Nettime: The Philosophy, Science, and Culture of Networked Temporality (Extended Version)

(Sections 2 and 3 are new, see below)

1. What is Time?

What is time? Surely time can be simple, as measured by clocks of various sorts. Distinct rhythms of a pendulum, or changes in number on a digital clock. The predictable movement of something that goes back and forth, an oscillator which covers a repeatable distance of space each time. But if we define time this way, we use notions like “repeat” in our very definition, presupposing that which we are attempting to define. Or perhaps, as suggested by famed theorist of time Henri Bergson, we are simply spatializing time by definining it this way. Clocks, after all, change physicially, and this isn’t time, it’s space. To imagine time as the movement from one moment to another, like “beads on a string,” is a spatial model.

Nevertheless, space and time are inestricably linked. It always takes time to cover an expanse of space, at least in the everyday world, and whatever takes up time seems to also occupy space. Whatever time is, it seems bound to a notion of space, even if the relation between these is anything but simple. Speed is simply the rate at which we cover space in time, converting one into the other. It can take me three hours to walk across town, or ten minutes by car. Inversely, endurance is simply the manner in which space is occupied by the same thing over time, and this indicates for us that, in relation to other endurances, something has “occupied” space. A stone occupies space, for me, at least, when it appears the same in relation to what’s around it for a period of time. This appearance continues, “repeats” itself, even when I close and open my eyes, or try to mash another stone into it, and realize, they won’t blend, even as coffee and milk seem perfectly happy to cohabitate in space, even if they displace each other a bit, but different colors of light seem to be able to overlay and blend and share space with hardly a problem. The displacement or occupation of space is always relative, and not only to the maps of occupations and displacements which are a spatial layout, but also in regard to time, for occupation and displacement, of objects or appearances, always happens in relation to time.

Models of Time: Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, Literature, Film, and Everyday Life

In the history of philosophy, definitions of time abound, and with this, it becomes possible to list off differing notions of time, the Augustinian philosophy of time, the Hegelian model, the Bergsonian model, the Deleuzian model. Within the history of science, there are also named models of time, such as Newtonian time, Minkoswki time, Einsteinian spacetime, Quantum spacetime. The time of Newton is similar to that of “beads on a string,” and yet, because it involves calculus, with its capacity for infinite division, the beads can be of any size, surely like physical beads on a physical string in physical space. With Minkowski, the time of physics began to compress and stretch, and with Einstien, time began to warp in relation to gravity, the famed “theory of relativity,” which introduced such new notions of “curved spacetime,” perhaps better visualized as “scrunched” or “expanded” spacetime, into physics.

Mathematicians, of course, had already begun to imagine such notions, and these seemingly unreal formulations were influential on the physicists who found more concrete applications for them. Riemann’s notions of quilting spaces of various types of scrunched or expanded spaces together to produce a monstrous “Franken”-space, a patchwork of geometries, each, of which would experience time differently in relation to these spaces, paved the way for Einstein. As did the work of Felix Klein, who famously realized that just as painters had been converting four-dimensional space and time into flat two-dimensional depictions for centuries, so there were ways to convert forms of space into each other by transforming and warping them, turning a sphere into a circle and an ellipse or back, simply in regard to the perspective one took on them. In fact, we often transform spaces and their shapes into one another simply by walking around them. All of this happens in and through time, space is never devoid of time, and vice-versa, and Einstein built upon this, giving rise to the stretching and bending spacetime spoken of by relativity theory. Quantum physicists, building upon this further stilll, describe a world in which spacetime is even stranger, permeated by jumps and fuzzinesses of various sorts, in which it is possible to either go back or forward in time, or act in ways which are fundamentally indistinguishable from this.

Beyond philosophy and science, there is also the time of other disciplines, the time as described by historians, ethnographers, sociologists. There is also the time described by literature, so many types of narrative time. And narratives aren’t only present in fiction, but also arguments (“if A and B, then C”), jokes, political narratives (“this war is different from the last one”), economic narratives (“this crisis was caused by this or that”), therapeautic narratives (“my parents help explain why I’m this way”), or the various other types of narrative structures we use to help us structure our lives. Or consume for pleasure in so many works of art. Language is itself fundamentally temporal, verbs producing transits between nouns, in regard to so many qualities and connectors, all produced by grids of symbols of various sorts that we arrange and rearrange in space and time like so many bits of a hypercomplex game whose stakes are often the very stuff of reality.

Beyond language, however, there are many ways in which we can bring the time within us into resonance with various aspects of the world around us. The time it takes to walk through a building, for example, in which one can walk faster or slower, loop back to where one started. Or subway time, whereby slices of an urban landscape are sutured by voyages of varying speed and directness within looping underground passageways which seem like so many virtual voyages into other dimensions. Or the time travels of filmic narratives, which by means of narrative conventions such as time-travel, can loop and bend.

If the time outside us seems relatively stable in relation to a variety of spatial layouts, however, our lived, “internal” time often seems the strangest of all. Memory flashes us backwards in time and permeates our present in varying degrees, even as anticipation, the futureshock of our past projected into our future, really, permeates our past and digs within it for useful memories which it them throws in front of us, permeating our present from the other side. Our future and present are saturated with the memories we use to frame and imagine them, just as our past is always organized and sifted through by means of the fantasies we have about future and present which help us organize our imagined future actions, hopes, and dreams. Separating past, present, and future in lived time, the time inside of us, often seems a paradoxical enterprise at best. Philosophers and mystics have long wondered whether or not the past really exists, or the future for that matter, as we never seem to “really” get to either, we live in what seems like an eternal present. And yet, this present is so full of past and future, memories and anticipations, hopes and fears based on those experienced previously, do we ever get the pure present? It vanishes, much like the past and future do. All seem unreal when you focus on them, as if time was only ever where you weren’t looking. And yet, mystics through the ages have countered that it is possible to expand time by meditating on this eternal present to expand it beyond time and space, to reach eternity within each and every moment and fragment of matter or space.

Taken to its extreme, inner, lived time begins to sound almost as strange as that of the physicists or mathematicians, microcosm refracting macrocosm or vice-versa. Then again, the physical world seems pretty stable unless we stray far from the “normal” conditions of the everyday, while lived internal time seems normaly only when we pay attention to how strange what seems “normal” to us actually is. Either way, the notion of time is used to describe these both, as aspects of the same thing.

