Running Backward Into The Future
Some Considerations About the Nature of Time and Memory
Part One: Describing the Field
Introduction
Marshall McLuhan made the point that the structure of any medium became the content of subsequent media. Thus the gift storytelling gave to writing was the content of the stories. The fact that the cadenced, nuanced, recursive and patterned structure of told stories was lost to the written text was only noticed much later.
Julian Jaynes made the same point with regard to the metaphors used by a culture to articulate the nature of human consciousness; the "landscape" of mind reflecting the topography and technology of each era.
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Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of The Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin, 1976 p. 2
. . . each age has described consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. ... A millennium later, Augustine among the caverned hills of Carthage was astonished at the "mountains and hills of my high imaginations", "the plains and caves and caverns of my memory" with its recesses of "manifold and spacious chambers..." Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives. The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth's crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers which recorded the past of the individual . . . In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness . . . was the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings. And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life . . . so . . . the subconscious [became] a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behaviors.... |
Effusion through cultures takes time, and it is the contention of this paper that the metaphoric shifts, or "memes", that changed physics at the beginning of the current century took a generation to segue to the biological sciences, and are only now being widely absorbed into the paradigms of cultural critique.
The deterministic, mechanistic, linear nature of the "watchmaker's" universe was first challenged by the notion of relativity. Time and space were now relative to each other, perception was relative to the perceiver as well as to that which was perceived, and even the category of "matter" was itself only a relative performance of the category "energy."
But if here and now were now "herenow" and light was both a wave and particle, still now was not then, even if they were conceptualized as herenow and herethen, or therenow and therethen.
The perception of the passage of time is dependant on the degradation of matter. Fish rot, people age, hot water becomes tepid, information degrades, patterns become chaotic. However, in the microcosm this process is not unidirectional. Feynman diagrams can be read forward or backward, making those terms moot. There is only the Spinozan oscillation of particles A and B which are now colliding, and now repelling, and their mutually generative relationship with tangential particles C and D. One either may read the story of the collision of A and B and the subsequent release of C and D who speed away, and/or, the story of the collision of C and D with A and B who absorb them and in so doing are pulled apart from their own coupling. Both readings are simultaneously permissible; in the ultimate "relativity" there is no true story, just a dual reality, now vice and now versa, now moving, now at rest.
The great mystery of physics is "why?" Why is time an arrow (->) in the macrosphere and a line (<-->) in the microsphere? The answer to this mystery can only be found (as is often the case with the answer to mysteries) by stepping outside of the frame of "physics". In a two-step dance, the notions of the effects of time are framed as "entropy" and "information degradation" by cybernetics, only to have the cybernetic metaphor borrowed by biologists who are defining living systems in terms of "autopoiesis" and "Gaia".
In the general drift toward the heat-death of the Universe, time is considered the entropic movement of the organized to the chaotic. Yet this is as "backward" a notion as considering Schrodinger's Cat to be only dead. The general drift of the Universe must be multi-valanced, a superposition of all possible outcomes factored over the superposition of all probable outcomes. The challenge here, as with all issues of measurement, is which door to open. If we open the door of the quark, all futures are rosy, if we open the door of the sun, all futures are cold. What remains to be seen is what happens if we open the door of emergent biological systems, i.e., "life".
In the entropic position (i.e., the movement to heat-death), the notion of the growth of autopoetic unities of increasing complexity must be viewed as anomalous. Therefore a different metaphor of "future" is necessary.
How do autopoetic islands of negentropy exist? They exist through a process of dynamic adaptation to their environment that involves the temporary entropic dissolution of some organization to the degree necessary to allow enough "noise" into the system to catalyze the creation of the next evolution of a negentropic state of more complexity.
Autopoiesis and Structural Coupling
The question of what defines "life" is traditionally answered by a list of criterion that quickly become problematic upon application. No sooner do we define "living" entities by a list of such attributes as: respiration, ingestion, digestion, excretion, reproduction and locomotion then we must start modifying the list, e.g., we have trouble including the vegetable kingdom unless the term "locomotion" is expanded to include phototropism. Similarly, "reproduction" must be broad enough to include sexual reproduction and asexual replication. The Turing Test adds another wrinkle, for nowhere in our original criteria were "intelligence," "consciousness," nor "self-consciousness." Yet, within the realm of common sense Robbie the Robot seems more "alive" than a lichen.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the founders of the "Santiago school of cognitive biology" have suggested a more relevant way to phrase the question of "what is alive?" To paraphrase the aphorism, "if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck." Maturana and Varela suggest that what makes an entity--from an amoeba to an elephant--recognizable as "alive" is not a list of component parts but a quality of organization. It is this quality of organization that they refer to as "autopoietic," a term that refers to the "self-producing" organization of living systems.
