The Long Delay

Human history has a long arc, but a relatively short tipping point towards the illusion of control.  We were for nearly unimaginable expanses of time and space a barely connected species roaming the earth, leaving slight traces in earthy pigment of hands, animals and dreams upon the rocks of our paths and the cave walls of our temporary dwellings.  We were not dominant, mass-farming, tool wielding empires - we were nomads and temporary players in a grand kaleidoscope of Earth.  Our existence was never guaranteed day to day nor over the centuries.

This changed rather rapidly and without some divine intervention - the blind watchmaking of natures evolution accidentally favored homo sapiens.  We happened onto fattened and readily plantable wheat in soil freshly fertile from melting ice ages giving rise to agriculture and related activities.  We relatively quickly took deep advantage of the situation (multiple times independently across the globe).  Agriculture and animal husbandry provided all the obvious advantages for survival like reliable food sources, ability to stay put, deep energy stories, safety and time for knowledge seeking.  The key stroke though was in being able to delay consequences. 

Long Delay entered the human enterprise for the likely the first time.  We were able to delay starvation through reliable, storable harvests.  We were able to build up settlements, trade routes, currency and complicated economic exchange, and, ultimately, we could "plan" for the future.  The idea of A Human Future had deep consequences for our belief systems - that is, our association of what happened in the world and why and how we were part of it.  Without an idea of a future, as realized by reliably imagining one and living to see it realized, there was no sense in having the belief of destiny nor dominion nor property.  A world without delay and of only immediate consequences is one outside of time and outside of storing up - storing up resources, storing up frustrations, storing up weaponry, storing up ideas.    In a nomadic, temporary world - to store is to encumber and to encumber is to be too slow to keep on.

In almost all accounts of big, long history agriculture and its resultant consequences is reverently viewed for all that it enabled.  The great spread of human civilization - its tooling, its trading, its Metal Ages, its science, its culture.  While these are all interesting and complex phenomena, they aren't necessarily good nor are they necessarily bad.  They certainly have produced an incredible proliferation of humanity for many tens of thousands of years.  And they've also come with extreme consequences for humans and non-humanity alike. 

The ability to delay consequences and harbor resources for science and tools and culture also provides those resources for warring, tribalism, weaponry, radicalized ideologies.  Oddly the delayed consequences have a downside that more false beliefs/non-true ideas about how reality works can fester unchecked.  For a Neolithic person a non-true assessment of a situation would likely carry grave consequences.  In the modern world, where most immediate needs for survival are assumed, especially in the West, a person can carry extremely non-true ideas about how reality works and what their place is in the world for decades.  And this is at the root of our current confused and violent situation.

Humans have warmed the planet possibly passed the point of being able to reverse course before there are dire consequences for humans and non-humans.  Humans have killed of an incredible number of species before they knew those species even existed.  Humans cure illness and disease and pests only to unleash unintended stronger adversarial viruses, bacteria and pests.  Humans craft new computational tools and methods with almost no thought to possible downstream uses.  Humans social and civil organization is now dominated by the wealthiest even in its most praised form of Democracy. 

Often all these pessimistic observations are rebuffed with the 100 year old idea of "Creative Destruction."  That is, eventually we end up solving all these things and this is just the natural course of a free market of progress.  It is also constantly remarked that we live in the lowest violence era in human history.  These rebuttals are really just more consequence of Long Delays.  Most of us do not live to see the consequences of these complex contingency chains we set in motion.  We are never put to task for our false predictions, category errors, and misassociation blunders.

Our religions, all the major monotheistic ones, are all about pushing consequences into the "next life."  Our popular moral philosophies typically justify various activities on the rather weak argument about doing it "for our children."  We insure, amortize, capital expense, socially secure, in-debt, mortgage for generations into the future.    All done because we've falsely assumed (or at least not proven to be absolutely true) that somehow, some way it all works out.  We can't even define what that working out would be except within our own delayed, selfish terms - does each of our own families and our own heritage and our own way of life carry on. 