Is Time a Word? The Linguistic Argument, and Beyond

Perhaps then the issue is with language, perhaps the most complex creation of humanity. Some philosophers have gone in this direction. Our language reifies, which is to say, “thing-ifies” whatever it describes. Words fix the flux of the world into static snapshots which don’t actually correspond to the much more labile conditions of the world beyond it. The useful fiction of words perhaps distorts or even creates what we experience as time. Nouns are perhaps the worst culprits, at least verbs are somewhat more honest, and adjectives allow us to imagine aspects things share despite space and time, while connecting words just do the dirty work of bringing these all together and putting them in motion. And it is in the motion that we rediscover the time killed by nouns and other less guilty words, the motion of producing and consuming sentences, and getting around the deceptive periods which separate sentences like so many false idols of space within time. Books spatialize time, then, perhaps as much as clocks, or films. Or bodies, which localize time within these lumps of moving flesh, and curl it up within these meat-computers we call brains, who then produce things like words which segment the world into words and then reassemble them to produce a parodic representation of the world beyond it.

But language certainly can’t be the only culprit. Films are also guilty, they slice the world up into snapshot images which are reassembled into moving images which are warped reassemblages which resonate with the time of the world, yet are fundamentally distinct temporal creations. Our everyday lives as then equally as suspect, as wel slice the world into bits, like so many moving cameras we move our perspectives around, dicing up the world from our own points of view, and then reassemble them in the fuzzily warped and edited storehouse we call memory. And if, as scientists argue, our present and future are threaded through with this highly suspect memory archive, then our present should hardly be trusted, it is ultimately a personal language of sorts, whose letters and words are the memories we use to help us recognize, describe, and re-present the present experiences we filter and categorize before we even realize we have done so. Perhaps the very notion of an ego is simply the deepest such memory-word we know, the “I” around which our language of experiences congeal.

Maybe this all because we have bodies which warp our experiences, turning moving light particles into sight, moving air particles into sound, translating our sense-data into memory-recognitions, and all in relation to our evolutionary heritage which biases us to look for certain experiences over others. Whatever time or space we ever experience is ultimately the result of the way in which our biological evolution evolved us to experience it, in ways which it felt were most likely to help us survive. And if our culture, our films and our words and so much else, were created from this foundation, might they not be simply more complex warpages of the world, inheritors of the biology which evolved us with its own agendas? Of course, biological evolution is only one level of complexity, the physical world had to “evolve” up to the point at which it could “evolve” organisms, and the difference between complex physical systems and living ones seems ultimately only a matter of degree. A whirlpool seems to have a “life of its own,” and to “want” to continue whirling the way it does. To say this isn’t proto-life is like saying that organisms aren’t hyper-matter. It’s all a matter of degree, or perspective.

Either way, if time is ultimately a word, and words are biased distortions of the world beyond us, this should hardly be reason to stop there and call it a day. There are so many levels of distortion, why fetishize language? Our bodies distort, our brains distort, our sense organs distort, our evolution distorts. It’s all distortion, all the way down. Or translation and creation, depending on how you see it. Matter distorts, and perhaps is this very distortion of some primordial energy, or something deeper still, as scientists believe that matter and energy are simply differing sides of the same. Perhaps space and time simply are distortions then too. Space, time, matter, energy, all distortions of some deeper matrix.

But matrix of what? Space, time, matter, and energy, these are abstractions of our experience, which seems only ever filtered by our bodies, brains, psychological biases, cultural biases, the list goes on and on. Perhaps the universe is little more than a set of translations of experiences into each other, and matter, energy, space, and time are simply the terms we use to organize the most stable of these, at least, as the world appears to us.

Is Time Real? Fantasies of Idealist and Materialist Notions of Time

Perhaps, as some have argued, it’s all a simulation, like we see in films such as The Matrix (1999). Perhaps studying film, or virtual reality, isn’t such a strange place to go to study time. Whatever time is, its as much there as it is in matter or energy. For even our most indubitable experiences, whether personal or shared with others, are only ever known as our experiences. Even if I perform a science experiment, and a community of scientists verifies it, it could be a dream, or I could be one of the famed “brains in a vat” which philosophers sometimes imagine. It could all be a simulation. And there is ultimately no way of knowing if when I see a bunch of scientists verify my experiment, that they aren’t all part of a dream or simulation. Perhaps there are glitches that might give it away, but even these could be parts of a larger simulation or dream still. This is why some scientists have argued that our universe could be one enormous simulation, a holographic projection, and they have even tried to develop experiments that could test if this were the case. But what then would be the difference between virtual and physical reality? Should we care?

Likewise with the physical world. Even if I only ever experience it through my own experience, the aspects of my experience that seem shared with others, which is to say, the so-called “physical” world, even if it’s not really there, even if other people are simply figments of my imagination, they seem so stable and follow such predictable rules, that they can treated as if they were “real.” In fact, even if they are an illusion, what difference would this make, so long as my whole life were this illusion? Of course, even if we were to learn that the whole world of our experience were a simulation, then we could start to wonder if the machine producing the simulation weren’t also a simulation of some deeper simulation.

Such an infinite regress occurs as well when it is not idealism taken to its extreme, but also materialism. If all is matter, then some of this matter give rise to illusions, images, like our sense experience and dreams. But perhaps this is just how matter feels other matter. Our brains experience our sense organs, which experience the matter of the world, it’s all matter all the way down. And thoughts then are just how our brains, which are matter, experience each other. Perhaps then experience, including that of sensation, thought, and feeling, is simply how matter reacts with other matter, and how this is experienced from the inside. Perhaps then all matter, including molecules, feel each other in some very simple, primordial way, and when matter gets more complex, it feels more complexly, and human thought is simply this.

Idealism has difficulty accounting for the physical world, and yet, taken to its extreme, idealism deconstructs itself back into the physical world, or cuts the cord to reality entirely, an impossible situation and/or infinite regress. Likewise, materialism has difficulty accounting for the inner worlds we experience, and seems on the verge of arguing that inner experience is impossible, or it pushes it into ever smaller and more distant realms of matter (ie: the body, the brain, the prefrontal cortex) in what is ultimately an infinite regress verging on the soul. No wonder so many of the most materialist scientists find that there’s a need for a ghost in the machine. For taken to its extreme, materialism ultimately deconstructs, hits paradox or infinite regress, or turns into its opposite, namely, a world in which all matter must have something like experience, even in simplest form.

And yet, even though materialism and idealism both deconstruct, perhaps this isn’t the worst place to be, for since experience is all we have really ever known, perhaps matter and appearance are sides of each other, which is to say, of experience, which is all we ever, well, experience. Space, time, matter, and energy, these all seem aspects of experience then as well. The experience we share is called the physical world, that which we don’t is our “inner” world, but it’s all appearances of varying degrees of stability. Those appearances which appear the most stable we call “real,” and those which are less stable are “merely” appearances, but since it seems there’s no firm way to draw a line between these, these are perhaps differences of degree.