"Self-producing" is itself a problematic term, in that it appears to be half of a tautology: living entities are alive because they are autopoetic; they are autopoetic because they are alive.
To explain in what way living entities are "self-producing," Maturana and Valera introduce the notion of "structural coupling" between entities and environments. To do so they distinguish between "structure" and "organization." Structure consists of the component parts of an entity, organization of the operational rules that permit and determine how those structural components interact. Maturana gives the example of a chair.
| Organization of a Chair Hyperlink Box |
The structural parts of a chair, its seat, back, legs and arms may be larger or smaller, fixed or adjustable, made of one material or another, or even--in the case of the arms and the legs--optional. However the organization of the chair, that which gives the chair its "chairness", is the relation of the seat to the back such that one can sit upon it. In the terminology of J. J. Gibson, it "affords" sitting upon and leaning against. These two elements--at a minimum--are necessary and sufficient. Without a seat you have a wall to lean against and without a back you have a stool to sit upon.
| Affordance of Chairs Hyperlink Box |
An autopoetic entity must--at a minimum--have a metabolism and a boundary. By metabolism I don't necessarily mean ingestion, digestion and excretion, although that is often the chain of mechanisms by which living things do interact with their environment, but in a more general way the process of dynamic interaction with ones environment; in which "dynamic" is understood to mean "a sensitivity to difference that exists over time." The boundary is not a discrete unit that merely physically separates the entity from its environment, as in the example of an envelope containing a letter but not being "part" of the letter. Rather, like human skin, or selectively permeable cell membranes, the boundary is an integral part of the metabolism, in these instances it is the mechanism that lets noxious chemical products leave the entity and necessary chemical products enter the entity. A letter could be a letter, and even be mailed (picture a folded and taped flyer) without an envelope, but a person could not survive in this world without a skin.
The process by which an autopoietic entity survives in an environment involves the entity developing physical (e.g., chemical, morphological, electrical) structures that enable it to "couple" with its environment in such a way that it can maintain both its independent integrity and absorb from and discharge to the environment that which it needs to survive. These structures vary amongst different forms of life, within particular types of life, and over the life time of a given individual. For example the need to absorb oxygen can be structurally met by symbiotic attachment to another (e.g., a fetus), oxygen porous "skin" (e.g., aerobic bacteria), gills (e.g., fish), or lungs (e.g., a person). A frog, nee tadpole, offers the example of a change of structural mechanism within the lifetime of an individual. That the entity needs to absorb oxygen from the environment tells us something about the environment (i.e., Earth contains an oxygen rich atmosphere, therefore anaerobic life can only exist symbiotically within aerobic life, or in an extremely limited range of locales.) How an entity absorbs the oxygen tells us about the structural nature of the entity. We don't need to breath to get oxygen. We need oxygen and human phylogeny has evolved to get it through nostrils, mouth and lungs.
Varela and Maturana make the point:
"In describing autopoietic unity as having a particular structure, ... the interactions (as long as they are recurrent) between unity and environment will consist of reciprocal perturbations. In these interactions, the structure of the environment only triggers structural changes in the autopoietic unities (it does not specify or direct them), and vice versa for the environment. The result will be a history of mutual congruent structural changes as long as the autopoetic unity and its containing environment do not disintegrate: there will be a structural coupling." (The Tree of Knowledge, Shambhala, Boston, 1998, p.75, italics in original)
In using this model one must remind oneself to always be aware of from whose perspective one "looks", to the wind the wall is an obstacle, to the wall the wind a scourge.
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Lynne Sharon Schwartz,Disturbances in the Field, Bantam Books, 1983
"Could you say that again..."
I thought about George's illustrations of the mother and the crying infant. It didn't seem to have occurred to him that the child might be a disturbance in the mother's field. When my infants cried ... my impulse was not to run and comfort them but to hide my head under a pillow... Of course most of the time I went to comfort them... |
This model of interaction, one of recurrent but not causal congruence, is exactly the meme that I believe has "traveled" from the quantum explanation of the physical world into the "field" of biology. What interests me is what a "recurrent congruence" with the future would look like. One notion, that of the "anthropic universe," posits that humankind triggers certain features of the universe, and vice versa, in a "handshake" across time in a manner that defies the linear, unidirectional notion of time. In order to discuss that question, however, we must first consider the meaning of "conservation" and "adaptation."
