This is the most recent incarnation of this attempt to describe reality and the conceptual effects it has;
One of my earliest memories of questioning more than just the dictates of family was sitting in church at about ten years old and vaguely wondering what purpose all that ritual really served. At that age the idea of God seemed so transcendent and religion only seemed to obscure and trivialize it. After several decades of trying to make sense of this world, it seems to me as though life is like an onion. You peel away every layer and finally there is nothing left. We distill away everything that seems transitory about life, searching for some hard little nugget of meaning and when we are done, have so little to show for it. The problem isn't life, the problem is the idea of meaning. Life is dynamic and holistic. Meaning is static and reductionistic. Thought is linear, reality is not. As an organ, the brain evolved for navigation and survival, so it tends to concentrate on the problems. How do we escape the obsessions of our mortality and see through the walls of our own bubble?
To begin with, the four dimensional map of spacetime does not accurately describe the territory. Points, lines and planes supposedly have a zero dimension. Well, 1x0=0. What they really have is a virtual dimension, not zero dimension. While a point can presumably be dimensionless, it is still a specific point of reference. The real zero for geometry would be empty space. It is the potential for any point, not a specific one. Also, three dimensions are the coordinate system of the point these lines cross, not space itself. Any number of coordinate systems, starting from any point, can be used to define the same space. You might say the Israelis and the Arabs use different coordinate systems to define the same land.
Time has two directions. The observer goes from past events to future events. On the other hand, these events go from being in the future to being in the past. To the hands of the clock, the face is going counterclockwise. The three dimensional frame of reference is not moving along an additional dimension. This subjective coordinate system is interacting with other such frames. To quote Newton, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
If we were to build a clock-like device to characterize non-linear motion, say of molecules in water, or people in a crowd, it would have many hands, going in both directions and the cumulative action would cancel out in a general equilibrium. With the concept of time, most of these hands are combined into the face, with a few going in one direction as coordinates for the reference point. Time is a linear measure of motion, not the basis for it.
The unit of time goes from beginning to end, but the process of time is going toward the beginning of the next, leaving the old. The hour on the clock starts in the future and the hand passes from its beginning to its end and then moves on to the next, leaving the previous hour in the past. Days go from dawn to dusk, as the sun moves from east to west, but it is the earth that is rotating west to east and the sunlight is moving through the time zones. Consider a factory. The product moves from start to finish, but the production line is facing the other way, consuming raw material and expelling finished product. This relationship of the process and the unit is one of perspective. A unit at one level is a process at another and vice versa. What matters to the process isn't so much the end product, as it is the energy produced, in wages and profits, calories burned, etc, that propels the process forward, consuming more material.
Our individual lives are units of time going from birth to death, while the process of living goes on to the next generation, shedding the old like dead skin. As life has purpose, rather then meaning, the relationship of the individual life to the larger organism is like that of a sentence to the story. The end is punctuation, rather then destination, as we are connected at both ends and the middle.
The reason time seems like a series of instants is because most motion is effectively at the speed of light and our mind is a process of consuming information and creating conceptual units, called thoughts, otherwise everything would be a blur.
Reality consists of energy recording information. As the amount of energy remains the same, old information is erased as new is recorded. Objective reality is the energy. Time is a function of the subjective information, as past and future do not physically exist because the energy to manifest them is currently tied up in the present. To the photon, there is no time. It contains no record of its past and only has physical direction. It is energy that exists as now. It doesn't exist in the past, or in the future. The concept of time only starts to arise when you attempt to record what these particles do and where they have been. Time cannot be reversed, but it exists as a function of the information being recorded, not of the energy doing the recording.
Time is not so much a projection out from the present event, as it is a coming together of factors to define what is present. The past being those influences which define current order and the future is determined by the energy to motivate that order. Evolution is when order is an open set and absorbs fresh energy, defining it and adapting to it, so that the future is a continuation of the past. Revolution is when order is a closed set, so the energy accumulates elsewhere and the future becomes a reaction to the past. While the past informs us, it also recedes at a rapid rate.
One definition of the arrow of time is that of decreasing usable energy and increasing entropy in a closed system. Keep in mind that a "closed system" is a unit and these processes are the aging of this unit. This relationship of the unit and the process is the basic model that the field of Complexity Theory(www.santafe.edu) has examined in great detail, with top down ordering in a bottom up chaotic environment. Such as the corporate unit in the context of capitalism. It is the individual and the ecosystem. The reason the bottom up context is logically chaotic is that its parameters cannot be defined, or it would become a unit in the next level of context.