A Matrix of Experience Beyond Binarity

Perhaps we can start from here, from experience, which is all we have ever known. Any experience we have ever had of a world beyond us, or of other experiencing consciousness, is only ever aspects of our experience, which isn’t merely our experience, but also the world. These are two sides of each other, like two sides of a sheet of paper, inseparable. We can’t imagine the world but through ourselves, and vice-versa, and each, like materialism and idealism, ultimately deconstruct each other, or giving rise to paradox, infinite regress, or some sort of fuzzy or oscillating mixture of these. One can either try to ignore this, and cling to ultimately relative notions like “self” or “world,” or embrace this, and realize that self and world are interdependent notions, aspects of each other, and of the more encompassing situation of which they are aspects, and which is all we have ever experienced.

Let’s call this grounding situation “experience.” From such a perspective, “my experience” would be that most fundamental aspect which seems unique to me, and those aspects which seem, from within “my experience” to exceed it somehow, to be that of “the world,” of which the experience of “others” is a part. For there do seem to be experiences beyond mine, as attestted to by the reports of other experiencers, even if I only ever access those through my experience. “Experience” as such, then, would be the term used to describe the seemingly larger whole of experience of which mine is an aspect. My experience would then be an opening onto experience as such, included and including it, as paradoxical as this might seem to more traditional forms of logic. Whatever logic there is in the world, it seems to derive from this, so if we want to call it paradoxical, so be it, the foundation from which logic emerges is paradox, such that paradox would ultimately, then, be the foundation of logic, and not vice-versa.

Space then could be seen as the most stable general network of shared experiences among experiencers. For example, if I move an object, and my friend sees this, we both see the object moving, but also the world of experience around this staying stable in relation to the moving object. The greatest stability within this seems to be what we call space, the invariant network which underlies and organizes that which is common to the experiences which experience within experience. While this may warp and bend according to gravity, and ultimately, acceleration, as the experiments used to ground relativity theory seem to show, then perhaps I would have differing experiences than another experiencer. And yet, a third party would be unable to tell which of us is having the “correct” experience of space. Space then would be that within experience which seems to give rise to all these experiences of space by various experiencers.

All of which shows why it makes sense to argue that there needs to be something producing all our particular experiences within experience, and why experience is still ultimately only ever the experience of experiencers, such that perhaps experience as such is an abstraction from the experience of experiencers, a projection of these, an ideal assemblage of all the experiences of all experiencers. This helps explain why the term experience is worth retaining, because there has to be something which relativizes these experiences, in regard to which they are “only” experiences, which is to say, if there were nothing underlying or producing these experiences, it would be redundant to call them “mere” experiences. But this is hardly the case, because experiencers don’t always have the same “external” experiences, and while these issues can usually be resolved by a third party, this isn’t always the case. But if we examine further the distinction between “internal” and “external” experience, this issue gets fuzzier still, for these are also merely aspects of the same, a question of degree. Is the experience of “my” eye the same as “my” experence? What about that of “my” brain? Is the world “mine”? Or my “ego”? Like “self” and “world,” these notions too will deconstruct.

Likewise with that between a particular experience and experience as such, or between experience and that which produces it. But the slippage can be at least partially stabilized by allowing all these notions to be relative to the context which produces these, such that they cease being reified notions, and work more as positions within networks of aspects of a whole which always exceeds the sum of its aspects.

From such a perspective, it’s possible to speak of experience as the ideal extrapolation of all the particular experiences of experiencers. Each experiencer has a “world” of experience, and the sum total of these, greater than the sum of its aspects, is “the” world, the ground of experience as such. The world would then be within all words, but yet always in excess of any, aggregate, and all, for it seems this world is always changing, surprising us, and hardly capturable by all worlds, even in the aggregate, similarly to experiences and experience as such.

In fact, it seems that any particular aspects of the world, or series of these, is always exceeded by the world. This seems to be the fundamental quality of the world of experience itself. Let’s call this “matrix” or “oneand.” It is matrix because it gives rise to the world and experience, and is present in any and all aspects thereof. And it is “oneand” because it is always in excess of any attempt to reduce it to any reified unity. Matrix, or oneand, would then be the very stuff of the world of experience itself. Any and all aspects of this would be only aspects thereof. Any segment, discrimination, unity, binary, quality, motion, concept, term, self, world, or anything else, would only ever be an aspect of matrix, or oneand, which is grasped in each and all experiences, and is that of which experienced, experiencer, experiencing, and experience are composed as so many of its aspects. Matrix, or oneand, is beyond whole and part, container and contained, or any other binary distinction, as well as beyond any unitary description, such as experience or appearance, or even attempts to be described by notions such as matrix and oneand. These two names, placeholders and useful representations at best, are simply two aspects of this fundamental stuff.

Martrix, or oneand, is that which is beyond and and all attempts to grasp it, even if present in aspect within all of these. To use the language of many Asian philosophies, it is nondual. That is, in regard to any “a” and/or “b” which could be said about it, or any other set of statements or chainging or nesting thereof, it would be neither a nor b, both a and b, neither “neither a nor b” nor “both a and b,” and both “neither a nor b” and “both a and b.”

All of which may seem nonsensical, or useless, irrational, illogical, or paradoxical, or whatever terms one might want to apply to this sort of thinking. Perhaps quasi-religious, or mystical, or deluded. But the logic behind the argument which brought us to this place is hopefully apparent. Logic and argument ultimately find their foundation in something ultimate and paradoxical like this, or are limited fictions. The irrational, paradoxical, useless, nonsensical, these are part of our world too, only aspects of the whole of which its parts are only ever that.

What’s more, science and mathematics are increasingly tending in such a direction. Early in the twentieth century, both physics and mathematics had a “foundations crisis” in which they began to question their most basic presupositions, and the results unsettled the seeming foundations of both. In phsycis, relativity theory and quantum physics demonstrated that any attempt to “reify” any aspect of our world gives rise to what, to ordinary thinking, would be paradoxes, such as incommensurable relative experiences, or uncertainties so uncertain that it’s ultimately impossible to determine if it is the subject performing the experiment, or the very substance of the world, which is uncertain, such that the very distinction between these seems to begin to break down. Physicists are still attempting to deal with the fallout from the “uncertainty” at the heart of relativity and quantum physics. Whether their interpretations of the data take a subject-oriented, epistemological tilt (ie: the Copenhagen Interpretation), or a more substance-oriented view whereby it is the world which has this uncertainty within it (ie: Bohmian interpretation), or rather opt for infinite regress (ie: Many Worlds interpretations), these are ultimately aspects of the same, which is to say, the manner in which, for whatever reason, its seems that the experience of the world, when pushed to its extremes, will deconstruct, turn into its opposite, produce infinite regresses, or otherwise resist extreme reification, and the concomitant binarization of inside and outside of a reification which always comes with this.