Structural Coupling as Conservation; Conservation as "Adaptation"
In the preceding section I defined the metabolism, i.e., the "organization" of the entity as the process of dynamic interaction with its environment; in which "dynamic" is understood to mean "a sensitivity to difference that exists over time."
Keeping in mind that the environment does not "specify or direct" the entity, but rather "triggers" it to respond in a structurally unique way, nevertheless the entity maintains a "recurrent congruence" with its environment that may include both sides changing in response to the other.
An example might be the salinization of a marsh. As the water grows saltier (perhaps due to a reduced influx of fresh water) the plants and aquatic life that inhabit the marsh are triggered to cope with the salt. Each entity's adaptation is a function of its own structure, i.e., reeds adapt in a reed-like way, mussels in a mussel-like way, crawdaddies in a crayfish-like way. The reeds may develop a cycle of growth that alternates fast growth during the rain (i.e., fresh water) season with stasis during the rest of the time, whereas mussels might alter their internal chemistry to develop a tolerance for a saltier environment, and crawdaddies learn to crawl to regions of least salinity and reconfigure their geographic distribution. Thus, in each case, the entity conserves its internal, autopoietic existence; it keeps the salinity at a non-toxic level.
What looks to the outside observer, as "adaptation to the environment" is, on the logical level of the entity, merely conservation. This is because the observer is operating on a level "meta" to the entity. Maturana and Valera caution throughout their writings that most errors in comprehension result from the theorist mistaking levels of logical type. When the marathon runner's adrenal glands secrete adrenaline and the presence of adrenaline triggers certain other structural and chemical changes that allow the body to oxygenate the blood at a higher than normal level, we do not attribute "knowledge" to the adrenals, the blood, or the various neurotransmitters. They don't do what they do because John Smith is running the marathon, or in order to "adapt" to his racing needs, rather, each accommodation is an attempt at the local level to maintain equilibrium and stasis. This is what is meant by "conservation". The blood conserves its oxygenated state, the mussel its moderately salinated one; only to the outside observer who perceives both the behavior and the context does the behavior appear to be a response. It is only a response in the eye of the beholder. Therefore it is essential, when describing the mechanisms of conservation not to attribute knowledge or intention on a local level. Those are meta-judgements which can be made after the fact on the observer's level.
The Nature of "Restraint" and the Necessity of "Noise"
The notion that the past exists is belied by the common convention of treating the past as a composite. The artistic rendition of this is in the film Rashomon, and the mundane can be found in the almost daily battles one has with ones children as to whether one did or did not agree to this or that. Without empirical truth, such as having one's life videotaped as the Loud family did, there is no "real" past, there is only "he said" and "she said" or more specifically, only this memory and that memory. Therefore, the truism that "nobody knows the future" is mirrored by the parallel truth that "nobody knows the past". As the Wizard of Oz would remind us, we are not lacking a knowledge of the future, we are only lacking any memory of it.
In keeping with the model of an external event triggering (rather than causing) the unfolding of an structurally inherent behavior which was described in the previous sections I wish to examine the cybernetic description of memory. I suggest that what we call "memory" is the recognition of pattern based on the observation of redundancy. That which doesn't appear to fit into this pattern (e.g, the "fact" that I said that my son could stay out with his friends until midnight) is either a "mistake" (i.e., I said midnight but I meant eleven), or is a novelty. It is this novelty, the "new", the something unlike what I was expecting to happen here that is the "unremembered" future. For although we have a simplistic linear convention of talking about the future, when the future meets our expectation of it (i.e., it rained last Saturday, it rained this Saturday, and I expect it to rain next Saturday as well) I am treating that as if I am remembering the future. Based on weather trends I "remember" that it will rain next Saturday and so am planning my picnic for Tuesday afternoon.
In an article entitled, "Cybernetic Explanation" (1967, American Behavioral Scientist), included in Steps to An Ecology of Mind (1972), Gregory Bateson presents a brief overview of the concepts of "restraints" and "noise" that will be useful in developing some new metaphors of/for the future.
The cybernetic model represents the world of meaning along the probabilistic lines of quantum theory rather than the causal lines of Newtonian physics. Whereas the famous billiard ball example "explains" the nine ball in the corner pocket in terms of the inertia, force, momentum, angular velocity, et cetera, et cetera of the billiard ball, and before that the billiard stick, and before that Lord Biltmore who wields the stick (and the scone he ate for breakfast, and all his antecedents going back to the War of the Roses), Bateson uses the example of kicking a dog. The kick, he reminds us, serves as a "stimulus" rather than a "cause," and the dog's "response" is a matter of the temperament of the dog (to cringe or attack) rather than being "determined" by the kick.
