call Chicxulub and the Tunguska event.

More recently, (and more cryptically) the arrival and near passage of two ‘ancient timekeepers’ is of interest to those who understand the Navajo (and Amerindian) ‘Following Pair’ mysteries, and those whose inner senses recognize the arrival of tiny messengers who nonetheless have a significant ‘impact’ even though they may not strike the Earth directly. I speak of 2010 AL30 and 2010 AG30. Discovered on January 10, 2010, these objects made their close approach on 1/13 (.3 lunar distances) and 1/14 (2.7 lunar distances) of 2010.

Scientists called them ‘weird’ and they were far more correct than any can understand or admit. Shortly before their approach the entire Pacific Plate lit up with extreme earthquake activity around its circumference, with the first in a series of large quakes coming on the day of the closest approach of 2010 AL 30. On January 12, 2010 at 21:53 GMT (13:53 PST) a 7.0 Earthquake in Haiti killed some 200,000 people. I believe these events are related, and that there is either a causal or signaling relationship between these objects and the Earth’s sudden geological upheaval. 2010 AL 30 passed through the constellations Orion, Taurus and Pisces, the Archer, The Ox or Bull (•), and The Twin Fishes (double vesica). This strikes me as particularly meaningful, however explaining its significance is not here my goal. The Archer may refer to an event analogized in Robin Hood, in which (•)’s interests and plans are being secretly served, while ‘Two Women” are involved, either as allies, neutrals, or opponents.


*-( .~o~. []{

Time:

In this image of process, red = past and blue = future. These should probably be reversed, which would result in the images being inverted. Nonetheless, we can see that with each ‘pulse’ (or iteration of the source) there is more of both — past and future, and thus, though time has a beginning and an end, these do not have the meanings associated with limits. Additionally, through its transdimensional nature, ‘all of time’ is always available, ‘right here, in the now’ (the center). From this center, actions and awareness ‘reach out’ of temporal and physical locality to change both the past and the future (in open defiance of models that freeze the past or the grant too much importance to the temporal and physical position of the being in question (the self)).


I would like to begin with a simple model. But before I do, I ask that you consider that the size and complexity of an organism must necessarily (and dramatically) affect its experience of time, and it is this experience that matters, not our mechanical measurements. But this ‘idea’ is physically real, not just an imaginative concept. Although the politics of light affect the experience of the simultaneity of events, so too do the politics of size and complexity.

The reason we use insects (or cells) in laboratory genetics experiments is simple: they provide the opportunity to observe multiple generations in a short or very short time span, and this allows us to more adeptly trace the complexities of phenotypes and other genetic expressions at play.

But size is not the only arbiter of temporal experience. Additionally, we must differentiate between simpler organisms (such as single-cell organisms) and more complex organisms (such as an insect, mouse, fish, or other animal). Time (or what I would call temporal flow) also has a lot to do with the number of constituents that comprise an organism or group, as well as the physical size. It should be clear that (as a guideline to which there are numerous exceptions) time is passing much faster for small, relatively uncomplex organisms than it does for larger relatively complex organisms — and the crucial thing to notice here is that relationality (the effective possibilities of relational activity and experience) is a crucial factor in this difference.

Before we move onto the next phase of our exploration, let’s take a moment to note that although the heart rate of various animals may differ dramatically, it’s not merely a fable that each kind of creature gets approximately the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. Nor is it a binding rule, but there is strong evidence that size (in animals) has a binding relationship to life expectancy as it may be measured by mechanical methods utilized by representational humans. It should be noted that very few indigenous peoples utilize mechanical methods for temporal relation or measurement.



{;L .~o~. |]_\


Now, let us begin with a model. First, we will use a model that doesn’t involve organisms. To make it simpler, we’ll invert the familiar model of a planet thusly:

Imagine a mirror on the inside of a sphere. At the core of the sphere is a lightsource, such that the interior of the sphere is illumined. The sphere rotates slowly about the lightsource at the center, and the sphere is permeable such that someone may introduce objects into it. We will introduce a droplet of ‘mirrorWater’ which you may imagine as being like a droplet of mercury which clings to the sphere’s inner wall and does not move except if the sphere is jostled by some extrinsic force, in which case it does what liquids do (it jiggles until it expends the energies it acquired from the jostling). Since the sphere is a mirror, and the mercury is a mirror, these both mirror each other, and also the light source. In this simple model, we will measure the flow of time as ‘the relative quantity of observable changes in reflections (in the sphere’s surface and the droplet) during one complete rotation around the core’. We will make one revolution in this state, to establish a baseline. Having never seen such a mirror, I am not sure what the result of adding the droplet would be, it might exist like a jewel atop a ‘ring’ of reflection that travels relative to the droplet as the sphere resolves. Someone with a better understanding of physics will have to answer this question for me.