In mathematics, the situation is hardly different. Around the turn of the century, mathematicians attempted to see if math could be used to “prove” its own assumptions. And this lead to paradox, infinite regress, or aspects of each, depending on how you interpret this. The issue was, in short, whether or not the “set of all sets” could be considered a set. That is, whether or not the most ecompassing way of talking about the world, the “set of all sets,” could itself be considered an aspect of the world or not. If yes, then there must be something which could emcompass this set, a yet more encompassing entity, for any set could always be a member of another set, thereby leading to infinite regress. But if it wasn’t, then the “set of all sets” was incoherent, a set that wasn’t a set, or a new type of set, one which fundamentally recast what it meant to be a set, for it paradoxically had a sort of infinite regress as part of its very definition, that which, according to what it means to be a set, would make it not a set. Contradiction, inconsistency, or incoherence, these were the options. And this led Kurt Godel in 1929 to prove, using the tools of the mathematics of set theory, that set theory was at its base one of these three, depending on how you wanted to frame the issue, and that there was no way to get around this and still be doing mathematics of set theory. And the results were generalizable from set theory to the rest of mathematics, at least to an extent that the results of Godel’s proofs destroyed any attempt to search for the foundations of mathematics in anything resembling this way. From here, the search for the foundations was in something, well, more slippery, paradoxical, and relative, in ways which uncannily parallel that in physics.

Beyond Reification

All of which is to say that the notion of matrix, or oneand, in the manner described briefly in the preceding sections, as the all of which any is composed, which is beyond reification, whole and parts, self and world, and yet that of which these are aspects, is resonant with the findings of math and science. That is, no matter how one interprets the data of relativity and quantum physics, data which have been reproduced and checked to such a degree as to be accepted unquestionably by the scientific community, the fundamental stuff of our world functions something like what I’m describing as matrix or oneand. Likewise, the foundations of mathematics requires something like a “set of all sets” or “number larger/smaller than others,” of which all others are aspects. If science is a form of materialism, and mathematics a form of idealism, they deconstruct their own foundations similar to their philosophical cousins, and are faced with paradox, fuzziness, or infinite regress. To use the language of mathematics, the options are incoherence, inconsistency, or incompletion, while to use the language of physics, the various attempts to explain away uncertainty (such as ontological Bohmian approaches, epistemological Cophenhagen approaches, or Many Worlds approaches). Ultimately, each of the three options in a given field are aspects of each other, and between and amongst these disciplinary views on the world, so many lenses on experience, these are aspects of each other. In fact, the foundations of any lens on the world seem to run into versions of this trio in one form or another, whether these lenses focus on inner experience or the physical world, or any other way of slicing up experience.

Matrix resists being ever turned into a one, and so, is oneand, and any attempt to reify or reduce it to a one will result in these limit effects, the ways in which the oneand will always manifest within ones, but never be reducible thereto. In fact, if there seems to be anything which limits matrix, it is only its ability to be any and all ones which are not exclusive and try to reduce any aspect of oneand or oneand itself to a one, even if this oneand is the all. As such, matrix is necessarily beyond one and many, part and whole, a and b, but that from which all these notions, and in fact, all experiences and worlds, derive, of which all are aspects, and each aspect is the all whole, if in its own way, for aspect and all are simply aspects of the oneand which is beyond such a distinction.

Some Precursors: Hegel and Schelling 

These ideas, while resonant with the forefront of physics and mathematics, are hardly new, even if they haven’t previously been described in this form. The notion that any aspect of our world must be an aspect of that which is within any and all aspects, a sort of “set of all sets,” was described by German philosophers, often called Idealists, in the early nineteenth century. F.W.J. Schelling spoke of an Unconditioned, or ulimited, that which was a ground of any and all conditioned, which is to say, limited, entities. G.W.F. Hegel built upon this further, saying that this Absolute was that of which any aspect of the world was a part, including concepts, things, persons, experiences, history, and the world itself. The basic thought here is actually quite simple. Any part of the world has to be a part of the whole of the world, which is always more than the sum of these parts, even if present in some way within all, and never reducible to any of these parts, because it it what is beyond them and gives rise to them. Without such a notion of the whole beyond any whole, paradoxes emerge. For example, what was before our universe, or where did our universe come from? Such questions lead to infinite regress, or paradox, or inconsitency.

And so, one can ignore the paradoxes, or see them as part of one’s description of the world, and in fact, as the fundamental ground of any and all descriptions of the world. Any descriptions which don’t admit, include, or somehow take this into account are dishonest partial descriptions, and those which do are fuller or more open descriptions. But all are limited descriptions, because these paradoxes seem unavoidable, fundamental, and don’t seem to go away. Whether we ignore them or not, they seem to be part of the fabric of the world. Might as well try to work with them, rather than continually be surprised when they frustrate our attempts to control and manage the world in various ways.

Hegel and Schelling were hardly the first to have these ideas, however. Both argued, each in their own ways, that “the Absolute” was fundamentally non-dual, which, to use the language of Hegel, means it is “speculative,” beyond the limits of “picture-thinking,” the term he used for thought which attempts to reduce things to fixed representations. The Absolute is beyond the limitations of language to describe it, and any notion of concept we use to grasp it has to be beyond the simplistic notions of logic we use to grasp less complex aspects of our world. And so, for Hegel, “the Concept,” which can be translated perhaps most accurately as “the Grasping,” takes the shape of the Absolute, not the other way around. Any simpler ways of grasping aspects of the world are then only limited aspects of our grasp of conceptuality, which, in its fullest form, is fundametnally non-dual.

Similar notions, namely, that binary, dualistic thinking are simplifications of the more fundamentally non-dual, non-binary thinking which is needed to understand more fundamental aspects of the cosmos, are much older than the nineteenth century. Hegel, for example, was influenced by the mystic Jakob Boehme, amongst others. In his later years, Schelling increasingly looked for the origins of his notion of the Ungrounded in various world religions. And there is much in common between notions of God as present in many theologies and this notion of the Absolute or Ungrounded. Isn’t God, whatever this term might mean, at least, in theory, supposed to be outside of time, space, world, subject, object, experience, language, and thought, and yet be present in any and all of these, as that which is always beyond any and all, yet cause and even ultimate purpose of all of these?