The nature of the dog's response to being kicked is shaped by the restraints in the system. The law of restraints was classically known as Occam's Razor, but most elegantly expressed by Sherlock Holmes, "When you have ruled out the impossible, my dear Watson, whatever is left no matter how improbable is the solution." An interesting corollary of this "negative" form of definition (that which is NOT forbidden / restrained, is permitted) is that the behavior / response is always seen as a member of a relationship, just as an electron is not a discrete thing, but a probability of an appearance. Just as what exists is the cloud-space of every wherewhen an electron might occur and the actual electron is merely the collapse of the probability wave under the impetus of our observation, so too the behavior exists as the complete set of all possible behaviors which "collapses" into a discrete occurrence (e.g., the dog either bites OR barks OR cringes) at a given, specific moment in spacetime.
In the relationship of the (actualized) part to the whole (of all possibilities) meaning is attributed to those parts which are either repeated (recurrences of the same unit), or to those parts which are recognizable transforms (permutations) of each other. Thus if there was once a sapling between the big rock and the pond, and later there is a tree in the same spot, and still later there is a stump there, one can reasonably assume the sapling, the tree and the stump are in some way versions (or transforms) of each other.
The process of communication, in the cybernetic model, therefore consists of the recognition of a repeated, or transformed, unit or "message" in two places (or at two times). The example which Bateson uses in the book of a message on a sender's pad being replicated on a receiver's pad reminds us that cybernetics was developed by the military to enable code-breaking and self-governing weapons. This pattern of communication is not to be understood in billiard ball terms of the behavior of the sender (e.g., hitting telegraph keys) causing the message received by the receiver, but rather as triggering something inherent in the receiver's equipment which causes it to respond to the stimulus by creating a redundancy. This is more clearly recognized in a living system, because it is the very nature of living systems to be patterned, redundant and autopoetic. Therefore, the original impulse toward puberty, whether it is weight gain, or increased hormonal secretions, or a change in the electrical patterns in the brain, or whatever, triggers changes in each of these systems (and others) of which each change in a self-increasing positive feedback loop, triggers other pubertal changes. Likewise, normal perception turns out to be a complexly organized symphony involving perception, storage, retrieval, construction of meaning and memory in elaborate synchrony and synthesis.
In order for the information in a message to be useful (or, in other words, in order to be able to construct meaning from the message) the message must contain not only content, but also a marker revealing its context. In my experience most marital conflict occurs over these context markers, e.g., whether this or that stance of body language connoted sarcasm, indifference or merely exhaustion. As the old joke goes, if a dog has bared fangs and a wagging tail which end do you believe? Thus, when Bateson says that the way you know an elephant's trunk is his nose is because you find it between his eyes and his mouth, he is pointing out the deeply ingrained expectation of shared vertebrate morphology which alerts us to the pattern of "the organ with which one smells is located in this place." Understanding this contextual rule allows us to perceive that a beak is a transform of a trunk, which is a transform of a bony ridge with holes in it. It is the fact that we (humans) don't have a homologous organ that makes it difficult for us to understand how South American honeybees when transported thousands of miles to United States research labs leave their hives to go collect honey at the right time of "day" and "year" according to their internal clocks which remain set on natal time, or how some birds migrate without instruction based on some awareness of geo-magnetic fields.
An intriguing notion is that we don't recognize our memories of the future because we don't recognize the contextual marker which would inform us that this perception, right here, right now is a memory of the future. Understanding the difference between "real," "fantasy", "dream", and "memory" is a learned comprehension. Perhaps people most prone to "deja vu" are those with a naive ability to catch glimpses of the "remembered future" that at some point of future evolution (or at some point deep in the recursive moire or "future-past") all humans will be conscious of.
Bateson concludes his article thus: "All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints--is noise, the only possible source of new patterns."
"Noise" is therefore not something of a different nature or type than the "meaningful" parts of a system, it is only something that does not have a context marker that identifies it as either a recognizable part, or a transform of a recognizable part, or a context marker. An excellent example of this was provided by my nephew, who was just under two-years-old at the time, when I took him to the park. Recognizing that the older kids "knew" how to play he undertook to replicate--in every detail--the behavior of some three or four-year-olds who were there. They were running around some pieces of play equipment in a particular pattern, touching certain parts of the climbing structure and jumping over a certain damp patch of sand. My nephew copied the entire sequence, including the gesture of wiping his forehead with his palm right before he jumped over the damp sand. Whatever "meaning" the game had to the children (whether they were Power Rangers, or Hercules, or Luke Skywalker, ad nauseam) was invisible to my nephew. To him, enacting the behavior was the meaning. The only part of the enactment whose meaning was obvious to me was the part about the palm across the forehead, it was the unconscious gesture of one child whose bangs were in his field of vision. Of course my nephew, who didn't have bangs in his eyes, didn't realize that that gesture was not a relevant part of the charade. Since he neither knew the "meaning" of the game, nor the "meaning" of the gesture, whatever "story" he would construct of the game would include the forehead wipe as an integral part, thereby creating a new pattern. The new pattern would neither "explain" nor be "explained" by the meaning, it would be the meaning.