We do not live in a less violent time - we have pushed the violence into the future and out of immediate human physicality.  We've hidden our brutality of this world in our technology and our obsessions with new media.  The most popular video game on the planet is Call of Duty - multiple billions of dollars in revenue.  As our world virtualizes more and more how will we all distinguish the violence in that reality from real violence?  We've ravaged our oceans with pollution and heat and they are rising.  We've fracked the Earth into earthquakes in middle America.  A huge chunk of the Wests GDP goes towards weaponizing - not education and end of life care.  Our sense of identity and place in this world has gone haywire - racism and sexism is still rampant. That terrorism still works is a proof point.  Terror doesn't need thousands of beheadings - just a few and a lot of YouTube views.  Militaries don't need millions of troops in lines razing each other down, just thousands joystick controllers flying drones.  Violence evolved in the resource of delay we provide it.

What repugnant, bizarre thread ensnares almost all of us in these violent delayed consequences?  Shame.  We are all shaming each other for not responding to the same consequences.  The delayed consequences act like a microphone and speaker in the shrieking feedback loop.  The complexity of delayed abuse is doubling back and echoing on top.  We can't cure all suffering, so please cure mine.  We shame each other into more mental abuse of ourselves so that we are incapacitated.  In this shame we trigger the worse natures of ourselves - we lash out in the dark fog of delayed consequences.  We hit anything in front of us we can just to feel something now, feel anything now.  We are ashamed all those future plans and stored up resources didn't real free us as we assumed and passed on.  We are ashamed to be ashamed - so we still treat different skin less worthy unable to admit our shame.

The arc of human history is long but most of it was before we began our short descent into delayed awareness. And here it is.  The only hope. To be here now.  To recognize now, not in the delayed future that isn't yours nor mine, we were wrong.  We will always be wrong.  When we decide we have answers or we decide to store more than what is needed for now - we wrong something else that has just as much right to existence as we do.  Our shameful fight for the righteous, controllable future is what destroys the now for us and the future for others.

Resources for further consideration:

The Ascent of Man, J. Brownoski

The Origin of the Species, Darwin

Sex, Time and Power, Leonard Shlain

Guns, Germs and Steel, J. Diamond

Ishmael, D. Quinn

30,000 Years of Art, Phaidon

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (movie), W. Herzog

Between The World and Me, T. Coates

The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou

The Silence of Animals, J. Gray

Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, BF Skinner

Plato at the Googleplex, R Goldstein

I Am A Strangeloop, D. Hofstader

Better Angels of Our Nature, S Pinker

Making Money, O. Berg

Property is Theft, Proudhon

The Blind Watchmaker

The Selfish Gene, R Dawkins

anything by Martha Nussbam

and about a thousand other resources.  I borrow language and ideas from all of them, perhaps, occasionally adding something new.

To Be Or Not To Be

Timeless reality marches on carelessly smearing existence upon itself.  Humans have been at war with nature and themselves for at least as long as there were enough humans to consider their own survival.  Transcendence hasn't come and won't come without a total absolution of what humans have come to define as humanity - the very notion of humans is one of dominance, manifest destiny, borders, dominion, mastery - ultimately to be Human is to actively Stake Claim Over Existence.

The cruel, thoughtless stroke of evolution was accidentally mutating a species with a biological advantage suited to terraforming. Humanity is a species who long ago deluded itself into believing its selfish survival depends on its ability to transform the world, not be transformed by it.  The selfish gene, in total success, morphs into the selfish species - a species that seeks its own survival at all costs.  So repugnant the thought, it is never uttered in even non-polite company -  that is... the Species As It Is Today Is Perhaps Not Perfect To Rule The Planet and All Planets.  Humanity always builds the metaphorical ark and loads the existence it collectively believes is correct.  And in this ark humanity remains largely unchanged, rarely aware, attempting to stack the deck in its short range physical favor - to defeat nature by being above it.  And to what purpose?  what end?  other than, that's how it must be.

To be, or not to be!  That really is the question.  The selfish species has almost always chosen Not To Be.  Humanity chooses Not To Be in concert with the nature and the purposeless, yet soulful tapestry of existence.  It chooses Not To Be a medium of existence and chooses To Be a raging deity building up its own existence at the destruction existence.  Humanity Stakes Claim by unstaking everything else.