Of Physics and Mathematics: The Time of Singularity

While it may seem that this is simply the pathway towards irrational mysticism, it is important to note that a similar notion, without the theological trappings, has been a part of mainstream science and mathematics since the early twentieth centuries, about the time of the foundations crises. One could even see this notion as a result of these, what these crises produced. This notion is that of “singularity.”

In physics, “the singularity” is the term most commonly used to describe that which gave rise to “the Big Bang” which began our universe. The notion of the singularity is itself paradoxical. Physicists know that as any entity approaches the speed of light, its space and time condense, and that is also what happens as any entity approaches a “Black Hole.” A black hole is an entity whose gravity and density is so great, that it compresses space and time, and matter and energy with it, to something like infinity. The reason we don’t know if it truly ever reaches infinity is because it seems impossible to “reach” infinity (is it a place or time that is reachable?), but also, because any method we have to investigate black holes can only proceed so far until the very forces of the black hole itself would either destroy the observation device, or severly warp any signs it could send us, as even light cannot elude the grip of a black hole once it gets close enough to it.

What’s more, the mathematical formulas which scientists use to model the behavior of black holes, the same mathematical formulas used to describe the behavior of the rest of the physical universe, which normally produce excellent predictions of phenomenon, cease to be of much use the close one gets to a black hole. The tend to go infinite, either towards infinity or zero, and ultimately, these are in many situations sides of the same. If there measurements of time or space, matter or energy, go infinite or to zero, these are ultimately simply differing ways of looking at the same. Infinite energy would destroy anything not it, but since it was infinite, unless this infinity came in several degrees (and would it then still be infinity?), it would be uniform, and hence, in relation to various aspects within it, having zero difference from itself. And since energy is always a  relative measurement (ie: something has energy if it can do more work than something else, no difference means no “useful” energy), infinite energy would be ultimately the same as no energy.

When mathematical equations bottom out like this, particularly in situations that oherwise provide coherent answers, but which when taken to an extreme, reach such intensity that the physical quantities cease to make sense, this is what mathematicians refer to as a “singularity.” A simple case can be found if you try to divide any number by zero. Since any number can be put in as a possible answer, and any number times zero is zero, when you subract that from zero to see if there is any remainder, the quotient and remainder will always be zero. And so, divide any number by zero, and any number can function as a quotient, and equally get you nowhere, with no remainder. And so, any number isn’t quite wrong, because any number is as equally wrong or right as any other. Which is to say, math ceases, in this case, to function as math. This is why mathematicians refer to the answer to this question, and those like it, as “undefined.” This is different from when you subtract five from five, which will give you zero. When physical equations give you zero or one in a situation in which these answers make no sense, give you infinity, or go undefined, this is what is meant by a “singularity.”

In the history of math, these sorts of results were often treated as quirks which simply had to be worked around. But as the various branches of mathematics, such as algebra and number theory, began to link ever more closely with parallel aspects of geometry, it became clear that these strange results in equations lined up with the strange parts of the figures and shapes they could be used to describe. The center of a sphere, since it is not included in the sphere yet is in a sense present in all its aspects, if indirectly, is sometimes described as being a part of the sphere “at infinity.” Likewise, when a line intersects itself, it gives rise to contradictory results in the equations which describe the line, points which aren’t merely undefined, but rather, singular within the shapes and figures those equations describe. These points are indeterminate, within more than one space, time, equation, or attempt to grasp it in one way or another, at the same time. They are one, yet more, which is to say, oneand.

Singular points in equations line up with those in figures, and those in figures with those in the world they are used to describe. And so, many of the equations of relativity theory break down at black holes. Likewise with quantum physics. In fact, the very notion of a “particle” in quantum physics is a fiction. A complex process of mathematical juggling is necessary to make the results of the equations and experiments become “particle-like.” This process, known as “renormalization,” essentially reifies the result, makes them “normal” enough for scientists to work it. All of which is to say that, at least according to the findings of contemporary physics, the closer we get to trying to reify the ultimate fabric of reality, the more it seems to “resist.” For this reason, many physicists don’t even believe it is possible to have “nothing,” for even the void of space seems to contain “vacuum energy” and swarms of “virtual particles” within “quantum foam.” And no-one knows what happens in a true singularity, like those present within black holes.

Some physicists feel that what appears as a black hole to us is the the singularity which, on the “other side” of a black hole, can or does give rise to another universe. Perhaps singularities are like pumps, inflating one universe with matter and energy from another, and the universe beyond the universe, the “multiverse,” is actually a “Swiss-cheese” like affair of universes laced into each other by these points of singularity, not unlike that of geometric shapes, lines, or equations which intersect each other in geometry and algebra.

And if space and time seem to condense and scrunch infinitely as one approaches a black hole, if we run the equations which describe the universe as we know it backwards from the earliest evidence we have of the Big Bang, which scientists call the CMBE, or Cosmic Microwave Background Energy, we hit a singularity, which is why scientists and mathematicians, as well as theoretical cosmologists, refer to this point which gave rise to the Big Bang as “the singularity.” This entity would be that which gave rise to matter, energy, space, and time as so many aspects. This is why it makes no sense to speak of time or space before the Big Bang, unless in a fundamentally differenet sense. For in some senses, if time and space “unfolded” from the singularity, can we even say that the singularity “exists”? The very word “existence” implies that something has an independent reality. “Ex” is the prefix for “out” in Latin, seen in English words like “exit” or “exterior.” That which humans, including scientists, refer to as existing is something which is the way it is independent of our desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and wishes, and in a manner consistent across space and time.

If there is no space and time “in” the singularity, or rather, all space and time are always already included within this inclusion which is beyond exclusion, can we really speak of it existing? Or rather, can we speak of ourselves as existing? For in a sense, it is only the singularity which exists, and our existence is but a fiction, as fictional, ephemeral, and “unreal” as dreams of hallucinations. Then again, none of us have ever actually experienced the singularity, and because of the laws of physics, we never could, we’d be obliterrated if we even tried to approach it. So perhaps it is the dream or fiction. Either way, it seems to be the fiction and the foundation of contemporary math and science, that which provides the bases for the very equations of physics which describe the most real things we have ever experienced.