Noise As The Perception of an Element Across the Boundaries of Logical Type
Suppose a cook in a warm kitchen who drank water as she worked. Without any conscious intent it was often the case that she needed to empty her bladder at just the moment that she judged the food to be done. Neither one of these two "facts" was the cause of the other, but they were more than coincidentally related. What I believe to be true is that with both a full bladder and a pot that needed to be watched competing for her attention she unconsciously prioritized the watched pot, and sublimated awareness of her full bladder. At the time that she judged the food to be "done," by visual, olfactory and/or innate temporal clues (e.g., it had cooked "long" enough), but before she became "conscious" of her judgement, her "mind" allowed consciousness of the state of her bladder to "intrude". Therefore she perceived that she needed to use the bathroom before she perceived that she "knew" the food was done, leading first to the impression of a remarkable, recurrent coincidence, and then to the "explanation" that knowing that she needed to go pee was how she "knew" that the food was done.
The rules of quantum mechanics, of cybernetics and of autopoiesis all build upon the foundation of the organization of logical types. The notion of logical type sets boundaries between content and context. It is a way of not confusing the members of a domain (flavors of ice cream, types of crustaceans, modes of production) with the domain itself (Ice Cream, Crustacean, Production). "Ice Cream" is not a flavor of ice cream, and therefore a corollary to the rule that the name of a set can't be a member of the set is that the name (e.g., "Ice Cream") must be a member of a metaset that therefore includes within it all the members of the "Set of Ice Cream," in other words, all the flavors. This set might be "Desserts," or it might be "Dairy Products," or it might be "Things That Are Cold." This example demonstrates that while one can't be a member of the set that one names, nevertheless one can be a member of a potentially large number of other sets, one's membership constrained only by the sorts of restraints (possibility and probability) mentioned elsewhere. The relationships between logical types can be portrayed hierarchically--as a outline or branching tree diagram--or embeddedly, as in a sentence with a plethora of parenthetical clauses, or a complex algebraic equation. Or, to use a quantum field metaphor, the multiple domains of types could be intertwined in a complex probabilistic sharing of spacetime, all equally present in potentia, all awaiting a trigger to manifest themselves, that trigger being the perception of an observer.
A consequence of this presence of embedded levels is the possibility of a simultaneously "closed" and "open" system. Within its own level a system (e.g., the digestive system, the stomach, a bacteria who live within the stomach) may be closed. Closed in this case means that anything that happens within the system will have ramifications throughout the system. Let us suppose a closed system which is the bacteria, the factors of the system include how it moves, where it moves, and how it responds to what it encounters--which may affect how or where it moves next, or how it responds to the next thing it meets, et cetera. As far as the bacteria is concerned it is just going about its business, if it does well in an environment with a certain pH it will tend to drift toward regions that are at that pH, if it encounters a region with an less than favorable pH level, and it has within itself a mechanism for in some way moderating the surrounding pH level, it will do so. Not for any other reason than for its own comfort, just as you or I will roll over in our sleep to shift into a more comfortable position. Within itself, the bacteria is a closed system. However, if you are dealing at the logical level of the stomach then these "random" behaviors of the bacteria within become the stimulus to your behavior. A bacteria adjusting its own, or the surrounding pH level may "trigger" a response in the stomach walls, peristalsis, or in the rate of flow of various gastric juices, or the creation of gas bubbles. Think of our tossing sleeper on a water bed. From the point of view (or logical level) of the sleeper she is unaware of her effect on the waterbed, she is not shifting her shoulder to cause the waterbed to bounce up and down. The waterbed is a closed system (water and membrane) and the sleeper is a closed system and yet from the point of view of an observer standing in the bedroom (up another level of logical type), it is apparent that there is a congruence between the movements of the sleeper and the movements of the water bed. Now, the difference between these two examples is a matter of scale. We can easily imagine an observer viewing both the movements of the sleeper and the co-responsive movements of the waterbed because sleeper, bed and viewer are all on the same scale. But, when we have indigestion we can only perceive that our stomach aches, or is full of gas, we cannot "see" the co-responsive behavior of the bacteria. Furthermore, to the degree that we conceptualize it we talk about it causally. "That chili gave me indigestion," as if it was something the chili was doing to us, rather than the sequence of events such that the digestion of the chili creates an environment of a certain pH, the pH level within the stomach triggers (but doesn't cause) congruent behavior on the part of the bacteria, et cetera. The realm of the bacteria as an independent autopoietic symbiot living within us is outside of our ordinary ken.