Now, as a control, we‘ll remove the lightsource, evacuate the sphere, and run the same revolution. Is there any flow at all? In other words… with no participants, and nothing relating to itself or anything else (remember, we’re limiting our inquiry to the inside of the sphere), time really isn’t happening. There’s nothing to relate against, so there can’t be any flow. Flow requires, at the very minimum, a subject and a context. No ‘reflections’, no flow. We could also say ‘no relations, no flow’. We could argue about whether or not we need living participants, but for now, for the sake of our model, we have agreed to set this argument aside.

Let us return to our lit sphere, with one droplet of waterMirror. We will freeze time, and while it is frozen, we will add a second droplet of mirrorWater near the first. We will then resume our rotation for the span of one complete cycle. The first thing that happens is not a doubling of flow. Much more. In fact, one might say that the ‘amount’ of flow has increased ‘infinitely’ or at least in a way that superficially appears infinite. Here’s why: regardless of whether our droplets make rings or not on the inside of the sphere, they create constantly modulating feedback between each other and the surface of the sphere. This is the effect you’ve seen at some barbershops where you have a mirror before and behind you, and they create an ‘infinite’ tunnel of reflections. On curved surfaces, this effect will differ, but will share features with flat mirrors. So the ‘arithmetic’ addition of a single other relational element does not result in an arithmetic increase in flow, but in a logarithmic one. And this is further echoed in the complexification of the medium (the sphere) or the context in which these events are ‘contained’.

Now let’s merely add ‘weather’, and run another cycle. What we shall notice is that each drop experiences the entire cycle from a unique — yet utterly complete — position of relation. Beyond that, they each uniquely experience and express each other’s reflections. Again, the increase in flow is astonishing, add –anything at all- to our little model, and the substantive and quantitative effects are staggering to behold. And yet, we are only examining little bubble-shaped mirrors. Before we depart for more sophisticated terrains, let us make two last changes to our model, which now has variable weather. The first change will be that each of our droplets will divide, forming a child on the opposite side of the sphere. Each of these children shall conserve the entire history of their parent, and become not a new ‘individual’, but instead, a new instance of all historical moments (all experiences, all reflections) of its parent. As with their parents, they shall also reflect each other, the sphere, and the weather — as well as (we presume this is possible), their parent and its companion. Now the outcome of this is of an entirely new order, because both parent and child affect each other and their companions recursively, such that any changes to the child or parent, whether they are in direct reflective contact or not, profoundly affect each other’s experiences and expressions of temporal flow in a similar variety of even more sophisticated ‘infinite progressions’, which, of course, change the context in a similar fashion as well.

And our last thought experiment will be to repeat the previous phase, with a new addition — the occasional random physical disturbance of the sphere itself. We will imagine small objects crashing into its outside surface, causing vibrations within that ‘jiggle’ our waterMirror bubbles. This slight alteration in the environment introduces radical new complexities, as each bubble modulates uniquely during these disturbances, and generates entirely new dimensions of experience, expression, and reflection. Again, the arithmetic addition results in a logarithmic expansion of actual data, and temporal flow.

In this model, the experience of time is unique to each participant and also comprises a shared experience of inter-reflection in which the unique character, history, and position of each participent imbues the flow with novelty, treasures of learning, and myriads of other features that insure it is a living flow, rather than a mechanical pulse. Time is emerging as the instantaneous outcome of relation amongst many simultaneous orders or scales — and any group that can be comprised from the bubbles. The addition of other variables endows the bubbles with further unique distinctions, yet simultaneously the result is that the fundamental nature of the unity (the sphere, that which disturbs it, the weather within, the bubbles, the reflections) is enhanced with new domains of relation, velocity, and the polarities of these.

Note: Prokaryotes (bacteria) usually ‘mature’ (become capable of division) within a few hours of being thusly generated (this varies upward to a few days). Some generate spores during inhospitable circumstances, and these are essentially hibernation-bodies which can be viable from months to years if current understandings are correct.

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