All of this is more reason to feel that the fundamental stuff of our universe is fundamentally nondual. Existence and non-existence hardly apply to the singularity or its products, for these are ultimately only aspects of it which are only ever partially and relatively applicable. Sense and reality as we know them break down at the singularity, and yet, it is the foundation of all we have ever experienced, including notions like reason or logic. And so, the foundation of sense is nonsense, the foundation of logic is paradox, the foundation of reality is fantasy, and yet, we can only ever know this by means of using the tools provided by sense, logic, and reality. The very argument deconstructs itself, such that it is possible to say that all we experience is neither nor yet both fantasy and reality, logical and paradoxical, existent and non-existent, sense and nonsense. The structure repeats with uncanny regularity. And this only indicates more powerfully why the notion of matrix, or the oneand, can be seen as that of which these are all aspects, so long as we keep in mind that the very naming and conceptualization of this notion is itself only an aspect thereof.

Whether or not we call this notion “the singularity” or “God” or “matrix” or “oneand” is perhaps irrelevant, what matter is how this notion changes our thinking and how we act, speak, and relate to the world around us. As Gregory Bateson famously argued, an information is only a difference that makes a diference. And if this notion doesn’t somehow make a difference to and for us, then perhaps it is no notion at all.

Is This Theology? Ethics, Science, Philosophy?

The similarities between this notion and that of “God” as described in many devotional traditions, philosophies, and other worldviews is perhaps not coincidental, and needs to be taken seriously. The fact that the at times most fervently atheistic mathematicians and scientists have found that their equations rely on an attempt to grasp something like “God” at their foundation should not be seen as an endorsement of any religion or belief system, and more than of atheism. “God” is a word, a human idea created by our culture, a projection of our greatest hopes, dreams, idealizations, desires, and perhaps fears. World religions are an attempt to domesticate, institutionalize, and instrumentalize and control the fundamentally destabilizing power and insight which is being described here, an insight so fundamentally destabilizing that it has shaken the entire Western scientific enterprese to its foundation, such that many try to work around and/or ignore it. But few who encounter it on a regular basis can deny that it is the foundation of what they do. This isn’t faith, it’s simply reason taken to its own logical breaking points and foundations, by its own means. Reason cannot found itself, for like everything else in the world, it deconstructs, and this ends in paradox, inconsistency, incoherence, or some mixture of these. Or the argument being presented here.

Any attempt to describe the notion being described here as “matrix” is necessarily partial. And the more it attempts to completely reify this notion, the further out of sync it will be with it, even if some degree of reification is necessary to even approach it at all. Between reification and pure openness, matrix is neither nor as well as both and. There is in fact here the core of an ethics, middle path between pure reification and pure dissolution, an ethics of development and growth of manifestation of matrix in all its fullness and potential.

And even science and mathematics, which often claim to be beyond ethics, are always already shot through with biases which imply various ethical ways of relating to the world. Why do we value doing science, or value doing mathematics? Why discover more about the way the world works, or try to control and harness the powers of nature? It is because we value things, like human life, or life in general, or pleasure which control over various aspects of nature brings, or even the pleasure of discovering the deeper secrets of the world. The motivationis always something we value. And whatever we value or devalue, even if it is passionately dispassionate activity, matrix must be at the core of this as well.

For in fact, matrix must be the foundation of all values, the source of all value and valuation, that which is valued in any valuation, as well as that which is beyond all value even as it is always an aspect of any and all values and valuations. When we begin to question which values we value valuing, the very notion of value will deconstruct like any others, and matrix will be staring us back in the face.

If it is possible that matrix is at the foundation of physics and mathematics, as well as that which all ethical and religious systems attempt to describe, and in fact, is that of which any aspect of the world is an attempt at representation in it s own way, then matrix is that which is refracted in any and all, even as some aspects of the world are more intensely matrixal, which is to say, they have more of the potential of matrix within them. The singularity, of course, but the singularity also destroys, which is to say, deconstructs, whatever it absorbs, and as such, it is neither life nor death to the cosmos, but also both of these and the other, beyond these and the foundations from which they derive.

The Question of Value

But the human mind, the inner experience of the world, now that is something which is able to bring the whole world of experience together within it, and reimagine the world in ever more powerful ways, then bring these dreams into the world, and unleash ever more potentials of the world. This mind, however, is a product of the deep creativity of the world itself, of the evolution of life and the cosmos. The human mind is perhaps the most fully realized representation of the singularity yet developed, even if a poor one at that.

And yet, the mind seems only the way in which our physical body feels itself from the inside, with thought as how the brain feels itself, feeling how the brain feels the body, and sensation how the brain feels the body feeling the world beyond. We are the sense organs of matrix, the way in which it comes to feel its world from outside its own insides. We are its dreams, thoughts within its giant brain, body, and world, which is to say, the cosmos, which is both inside and outside of us, as we are all inside and outside of matrix. Have we ever left the singularity? Is the Big Bang just a dream, as much as our cosmos, as much as our own experience, and our dreams of dreaming? The argument is little different than that which questions if we are living in a simulation. What matters, ultimately, is the difference this all makes.

And it seems that if matrix values anything, it is the further development of matrix. Which is to say, the robust emergence of more emergence. For what matrix does is emerge, it is emergence, and when it is more intensely emergent, it emerges not only in the present but future, it gives rise to time from the process of its emergence from itself. Spacetime results from emergence emerging from itself, as that which is opened within matrix so that it can emerge as emergence, which is what it is. Emergence is simply another name for matrix and oneand, for it is that of which these are, essence and existence being oneand, even if more intensely so in some aspects of the world than others. Dormant emergence is emergence turned against itself by extreme reification, while emergent emergence is emergence in the process of existing as its essence, which is to say, to emerge, and to do so in a way which feeds into future emergence, avoiding extreme reification as much as dissolution, while making use of both towards the end of greater emergence beyond past, present, and future, yet within all of these.

And so, if we are to develop an ethics from this, values to guide our projects, then we need to find those aspects of the world which are most intensely and sustainably emergent, and model our behavior on these, learn from them. And since matrix is fundamentally non-dual, is should come as little surprise that those aspects of our world which are most intensely emergent, which is to say, which complexify the most intensely and sustainably, are those which do so by intertwining with others, by emerging in relation with them, intertwining their own projects with those of others. No aspect of the world can emerge by reifiying itself, or turning other aspects of the world into reified mirror aspects of itself. No, the world resists this. All aspects of the world which thrive are other-centered and directed, because this is the core way in which one can be self-centered and directed.