Blasphemy!  Nihilism!  Those are the thoughts of many who will read this.  Hater of life!  Hater of existence!  Which, of course, is completely the anti-thesis of a position of restraint, of an observant and meditative non-position.  A meditative position is one of perpetual openness and one of non-believing, non-truth, non-brand, non-ideology, non-decisions, non-human.  "Non" is the scary part to humans, particularly those humans raised in a Western and/or a religious doctrine of any kind.  The entire idea of civilization, personhood, society, intelligence, religion is a reification of Humanity as a fundamental thing of the universe.  This is the biggest, most fateful delusion of all.

It's near impossible to break free from Humanity As The Source of Existence.  Probably so improbable this break in absolute doctrine humanity will accidentally but totally complete its program - humanity has already crafted the necessary tools of the ultimate Terraform: distributed ledgers, virtual reality and generative manufacturing.  Humanity as a physical species is now completely unnecessary, so total its staking claim over reality.  And then there's this other staking claim out there... one in which the physics still matter to some, but it's no less completely destructive.  This claim is the one of distributed, ancient physical violence married to 24/7 mediation through global hyperconnectivity.  These are the two mainstream humanities.  They are weirdly at odds and yet totally syncopated: in a strangely grotesque Not To Be dance they both are dancing humanity to its final end - the complete distraction of claim staking species that's staked so many claims its oceans will overwhelm all.  As part of that distraction there are those humans of all humanity staking out Human Technology Will Save Us Yet Again.  To Mars!  The Sharing Economy unto the autonomous everything!  Drones To Deliver The Food and The Bombs!

A dark, dim view?  Yes, of the two dominant humanities.  Getting beyond the ultimately limiting humanism and into non-humanism lightness of being can be found.  Existence itself, all around humans and nature alike, is beautiful, wonderful, awesome, unflinching and distinctly Non-Human.  A higher engagement in existence through transformation and transduction - living through existence, not in-spite of it.  To become, to always be-coming into new relations - never clinging to old relations, old terraformed hierarchies.  Relenting and restraining from being the cause and instead becoming affected. 

It is an unlikely future for the human species.  the dominant humanities program Not To Be.

some of us will non-program To Be. Always something else - part of a shifting tapestry of existence.

This is contingency

Selection by consequences (the main phenomenon of evolution/learning/mediation) follows a basic movement towards interoperability and interchangeability through modularity.  As forms/structure proliferate (are selected for survivability)  an ever progressive reduction to the simplest aspect of the structure providing the survivability function occurs.  What is replicated within the generational line, the environment and the overall mesh of consequences is a generally modular structure - the signal separates and replicates from the noise. 

Noise and signal.  In replication.  

That "life" on earth (and likely other planets) shares carbon as its elemental basis and proteins and cellular structures as replicating machinery is an example.  Music and the arts are another example of a progression of signal differentiation until what is widely shared is almost pure signal.  Music went from noisy localized and often private events to reproducible written scores to recorded and replayable sounds to studio produced to advertising jingle to 3-note musical logos to iconic ringtones to machine remixes and generative machine mixes.  It is now almost pure signal and total self replication.  Visual arts went through and are still going through this transformation from event to prints to xeroxes to Internet shared images to machine recompositions to computer vision and now googles deep dream and so on.  Manufacturing, too, has gone from artisan craftspersonship to machine generated and exchanged designs printed out and machine assembly by networked 3D printers and robots.   The object is now too pure signal.  

In all these examples gone is the noise of the event. Noise of the making. Noise of the specific context of creator and environment.  Soon we will have virtual realities that remove the noise of the singular universe and have everyone in their pure signal forms drifting through universes of platonic forms.  For these are the most efficient and survivable concepts that remain after consequences.  

Until.  New forms disturb the peace.  From the heat death of pure signal... Springing from probabilities... Which are outside of consequences or rather spring from the complex network of consequences all colliding... A new form burrows out and shocks the consequential network.  A constant, yet choppy cycle of noise to signal to noise - from isolated event to selection to full replication to collision of pure signal to isolated event. 

This is contingency.  This is the phenomena of networks. 

The Effect of Time

Our modern lives (in the West) are ontologically organized around time as a fundamental piece of whatever makes up existence and life.  "Time is money," "On time is late," "Be In The Present," "Live like this is the last day of your life," "Time changes everything." Are just a handful of the slogans we tell each other about time's primacy.

It is an illusion.

what is time?

