https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line
Time is On My Mind
I have, for many years now, decades really, marveled at the peculiar modern human propensity to form and believe models of time that are as absurd as they are impossible… namely, that there’s a ‘single stream of linear temporality’ to which all beings, relationships and situations are subject. This ‘universal’ concept of a single temporal line, flowing only from past to present to future, is at once intuitively natural and completely impossible.
At least since the publication of Einstein’s relativity theorems, it has been obvious that the existence of light-cones and world-lines implies a situation vastly differing from our common-sensical conceptions and measurements of temporality. In any intelligent evaluation of temporality (and let’s be clear, if one gets this wrong as a first move, it will rapidly become impossible to understand the nature of identity or relation »at all) it should be obvious that the ‘age’ of anything involves a complex manifold of participants, timelines, world-lines and light-cones.
Thus ‘the age of life on Earth’ is not the single-valued, temporally ‘flat’ derivation of ~3.8 billion years, but rather that number multiplied by the number of organisms, their unique temporal ‘rates’ (speed-of-life), and the myriad relationships »between them. A simple example is easily presented as follows: 8 billion humans existing together on Earth for ‘1 year’ = 8 billion human life-years (+ the relational temporalities between all of them).
This result is only accurate if we agree to see the humans as separate from all other life forms, including the cells and virii and fungi that comprise them. Consider that if a cell’s ‘rate of life’ is approximated as 1 hour of cell-time = 1 month of animal time, a single hour in a single human body is ~65 trillion months or 5416672602739.726 years. While this seems absurd to imagine, what is actually going on temporally in and as what we refer to as organisms are forms, modes and extents of temporality that totally defy our ‘common-sensical’, single-world-line concepts of time and relation.
This aspect of time is profoundly provocative to consider, but there are many other features of time that are orthogonal to (that violate) our common thought, evaluation, awareness and perspective. It is obvious, for example, that time, like water or even electromagnetism »has character, and that character is incredibly complex in its properties, potentials and characteristics. Further, it is clear that time has characteristics that can act retrocausally (the present being transformed by the future) and there are forms of temporal causality that are not merely the result of procausal (the past informing the present) characteristics… there are modes of procausality that violate or directly refute our A causes B conceptions.
0 Comments