Even though we have come to understand there is no preferred frame of reference, when we define space as a three dimensional coordinate system, with a linear graph of motion as a fourth dimension, we are using the perspective of the generic point as the basis for explaining reality, but a more objective description requires understanding how many such points interact. How should we go about considering objective reality, when the very concept of perspective implies a point of reference? Our fundamental process of thought is inherently reductionistic and linear, so how do we reconcile it with a reality that is neither? Temperature is how we conceive of non-linear motion. It is a statistical measure that begins to lose meaning at the molecular level, as individual molecules are moving along particular trajectories and at specific velocities. At the human level, government statistics are a form of temperature reading of economic activity. To the individual, motion is experienced as the linear procession of events, thus our assumption that time is the basis of motion, but to the larger group there is no preferred frame of reference. It is the concept of temperature, the level of activity and energy, that describes non-linear motion.
As politics is the process of organizing and refereeing competing perspectives, it has more in common with the mass motion of temperature then the linear motion of time. While particular movements have their own historical perspective, consideration of the past and concern for the future don't resonate across a fractured and fractious political landscape.
Most of human evolution was as members of a group and this, more then the individual, provided the frame of perspective. As people became ever more aware of their own individuality, the group perspective became the basis for the concept of God, to which the evolution of language embellished and attached narrative structure. As groups intermingled and otherwise interacted with the environment, this mythological structure grew and evolved, while the basic sense of being part of some larger entity remained. The result being these convoluted religious institutions, which people then focus on the aspects of that have particular resonance, be they basic icons or complex texts.
While the religious institution is ordered from the top(God) down, it has evolved from the bottom up, much like the human psyche is based on those elementary childhood experiences, no matter how subjective and particular they might be. The reason that even religion has evolved from the bottom up is that the absolute, that universal state of equilibrium, is basis, not apex. It is the element out of which structure rises, not the plan by which it is formed. The principles which define form are as much compilations of more basic principles as the matter they shape is complex interactions of more basic elements. So the spiritual absolute is not a model of perfection from which we have fallen, but the essence of being and awareness out of which we rise. If we are to view life as a bottom up emergent phenomena, rather then top down ordered intellect, all of life on this planet might be considered as one large organism, ultimately motivated by the most basic sense of being, shining through the varied lenses of diverse individual organisms, with ever folding layers of complexity, both in terms of biological diversity and intellectual ability.
That the institutional description of God focuses on the quality of intelligence, rather then of basic awareness, has an important political consequence because it validates the top down structure. We have developed any number of such structures. They have an organizing purpose and principle to maintain their viability in the chaos of the larger environment, be it the external defense of territory, or the internal provision for the needs of those within it, whether families or nations. In the process of developing this unitary structure, it is easy to overlook the dualistic nature of the forces at work, between the top down order and bottom up process, so that frequently those governing this entity abrogate all rights but their own. Much of human history has been the story of reconciling this top down authority with the organic society it seeks to control. These forces are reconciled within our own civil organization by the fact that the republic is a top down structure, while democracy is a bottom up process. One conservative civil structure, the other, dynamic social organism.
Atheism tends to have the same top down bias, with the assumption that awareness is a property of mental processes and only really emergent in humanity. This prejudice doesn't explain the motivational instincts of all biological organisms. There are two mysteries, life and consciousness. It seems logical that the roots of awareness extend to the very base of biology and these two are one mystery. Awareness is the organizing principle of the central nervous system, rather then a property of it. Knowledge is the subjective ordering system, which we project, like four dimensional spacetime, on reality. Good and bad are not a dual between the forces of light and darkness, but the biological binary code. The intellect rises out of emotion when good/bad becomes yes/no. For the process, they are relative. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken. For the individual, they could well be absolute, at least to the chicken.
While we are possessed of and motivated by this singular sense of being, the world which we are conscious of is one of contrasts, good/bad, yes/no, positive/negative, light/dark, up/down, left/right, inside/outside, male/female, past/future, unit/process, individual/group, absolute/infinite, order/chaos, expanding energy/collapsing mass, cats/dogs, etcetcetc... Even the absolute, as universal equilibrium, is both everything and nothing, as in absolute zero. Then there are the connections, the colors of the spectrum, the complexities of nature and life and society, the neurons of the brain, observer and observation, attraction as well as repulsion and all the other forces holding it together, but not too together. This is because it is all those contrasts and conflicts that give weight and shape to reality. Without all these natural tensions, it would be just a flat line on the heart monitor. Sometimes they do tear everything apart, but often they mesh together in some larger whole.
Our current moral codes evolved as humanity struggled to survive. Now we need to adopt a belief system which respects the environment as much as members of our own species, or else. There is a time in one's life when the father goes from being the model one follows, to the foundation one rises from and humanity is at that stage.
John Brodix Merryman Jr.