Perhaps this an old (time again) forgotten hypothesis I'm proposing here.  Good old Plato or Zeno or Buddha and countless religious ideas and a few mathematicians and scientists touched on such a notion.   The hypothesis is simply that time and change are not primary.  They are partial phenomena.   That is, they are little things built up from a static, omnipresent everything.  

What we notice as time is simply a shift in perspective.  We connect differently to network of existence.   We are ourselves a network of connections and connected to the wider network.  Our perspectives (perceptions) are the effects of this network.   As we "age" - grow, consume, create, learn, procreate, etc - we are simply connecting differently.  the US that makes up the network we call OURSELVES is a different network.  Nothing in the structure of everything has changed.   

Why bother with this meta-physical hocus pocus?   On one hand, because that's what I'm doing.  There's no bigger cause.  It's just where I am in my perspective.   What are the connections I'm bringing to bear on this conception?  Beyond my own "point in life" I've researched and experienced a wide variety of scientific, mathematical, philosophical and artistic theories of time and they all dance around with more or less some shred of believability depending on the context.   The illusion of time in my own common sense is also very stubborn.   So this has all led me, whatever I am, to reconceive of time (and space) not as primal.  

The seeming single directional arrow of time (but only a Newtonian scales), spacetime curvature by mass/gravity, psychological relativity of time, the concept of "time" to an abstract Turing Machine, the notion of space as a network, all suggest that time itself is not. And if time is not then space is not.  And thus motion is not.

And by not, I don't mean these concepts and their "observed" existence is not.  Most certainly this concepts exist within what I call "localities of everything".   That is, in the sub network of existence where persons and animals and plants and von Neumann computers connect we have these phenomena/properties of existence that we label as time, space and motion.   As we look forever beyond/outside of/below/inside of the infinity of everything we find these notions breakdown rather quickly.

Consider virtual reality.   What is the notion of space and time in virtual reality?   What is the notion of circles and spheres and persons?   What are those "realities"?  

One cannot easily dismiss virtual reality as some toy, not quite real version of existence.   There is nothing logically nor experimentally that will allow one to simply throw away virtual reality as a genuine universe to observe.  Virtual reality is not a simulation of "our reality."  It is a unique, universal reality all unto itself.   Perhaps you can argue it is limited by the computational power of the computers/network it runs on.   But that argument doesn't hold up because we know that even objects as simple as a universal Turing Machine can compute anything that can be computed... Our own reality seems constrained by the total atomic matter available... but even that makes no sense as an invalidation of our reality as not being a reality.   Besides as soon as we think we've reached the end of slicing or expanding reality to its fundamentals we find other bosons, spins, fluids, ethers, dimensions, traces, branches we had yet to notice.

And so my hypothesis is only provable by what means?  a mathematical proof?  thousands of experiments?  

It is unprovable in the sense of absolute proof.   

The value here of stating such a claim isn't in its absolute proof.  It's value is in furthering connections.   Does it open me and others to more sub-networks of existence?  does it help previously disconnected theories?  Do we care about those connections? 

In a sense it doesn't matter.   In another sense, where I personally wish to have more coherence in my own experience of existence, it matters to me.   I wish not to give away everything to a relentless, unchanging clock forever ticking away.  It's too reductive of a concept and doesn't even hold up well within science and math.   Computational sciences operate slightly differently.  Instead of time like ticks of an atom or pendulum swings or moves of a clock hand around a circle, computational time is simply measured in "operations" or "elementary steps" in a computation.

I reinterpret that notion of "operations" to "connections".   When we compute (algorithms doing stuff... input, transform, output.... algorithms interacting) we connect.  We take one thing to another thing.   And time is measured not by some elementary particle of time, but simply as a "step" or a "configuration" or a "connection change." (I borrow heavily from ideas from Wolfram and others.)

It is hard to take these ideas seriously in experiments as our tools and perceptions are way too limited.  It is only possible via philosophical wandering and by computing.  Playing around with enough programmatic complexity to see if more and more of what we experience as the effects of time (and space and motion) show up.

That's probably not very convincing as theory of time's existence... but ask yourself how convinced your watch (iwatch), desktop, wall clock, the sun, NSIT, etc are all in agreement on time's nature or are simply connecting more and more of your experience to their semi-synchronous connection to each other.

The effect of time is simply our limited view of everything.