From time to time, awareness of a closed system which is embedded within us or within which we are embedded, permeates human consciousness. This is possible because thresholds are variable. As a mother I can smell when my children are becoming sick before they experience any symptoms, my olfactory threshold is more sensitive than their "I feel yucky" threshold. The contact point between two closed systems, the point where one can impinge on the other as "noise" will be conceptualized differently, depending on whether each system is construed as a product (object) or a process (action). These two perspectives express the difference between Newtonian (billiard ball) physics, and quantum field theory and between atomistic, causal models of biology and transactional models.
As we apply the metaphors of quantum electro-dynamics, or autopoiesis, to our perception of "time" we must also consider the following questions:
·Are the "past", "present", and "future" each separate closed systems that only interact on some "higher" meta-level; and if so, what is that level?
·Or, are "past", "present", and "future" merely superficial constructs superimposed on one unified field, i.e., "time" as a social / linguistic convention?
·Whatever the "unit" of time is, what is its nature? Is it a thing (e.g., the present), an action (e.g., being now, or even "nowing"), or a state (e.g., now-ness)?
In looking for signs of the future, or signs of memories of the future, are we looking for the glimpse of the tree and the stump inherent in the sapling, or for the pattern inherent in the water droplets on the walls of the cloud chamber that are the sign by which we "see" the electron's trail?
The WhenWhere Where a Part Is Equal to a Whole
For the purposes of this paper I am positing that "past", "present" and "future" are closed systems embedded somehow in "time." If this is given, then one may ask what is the relationship between (or amongst) these embedded systems. One possibility is that they are separate, non-communicating units, like three paisley cones side by side on an Indian bedspread. From the "outside" an observer may see that the shapes of their crookedness seem to correspond (like nested spoons), but this "relationship" would only be in the eye of the observer. A second metaphor for understanding the relationship of the three sub-units of Time is to envision them as nesting Babushka dolls; the question then becomes which is nested within which?
| The Jewish Mystics Hyperlink Box |
What happens if we follow the schema of the mystics, and allow the future to be associated with the "unconscious part that makes the body live", the present to be associated with the "feelings", and the past to be associated with the "intellect"? One association we can make is along Aristotelian terms, that the future is therefore the motive realm, the present the sensible realm, and the past the intellective realm. Another is to cast the future as the noumenon, and the present as the phenomenon. If this is the case, then the present that we experience is only our sensible (or sensory) apperception of the inaccessible, ontological future experience-an-sich.
Following the mystics we must posit that the dolls are nested so that the past is a special case of the present (i.e., of all the possible pasts, there is one that we "remember" and so believe to have really happened); and, that the present is a special case of the future (i.e., of all the possiblities of what may happen--of all the sines of the probability wave of the present--there is one that we experience as "happening" and so believe to be real).
Although experientially we are always in the present (try and think of any time in your life that you didn't experience as "now"), if the present is embedded in the future, then, when we are in the present we are also in the future. How is it possible that an "infinite" present can also be a part of an "essential" future? It is possible only in "infinity," where the part is equal to the whole.
Our perception of one segment (the present) of the time continuum, as if it were the whole is an example of how the "part" may be considered part only in relationship to a whole. The present does not feel, subjectively, as if it were part of a larger unit (Present-Within-Future-Within-Time). It feels as if it were whole, a whole part, if you will. However a future without a "present" (which would be experienced only once we were in the future; so that it would then be a "present" without a "past") would feel incomplete. Therefore, the larger unit is paradoxically more aware of the smaller units than they of it, i.e., a whole made up of parts. We can posit a working definition of "part" and "whole" as a consciousness of completeness in the first case, in contrast to the consciousness of a compositeness in the second. Ironically, it would be the loss of a part that would allow you to know that the composite entity was a "whole". And, it is in fact, the loss of our "memory" of the future that makes us realize that our sensory perception of Time is incomplete.