Sparks, Maryland
brodix@earthlink.net
One of my earliest memories of questioning more than just the dictates of family was sitting in church at about ten years old and vaguely wondering what purpose all that ritual really served. At that age the idea of God seemed so transcendent and religion only seemed to obscure and trivialize it. After several decades of trying to make sense of this world, it seems to me as though life is like an onion. You peel away every layer and finally there is nothing left. We distill away everything that seems transitory about life, searching for some hard little nugget of meaning and when we are done, have so little to show for it. The problem isn't life, the problem is the idea of meaning. Life is dynamic and holistic. Meaning is static and reductionistic. Thought is linear, reality is not. As an organ, the brain evolved for navigation and survival, so it tends to concentrate on the problems. How do we escape the obsessions of our mortality and see through the walls of our own bubble?
To begin with, the four dimensional map of spacetime does not accurately describe the territory. Points, lines and planes supposedly have a zero dimension. Well, 1x0=0. What they really have is a virtual dimension, not zero dimension. While a point can presumably be dimensionless, it is still a specific point of reference. The real zero for geometry would be empty space. It is the potential for any point, not a specific one. Also, three dimensions are the coordinate system of the point these lines cross, not space itself. Any number of coordinate systems, starting from any point, can be used to define the same space. You might say the Israelis and the Arabs use different coordinate systems to define the same land.
Time has two directions. The observer goes from past events to future events. On the other hand, these events go from being in the future to being in the past. To the hands of the clock, the face is going counterclockwise. The three dimensional frame of reference is not moving along an additional dimension. This subjective coordinate system is interacting with other such frames. To quote Newton, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
If we were to build a clock-like device to characterize non-linear motion, say of molecules in water, or people in a crowd, it would have many hands, going in both directions and the cumulative action would cancel out in a general equilibrium. With the concept of time, most of these hands are combined into the face, with a few going in one direction as coordinates for the reference point. Time is a linear measure of motion, not the basis for it.
The unit of time goes from beginning to end, but the process of time is going toward the beginning of the next, leaving the old. The hour on the clock starts in the future and the hand passes from its beginning to its end and then moves on to the next, leaving the previous hour in the past. Days go from dawn to dusk, as the sun moves from east to west, but it is the earth that is rotating west to east and the sunlight is moving through the time zones. Consider a factory. The product moves from start to finish, but the production line is facing the other way, consuming raw material and expelling finished product. This relationship of the process and the unit is one of perspective. A unit at one level is a process at another and vice versa. What matters to the process isn't so much the end product, as it is the energy produced, in wages and profits, calories burned, etc, that propels the process forward, consuming more material.
Our individual lives are units of time going from birth to death, while the process of living goes on to the next generation, shedding the old like dead skin. As life has purpose, rather then meaning, the relationship of the individual life to the larger organism is like that of a sentence to the story. The end is punctuation, rather then destination, as we are connected at both ends and the middle.
The reason time seems like a series of instants is because most motion is effectively at the speed of light and our mind is a process of consuming information and creating conceptual units, called thoughts, otherwise everything would be a blur.
Reality consists of energy recording information. As the amount of energy remains the same, old information is erased as new is recorded. Objective reality is the energy. Time is a function of the subjective information, as past and future do not physically exist because the energy to manifest them is currently tied up in the present. To the photon, there is no time. It contains no record of its past and only has physical direction. It is energy that exists as now. It doesn't exist in the past, or in the future. The concept of time only starts to arise when you attempt to record what these particles do and where they have been. Time cannot be reversed, but it exists as a function of the information being recorded, not of the energy doing the recording.
Time is not so much a projection out from the present event, as it is a coming together of factors to define what is present. The past being those influences which define current order and the future is determined by the energy to motivate that order. Evolution is when order is an open set and absorbs fresh energy, defining it and adapting to it, so that the future is a continuation of the past. Revolution is when order is a closed set, so the energy accumulates elsewhere and the future becomes a reaction to the past. While the past informs us, it also recedes at a rapid rate.
One definition of the arrow of time is that of decreasing usable energy and increasing entropy in a closed system. Keep in mind that a "closed system" is a unit and these processes are the aging of this unit. This relationship of the unit and the process is the basic model that the field of Complexity Theory(www.santafe.edu) has examined in great detail, with top down ordering in a bottom up chaotic environment. Such as the corporate unit in the context of capitalism. It is the individual and the ecosystem. The reason the bottom up context is logically chaotic is that its parameters cannot be defined, or it would become a unit in the next level of context.