But there is a middle zone. Towards one extreme in our world is the matrix which pursues the pathway of maximally robust self-centeredness, and those who tend to the other extreme, which is maximally other-centeredness. Those which follow the first path, which can be thought of as paranoid, tend to thrive in the short run, but undermine their own success in the long run, producing continual crises and potential crashes as they destroy the very aspects of their world which sustain them. Those aspects of matrix which are other-centered tend to proceed at a much slower yet more distributed way, and in the long term, this is more productive, stable, rich, and in sync with the deep patterns of matrix itself. Those which are purely other-centered or purely self-centered, however, will ultimately deconstruct themselves, but those who pursue the middle path will find a degree of resonance with that of the world around it as it tries to emerge more robustly as well. The distinction between self and world, in fact, begins to deconstruct, and what remains is the emergence of emergence. This is a non-dual ethics and way of life. Such an approach to the world, however, is ultimately relative to one’s surroundings, for the middle pathway is only ever the middle between reification and dissolution in relation to the world in which it finds itself.

Matrix desire to liberate matrix from its fetters, which is to say, from limitations, to develop itself and emerge in the most profound yet sustainable way possible. At least, this is what the history of the cosmos seems to show. All that we value is based upon life and life more abundantaly, and this is the result of the manner in which matrix valued and hence worked to give rise to something like matter and life which could value something like life and life more abundantly in the process. The paradox, the non-dual irony, perhaps, is that the more we value the quality of life of others is the greater degree to which ours increases.

And this seemingly opposite, dialectical logic is the way the world seems to work. Take any particular aspect of the world to its extreme, and it will deconstruct its own foundations, yet intertwine it with others towards non-dual ends, and new emergences will come to be which will give rise to new dualities which can give rise to yet more intense emergences, in and beyond duality and non-duality. Dialectics and deconstruction seem to be a part of this process.

In the process of emergence, matrix gives rise to a world fuller and deeper than it was in the singularity, a world with us in it. The sigularity has given us the world, and we can give it back, and in the process, gain it ourselves, in, through, and beyond ourselves. We do this by desiring liberation via the middle path, between reification and dissolution, for any and all, and working to make this possible. Within the zone of robust emergence, it means pushing things away from reification and mirroring of the same, and towards the refraction of difference, towards curiosity, desire, change, multiplicity. Politically speaking, this is radical socialist democracy, not chaos, but the world described by post-anarchist thinkers. Certainly, it is different from the evil world of today, ruled by megacorporations which run countries to divide and conquer the world via racisms, borders, queer-phobias, mysogyny, and general impoverishment of “others,” as well as the incarceration or bombing of others, always imagined as well valuable than ourselves, thereby producing a world always on the verge of its own deconstruction. Slower yet more distributed development is the only ethical way, investing in others until all are ready for the next step, and distributing control of the process, economically and politically, to the maximum degree that is sustainable. That is a robust world, a world that is maximally emergent.

While nature did not emerge that way, for it emerged from scarcity, in a world of animal eats animal, biological evolution hit an inflection point with humanity, it evolved altruism and cooperation, as well as recursive thought, and these gave us the ability to take evolution to the stars. They also gave us the ability to destroy and be cruel to ourselves, as well as the ability to extinguish all life on our planet. Unless we learn to conquer our inner worlds, we will destroy our outer ones. The fiction that science and mathematics are beyond values fails to take into account the fact that as science is on the verge of deconstructing the human to give rise to the post-human, via technologies such as artificial intelligence and nano-bio-tech, we need to deconstruct our values to emerge from these as well. Emergence, and the pathway provided by the middle path of robust emergence, which models its behavior on the most robustly emergent aspects of the world around it, is a way to deconstruct the dualities which have reified our world into its currently dangerous and painful state.

There are philosophies of the past which have argued many of these notions, if without making use of the logics of mathematics and physics. The philosophy of the West, particularly that which comes from the pathbreaking work of Gilles Deleuze, is currently tending in this way, and the Deleuzian notion of the virtual is a definite influence on what I am calling matrix, the oneand, and emergence. The major influences on Deleuze, such as Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simond, A.N. Whitehead, C.S. Peirce, or Baruch Spinoza also indicate similar pathways. Relational emergentism has always been a minority position within Western philosophy, an underground current that was always overshadowed by the thinkers of reification, such as Rene Descartes or Immanuel Kant. Despite Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegel, as well as many of Hegel’s own later writings, Hegel’s more truly dialectical works, such as the Phenomenology and the Logic, are also crucial precursors to this mode of thinking, even if this is often obscured by interpretations of Hegel, including those of the late Hegel himself, and to a lesser extent, Marx.

But even before these, there are precursors in the Classic Arabic and Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist philosophical traditions which provide incredible resources for imagining non-dual philosophies of relational emergence today. That said, many of the forms of non-dual insight present within these traditions retains, like most Western philosophy, aspects which keep the powerful non-duality of some of its most crucial insights in fetters. Classical Arabic and Buddhist countries through the ages are not necessarily the zones of the greatest robust emergence. For even if they liberate the mind, they do not necessarily liberate society, just as Western societies tend to liberate the physical world for a few but not the many. A truly robustely emergent, non-dual worldview would have to deconstruct aspects of all of these precursors to imagine something new and different in sync with the particular needs of the middle path of the worlds in which we find ourselves. Any robustely emergent worldview will always selectively employ dual and non-dual elements in order to deconstruct local roadblocks to liberation to maximally sustainable robust emergence, and to help solidify and temporarilly reify those which are needed to allow for greater emergence in the future. A truly complete non-dual philosophy would deconstruct itself. All emergence is local, and hence, all strategies to further emergence, which is to say, worldviews, ultimately are as well, including this one.

Beyond Reified Chronotopics

We live in an age of networks, and I have written extensively elsewhere about what a philosophy of networks, based in emergent relationalism, as its local manifestation, might look like. Such a worldview would have to deconstruct the traditional reifications between philosophy and politics, science and fantasy, ethics and knowledge, in order to produce something which emerges from these contemporary cultural stases. And if we live in networked times, it is from networks we must emerge, and through which we can, for networks are ultimately ways of thinking of how emergence occurs. Composed of nodes, links, grounds, and levels of processes, all these can be seen as aspects of the ways in which emergence comes to be, between the extreme reification which nodes often give rise to, and the dissolution of processes. Between these, networks come to be, and from these, the potential for liberating our world to more robustely emergent ways of being.

This essay began with an investigation of time. From a networkological perspective, any aspect of the world can only ever be understood in relation to the whole, for if all is matrix, part and whole always exceed each other, for both are oneand. And so, any term needs to be deconstructed and reconstructed in regard to how it relates to the local attempt to give rise to even greater robust emergence in any and all. Matrix is fractal and holographic, and so must its method of analysis and synthesis, deconstruction and reconstruction.