Infinity is a "worldstate," a "mode" of being, an ontological reality. Infinity is the wherewhen of parts which are as if wholes. Time is a composite whole made up of past, present and future. It partakes of infinity because each of these parts can be as "long" as the composite whole, the "eternal" past, the "ephemeral " present, and the "immanent " future.
Because in the present we can remember the past, we comprehend how in relationship to that past, the present is the future. As Wimpy, when we pay on Tuesday for the hamburger we ate last Sunday, we remember striking the deal, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.". Therefore on Tuesday, we experience both Tuesday-as-present and Tuesday-as-Sunday's-future. Both are clear to us, as is Sunday-as-Tuesday's-past. The difference is that on Tuesday we can remember Sunday, but on Sunday we cannot yet remember Tuesday. Why is that? The unidirectionality of memory is our clue that there are gaps in the wholeness of time. The present is as if it were cut out from the future in which it is embedded; it is experienced as if it is a part that is equal to the whole of all of time.
Time can only have meaning to an individual, not to a category
Whether we are speaking of the negentropic growth of mighty oaks from little acorns, or of the more typical entropic decay of the ancient oak back into the fecund forest floor, our language only makes sense if we speak of a particular, specific oak. All oaks may grow and rot, but each does so as a unique individual. To refer to an acorn, a sapling, a mature tree and a rotten stump which exist side-by-side on a given Tuesday at 4 o'clock as the stages of one tree's life can only make sense to us as metaphor. This particular acorn will one day be a sapling like this particular sapling (and thus the relation of this sapling to this mature tree, etc.) but this particular acorn is not the one that this particular sapling, real and present to us on Tuesday afternoon, grew from. Thus, while all tress grow severally, each tree grows individually. This is what distinguishes trees from electrons, for this electron is that electron.
One of the reasons that time does not have a direction among sub-atomic particles is because the particles don't exist over time. Unlike the wild animals who are tagged by zoologists so that their movement over space and time can be tracked, photons, electrons, muons, quarks, et cetera cannot be "tracked". Even if one could "tag" them at the nanomoment they appeared, one would never find the "tagged" particle again. Sub-atomic particles can be created, but cannot be "saved" or "stored." Like the performances of a play, where each night's enactment is a discrete entity even though each night the actors follow the same script and staging. The script and the stage directions are the "rules of creation" of the enactment, and these "rules" are a metaphor for a quantum field; each night's performance represents the one-time-only observable manifestation of these rules, tomorrow's performance will be a different, unique enactment.
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This is quite different from objects (and subjects) in the macroworld. Because discrete objects do continue as congruent entities over time, time has an impact on them. In this way time is like a force, for instance gravity, or pressure. Forces effect objects according to a variety of different laws, which are often expressed in terms of inverse logarithms. The density of a being (i.e., its weight) in relation to its size (i.e., its mass) will shape how gravity effects it, that is one reason that flies can walk on the ceiling. Also, the distance between two objects, as well as their size, "permits" or "forbids" various forces from acting between them. That is why sub-nuclear particles are bound by the strong force, nuclear particles are bound by the electro-weak force, and macroscopic particles are bound by gravity.
Perhaps there exists some similar relationship in which those entities that exist as a continuous manifestation of the same organization over time (e.g., blue-green algae or humans) are therefore subject to the entropic (ageing) "force" of time. "Force" is being used here metaphorically, for lack of a better term. Entities that exist as rules for enactment and appear as non-specific, temporary manifestations from time to time (e.g., blue quarks or photons) are not subject to the entropic forces of time. The paradox then becomes a matter of boundaries, at what juncture a "community" of timeless atoms "becomes" a meta-entity (an entity of a "higher" logical type, or a "second order" autopoietic system) that is a timebound, conserved, deteriorating being.
But how do we know that we are the same being, existing over time? How do we know that the self who wakes up from a night's sleep is the same self as she who lay down to sleep? We know because the self who awakens can remember having gone to sleep, and perhaps can even remember her dreams during the interval. But how are we to know whether this is an illusion; and that each moment we, like the electrons, are newly minted complete with a "remembered" past, as proposed by the heresiarch of Tlon.
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Between the motion and the act falls the shadow
"Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow." [T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" (1922)]
One of the markers for the distinction between subject/objects (like people) and manifest processes (like electrons) is found in language. Things (beings, objects) have names, processes (seeing, thinking, doing, knowing, being) are verbs. Descartes famous ascertion "Cogito ergo Sum" was a case in point. Each part of that identity statement is a noun (or a gerund, which is functionally the same). "I think", "I am". An electron statement of being would be: "Becoming beingness", "Being being". A processional person would say: "Thinkingness, being". In the land of Tlon where the people eschew nouns for verbs these distinctions seem obvious.