Even though we have come to understand there is no preferred frame of reference, when we define space as a three dimensional coordinate system, with a linear graph of motion as a fourth dimension, we are using the perspective of the generic point as the basis for explaining reality, but a more objective description requires understanding how many such points interact. How should we go about considering objective reality, when the very concept of perspective implies a point of reference? Our fundamental process of thought is inherently reductionistic and linear, so how do we reconcile it with a reality that is neither? Temperature is how we conceive of non-linear motion. It is a statistical measure that begins to lose meaning at the molecular level, as individual molecules are moving along particular trajectories and at specific velocities. At the human level, government statistics are a form of temperature reading of economic activity. To the individual, motion is experienced as the linear procession of events, thus our assumption that time is the basis of motion, but to the larger group there is no preferred frame of reference. It is the concept of temperature, the level of activity and energy, that describes non-linear motion.
As politics is the process of organizing and refereeing competing perspectives, it has more in common with the mass motion of temperature then the linear motion of time. While particular movements have their own historical perspective, consideration of the past and concern for the future don't resonate across a fractured and fractious political landscape.
Most of human evolution was as members of a group and this, more then the individual, provided the frame of perspective. As people became ever more aware of their own individuality, the group perspective became the basis for the concept of God, to which the evolution of language embellished and attached narrative structure. As groups intermingled and otherwise interacted with the environment, this mythological structure grew and evolved, while the basic sense of being part of some larger entity remained. The result being these convoluted religious institutions, which people then focus on the aspects of that have particular resonance, be they basic icons or complex texts.
While the religious institution is ordered from the top(God) down, it has evolved from the bottom up, much like the human psyche is based on those elementary childhood experiences, no matter how subjective and particular they might be. The reason that even religion has evolved from the bottom up is that the absolute, that universal state of equilibrium, is basis, not apex. It is the element out of which structure rises, not the plan by which it is formed. The principles which define form are as much compilations of more basic principles as the matter they shape is complex interactions of more basic elements. So the spiritual absolute is not a model of perfection from which we have fallen, but the essence of being and awareness out of which we rise. If we are to view life as a bottom up emergent phenomena, rather then top down ordered intellect, all of life on this planet might be considered as one large organism, ultimately motivated by the most basic sense of being, shining through the varied lenses of diverse individual organisms, with ever folding layers of complexity, both in terms of biological diversity and intellectual ability.
That the institutional description of God focuses on the quality of intelligence, rather then of basic awareness, has an important political consequence because it validates the top down structure. We have developed any number of such structures. They have an organizing purpose and principle to maintain their viability in the chaos of the larger environment, be it the external defense of territory, or the internal provision for the needs of those within it, whether families or nations. In the process of developing this unitary structure, it is easy to overlook the dualistic nature of the forces at work, between the top down order and bottom up process, so that frequently those governing this entity abrogate all rights but their own. Much of human history has been the story of reconciling this top down authority with the organic society it seeks to control. These forces are reconciled within our own civil organization by the fact that the republic is a top down structure, while democracy is a bottom up process. One conservative civil structure, the other, dynamic social organism.
Atheism tends to have the same top down bias, with the assumption that awareness is a property of mental processes and only really emergent in humanity. This prejudice doesn't explain the motivational instincts of all biological organisms. There are two mysteries, life and consciousness. It seems logical that the roots of awareness extend to the very base of biology and these two are one mystery. Awareness is the organizing principle of the central nervous system, rather then a property of it. Knowledge is the subjective ordering system, which we project, like four dimensional spacetime, on reality. Good and bad are not a dual between the forces of light and darkness, but the biological binary code. The intellect rises out of emotion when good/bad becomes yes/no. For the process, they are relative. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken. For the individual, they could well be absolute, at least to the chicken.
While we are possessed of and motivated by this singular sense of being, the world which we are conscious of is one of contrasts, good/bad, yes/no, positive/negative, light/dark, up/down, left/right, inside/outside, male/female, past/future, unit/process, individual/group, absolute/infinite, order/chaos, expanding energy/collapsing mass, cats/dogs, etcetcetc... Even the absolute, as universal equilibrium, is both everything and nothing, as in absolute zero. Then there are the connections, the colors of the spectrum, the complexities of nature and life and society, the neurons of the brain, observer and observation, attraction as well as repulsion and all the other forces holding it together, but not too together. This is because it is all those contrasts and conflicts that give weight and shape to reality. Without all these natural tensions, it would be just a flat line on the heart monitor. Sometimes they do tear everything apart, but often they mesh together in some larger whole.
Our current moral codes evolved as humanity struggled to survive. Now we need to adopt a belief system which respects the environment as much as members of our own species, or else. There is a time in one's life when the father goes from being the model one follows, to the foundation one rises from and humanity is at that stage.
John Brodix Merryman Jr.
Sparks, Maryland
brodix@earthlink.net
Labels: religious theory, space, time
