https://organelle.medium.com/understanding-time-a-biorelational-perspective-770cdd4af974

Just exactly how ‘old’ is a single organism?

Consider the implications of world-lines in Einstein’s relativity. One way of thinking about this is that each observer is a unique instance of timespace, and has unique experience of relation-in-time. This has implications for the actual nature of biorelational temporality that deserve careful attention. The idea of ‘flat time’ (as if the entire planet was the only world-line we count) is useful, but also absurd, because the actual number of distinct organismal experiencers/observers is somewhere between 500 billion billion and 1 trillion trillion. That’s how many world-lines exist here, in a biorelational hyperstructure.

We must also account for »the relationships between them.

So how much organismal time passes on Earth in a single ‘year’?

For humans, there are ~8 billion of us on Earth. This means that, in order to understand the world-line temporality, we would multiply one year by the number of humans. A single ‘year’ on Earth is thus 8 billion human life-years. »And all the relationships between them. And all the relationships between them »and all other organisms on Earth at the time.

So how ‘old’ is a single organism… say, a housefly?

If we examine the species of houseflies, we can estimate the number of such flies that have ever lived. There are approximately 100 trillion houseflies on Earth at present. They have an average lifespan of 20 days. If they are 120 million years old, the following results ensue:

Over the history of this species, something like 2.5 * 10^20 houseflies or 250 billion billion individual houseflies have existed. That means that Nature has run 250 billion billion housefly experiments on Earth, and any housefly you encounter is the result of those experiments (divided by the fraction that any specific fly’s hereditary lineage represents).

If we presume that houseflies experience biorelational time at exactly the same rate as humans, they have existed for 250 billion billion life-years. Compared to any housefly, the ‘one world-line only’ age of the UNIVERSE is … trivial.

If, instead, we adjust their lifespan to be roughly equivalent to our own, 1 biorelational ‘housefly year’ = ~ 1,303.75 human years. This would mean that the organisms we call houseflies are 325.9375 trillion trillion years old in terms of biological time.

This is important for a number of reasons. But what I want to highlight is that not all organismal intelligences are »cognitive. In insects, the ‘intelligence’ (often) isn’t really about brains, but rather, about bodies. They comprise an astonishingly sophisticated array of ‘intelligence’ that is »physicalized over time. The ‘intelligence’ of the common housefly has been physically perfected over an almost inconceivable amount of biorelational time. The depth of that intelligence is staggering— but it is largely physical, rather than cognitive.

The organims of Earth form a »network of unique intelligences, world-lines, and temporalities. This network is the ‘sum over the populations’, each with their unique forms, activities and relationships. Our own intelligence is not really ‘ours’. Rather, it is the result of our capacity to inhabit something that resembles a superposition over the vast majority of organisms on Earth.

Damage to those networks, lands in us in real time. And when they are healed, or re-diversified… the benefits of that land in us in the same way.

https://organelle.medium.com/understanding-time-a-biorelational-perspective-770cdd4af974