2003-09-06

The nature of time


I should justify what I've done with the term "distance" and what I'm about to
do with "time".

As we get used to a thing it gets aligned with the effects it has, and these
alter our conception of the original thing, become part of it.

In a small way, you can see this in the sequence of terms that have been
abandoned as they get aligned with the taint of racism (this is a Pinker
example). A word is used to identify a class of people, the words becomes
tainted with the context in which it's often used (for discrimination, for
example), and the context backwashes into the meaning of the word itself.

"E-mail" signified initially "electronic mail", but the hyphen is on its way to
collapsing and it doesn't need to be so obviously linked to its origins.
"Email" has become a thing in its own right.

So it is with social and linguistic phenomena as it is with physics and the
form of the body and brain. (This is Popper's genetic expectations.) Distance -
physical distance - is aligned with the useful observations and deductions we
make from it (it's not useful to know a gazelle is 100m away; it is useful to
know you're less likely to hit it from that distance than if you were closer).
So distance, in our hardwired genetic understanding/expectation of it, becomes
something else and much more complex (but more general).

Useful observations? A photosynthesising bacterium moves towards the light to
feed (Popper's example). There isn't intelligence there making deductions.
Dennett would say that there is a continuation of ways of choosing between
options. The bacterium has a decision-point: it moves towards the light because
of the light. But the two are the same thing, the observation and the movement.
They're isomorphic. If the movement wasn't made, then the observation wasn't
either.

It isn't that distance is bound up with the concept of "a measure of the
half-life of causality", it's that the two are the same: distance simply *is*
the measure of the half-life of causality. This means we present a generalised
interface to the rest of the world. In the same way as a bowl affords anything
that obeys gravity that can rest in the bowl to use it without specifying
exactly what, our interface to distance can accept anything that defines a
territory of moving effects. Ideas, for example.

And so it is with time.

All this is much more visible in cyberspace where there is no distance and this
is no time. We're very good at ignoring this and pretending our reality extends
into the online world, but 3d graphics aren't 3d: they're flat, two
dimensional, and have been constrained to obey a 3d physics, to be closely
aligned with the behaviour of that world. So we understand that they're "3d".

There isn't distance online, there is nothing beyond the screen, but we still
find and discover people, still make connections.

But what is time? In one sense we use it as a cursor, a way of determining
position. Edward was King of England, and "was" indicates "behind" in a linear
view of time where the future is forward (or "ahead" in etc). But can we also
say that Edward is King of England in 1553? I think we can, there's no "was"
required there.

Given we're embedded in this cultural frame of ours, and we're embedded in this
time, and in this geography, we can get away with saying "Elizabeth is Queen".
People know that I mean England, that I mean in 2003. And what Queen means, and
that Elizabeth is a person. So by adding extra specificity, saying "Edward is
King is 1553" is also true.

That's one use of is/was, and it doesn't seem particularly useful. How about
another usage:

"The world was flat", "The world is round". From our frame, our point of view,
the world is round and the world has always been round, in the year 900 or
whenever. But for the people in 900, "the world is flat" is a true statement,
and it always will be, despite the position of the time cursor.

Is/was can mean moving through different cultural frames or paradigms. It's a
meaning-based usage of time to go along with our meaning-based usage of
meaning. "Is" is used to designate a truth statement that holds true from
within our current worldview regardless of its temporal location. The
temporal-time becomes a specificness indicator like location or surnames. "Was"
is used to designate a statement that held true from a worldview that no longer
exists.

I think this shift in usage is coming in the same way as the collapsing hyphen
of "email".

The temporal-time and paradigm-time are closely aligned. If you don't believe
me, that's a present-tense statement. But if I pursuade you it's because I've
caused you - in the most literal sense - to *change your mind* in some way.
It's not that I've given you more information and now you agree (assuming that
to begin with you thought about this and decided it was false), it's that your
own metaphor set has mutated. And so you *used to* (past tense) not agree with
me. In this instance, the temporal-time definition of is/was and paradigm-time
version agree.

In cyberspace, there is no time. There's just a rolling state of being. In the
real world, the present fully encodes the past - there's no deleting,
everything has to fit in with what it extant - and there's decay, entropy and
so on. That's how the temporal cursor moves on. But in cyberspace, there's no
decay, no past. A change completely obliterates what was there before, and
past/future are defined only relative to the real world. But the "true to the
medium" time must be defined by some other kind of change, and changes occur
from events moving through the space that constitutes cyberspace.

Time is local in cyberspace - it moves at different rates in different areas of
the space - and is defined by that which can't be destroyed completely, which
is the statements (from a technological and an idea perspective) that make up
the space. After all, if those statements disappear the space too disappears.
Time and space are bound up there. But if the space is the mutate the
statement-structure can't be utterly replaced, and the statement-structure, the
idea-network, the context-mesh is what time is contained in. Time is the
iteration of paradigms (or space itself) online.

Often this matches with temporal-time because that's the order in which changes
occur. A website is, or was, in line with whether existed at that time or not.

Time in cyberspace is the network of statements altering in some way. A
statement isn't located a temporal instant like a verbal statement in the
physical world: it has an ongoing existance, a span. It replaces or augments
the network of statements already extant and changes their meaning by its
presence. A statement is an act is an object. Things are simultaneous when they
occur in the same state of cyberspace.

[more thinking reqd with this stuff, not very happy with it.]


#


(Expectances are hardwired physics implicatures. There's a loop here too.
Expectances are in response to the environment, but our actions and reactions
become calcified into the environment as extelligence. Extelligence *is* the
environment and then it refolds back into expentance. Or something.)