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Is the Notion of "Being as Process" Which Informs Quantum Field Theory and Autopoietic Systems an Appropriate Meme Use For Analyzing Culture?
If we were to speak of human consciousness in the same way Pagels spoke of quantum field theory, or Maturana and Valera speak of biological systems we would have to say that what is, are embedded self-producing systems. The arrow of time exists as a boundary marker between the microsphere level and the macrosphere level.
"Time" and "being" exist in a complementary fashion; those entities that are "timeless" don't "exist" (as entities), those entities that "exist" are subject to the rule on time (i.e., entropy). The "proof" of this is that, although we don't experience any "gaps" in the flow of time, for some mysterious reason we have no "memory" of the future. This is significant in its absence (as Sherlock Holmes showed us in the case of the dog who didn't bark in the night). The boundaries between levels are often permeable--to information, if not matter ( "What is Matter? -- Never mind. What is Mind? -- No matter.") Awareness of other levels is experienced as "noise" in the channel. Therefore, though we don't "remember" the future perhaps that is because we are effectively turning a deaf ear to the "noise" in the system. Perhaps, as the Eastern mystics have told us all along we have to learn to stop "listening" in order to "hear" the future. However, to speak of human consciousness as if it were a quantum field, or a biological system is akin to using a plumber's tool to fix a carpenter's problem. A borrowed "meme" may not be the appropriate tool with which to undertake our search for the form of future-memories. Various authors have written on this point.
Keith Ansell Pearson [viroid life (1998)] raises the question as to whether the notion of "meme" itself, based as it is on the natural vehicle of genetics, is an appropriate vehicle to carry cultural transformations--regardless of content--given the man-made (i.e., mechanic or artificial) nature of culture:
"In his The Selfish Gene Dawkins seeks to advance a new cultural Darwinism by interpreting the evolution of culture in terms of a memetics. He argues that concentration on the gene as the unit of selection is unhelpful when it comes to understanding the'evoluton of modern man' (1989:191). However, he simply fails to appreciate the immense complications which the notion of 'memes' raises for a theory of human 'evolution'. To replace 'genes' with 'memes' as a basis for understanding 'culture' is to remain on the level of naturalism (as opposed to artificiality). Memetics completely reifies the processes of cultural evolution since it has no insight into how such processes involve technical and social mediation. The idea that culture develops in terms of a process of self-replication analogous to genetic evolution is an assertion at best and completely unfounded." [p.13 footnote 3]
Randy Whitaker, posted the following dated 24 October, 1993, on his online "electronic forum for Autopoiesis & Enactive Cognitive Science," The Observer.
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While he is talking specifically about the writings of Maturana and Valera, I believe his comments about the epistemological and non-ontological nature of autopoiesis provide a caution regarding any articulation of this meme as a cultural phenomenon.
Other theorists have no difficulty postulating the spontaneous emergence of autopoietic systems as a response to stimulus at a "lower" level of organization.
Turchin and associates propose an "evolutionary-systemic philosophy" that is built on "actions, rather than objects ... [or] energy". His posting on the Principia Cybernetica Web site summarizes the model of the "metasystem transition" which he elaborates elsewhere (The Phenomenon of Science, Columbia University Press, 1977)
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He postulates that "the major steps in evolution, both biological, and cultural, are nothing else but metasystem transitions of a large scale." And goes on to say, "When we speak of cybernetic systems, we can describe them either in terms of their structures, or phenomenologically, in terms of their functioning. We cannot claim at the present time that we know the structure of the human brain well enough to explain thinking as the functioning of that structure. However we can observe evolutionizing systems and make conclusions about their internal structure from a phenomenological description of how they function."
He then proposes the "evolutionary" model: When a phenomenological description of activities of some systems fits this formula we have all reasons to believe that this is a result of a metasystem transition in the physical structure of the systems. Here is the sequence of metasystems transitions which led, starting from the appearance of organs of motion, to the appearance of human thought and human society:
control of position - movement
control of movement - irritability (simple reflex)
control of irritability - (complex) reflex
control of reflex - associating (conditional reflex)
control of associating - human thinking
control of human thinking - culture
In addition, Bruno Latour (1997, On Actor Network Theory), while using a different vocabulary, describes much the same process of "world creating."
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Keeping in mind that we are speaking metaphorically, let us now look at some conceptualizations of the "future" that posit it as a series of non-deterministic actions that involve an element of freedom, or as a moving actant that co-determines its being along with those who experience it.