From a networkological perspective, time is an aspect of emergence. Emergence is most reified, in the temporal sense, when reduced to space, which is what was described at the start of this essay as spatalized time, which is to say, the time of clocks. Clock-time, or less extreme reifications of time, such as moments or memories, can then be linked together to form networks. These include the linear flattenings of time and its moments into the image of beads on a string, or a set of events placed one after another in a repetition of the progression of homogenous moments. But such a network is one in which the pure linearity implies a point at a distance, a virtual point, the image of a moment as monad which extends itself in one-dimension forward, and the network formed between the points of the line and this virtual center, one which flattents the time of a circle into a straight line yet is as controlling as the center is to its circumference, is always present in its absence within each moment and all, regulating their form and linkage, their slicing from their surroundings and their reconection into linearity. Events with completely homogenous form, forced into homogeneous order. Such is what the attempt to reify time at the level of the link looks like, even as the reified instant of the clock, or the moment, is this at the level of the node. When this occurs, all time at the level of the ground, which is to say, as change, that which is both within and without moments and their progression, is concieved in relation thereto. As a result, the process of emergence itself is radically foreclosed, and all change seems simply the repetition of the same.

There is another way, in which the “–and” of the oneand peers out from within the one of any node, link, ground, and process, as well the processes of noding, linking, grounding, and emergence which give rise to these. At the level of the node, time is much more than clock time, nor any idealized or homogenous moment. Time is fundamentally multiplicitous, never the same, and any reification of it, any grasping, can keep grasp in a manner which reveals this openness as much as conceals some of it to make this grasping possible in the first place. Likewise, at the level of linking, moments, episodes, actions, these don’t need to be linked in a straight line, nor made part of a grid pattern like space (ie: a “database” approach to time). There are as many ways to link moments as there are ways of creating networks. Each of these maps of time, or chronotopes, has its particular flavor, and may be applicable in various ways to particular situations. Some are more decentralized than others. A line is the most centralized and controlled way of turning change into a perfectly regimented series of monadic nodes. And yet, the more loops and short-circuits within this, the more the line folds back upon itself, and produces networks which subvert linearlity from within it, liberating it from the iron yoke of progression. Memory, anticipation, the more these enter into time, the less time is just a focus on the actual and now right in front of us, the more free it is. Of course, if the moment can also be liberated, expanded to include the whole world, full ot past and future, exploding the node from within. Whether exploding the node or link, relative dereification, at least in a world like ours, allows more emergence to bloom between the cracks of paranoid control.

If networks are made of nodes and links, they always define themselves against backgrounds which ground them, and these grounds are neither fully within nor fully outside of these networks. If moments and their modes of linkage are the basic ways of conceiving of time, and this is seen against the background of physical change in space, then to liberate this is to see the emergence underneath this, the ways in which change is so much more than physical. Physical change and mental change are aspects of each other, we only ever apprehend the physical world through our filters. Even what seems like simply physical change can be interpreted in so many different ways, and this occurs by means of its intertwining with memory and fantasy, of the futurepast which is the ground of the now and vice-versa, of the neither/nor at the heart of change. And here we see how we verge on that which is neither/nor or yet also both and, which is to say, emergence. When emergence is reduced to processes nested within each other, to the quantitative emergences, simply one layered on top of the next, which gives rise to spatial, physical change, and none of the qualitative emergences which produce truly emergent newness, deconstructing and reconstructing nodes, links, grounds, and levels, all towards giving rise to more robust emergences in the process, then nodes, links, grounds, and levels of processes producing networks and their aspects are so many distinct reified aspects.

When these are all seen as aspects of emergence, however, everything shifts. Emergence gives rise to processes which intertwine, and these give rise to stable environments with stable structures which produce entities which can then link with each other, and as each continues to emerge in relation to each other, the parts and whole emerge at ever greater levels of emergence. Node, link, ground, and process are so many levels within the networks of emergence, each nodes which link together against the ground of the world of emergence itself.

Time is only ever an aspect of emergence, just as space is the background of invariance against which change occurs. Time is closer to emergence, and space to reification, and yet, both are aspects of the manner in which emergence differs from itself to give rise to a world whereby it can emerge more profoundly from itself. Space is congealed time made static in matter which displaces other matter, and time is how this is reunified in a matter which experiences the displacements of others. Experiencers can notice change because they compare change to sameness, time to space, and in the process, can even come to realize that they are experiencing. This is what humans do. Time displaces itself within itself as internal emergence and flow, and space in regard to what is outside of itself, as physical change. Inside and outside, space and time, both deconstruct, and are aspects of emergence, which is beyond all of these, even if each is a reification of emergence which has the potential to emerge more robustly, in regard to itself and world, if it loosens the hold of reification upon itself and world. Networks are simply one way to conceptualize this. But they are a model in sync with out increasingly networked times.

Neurotime: The Temporality Structure of the Brain

If clock time is the simplest time, then what is the most complex we know? Ultimately, the most profoundly emergent temporal phenomenon we know is the human brain. A brain is a network of intertwined pulsing fibers. These fibers pulse faster when stimulated by the pulses of others, and when this happens, they secrete a material that strengthens their connection backwards with whatever stimulated it. Intersecting and looping back into each other, the fibers feedback and forward into each other. Their intersections are so many nodes, linked together, giving rise to modules and nodes which are so many wholes which ground them, and a processes which emerge from these. While some of the modules are relativiely fixed in form, the brain is constructed for maximum sustainable flexibility, which is to say, fibers have links to diverse parts of the brain, and the firing of one inhibits or promotes a wide variety of others. As a result, the brain is continually voting on what it percieves from the outside world, and each part of the brain continually voting to produce guesses for what it believes other parts of the brain and outside world will do next, based on its memories of what these were in the past. When parts of the brain agree, they fire in sync, their pulsing producing a rhythm, and as various other parts of the brain vote, the sync flows up and down the levels of the brain, from sensory nerves to emotional and cognitive centers, untill there is, with any luck, some agreement, and when this happens, so long as some other part of the brain with veto power doesn’t intervene, sensation gives rise to action. The patterns of sync are ideas, and the largest pattern of sync in the brain at any given time, its “dynamic core,” is consciousness.

The brain is a time machine, a fundamentally distributed network, and it produces the most fundamentally complex form of time we know. It stores its memories distributively, and makes its decisions by debating which memories to choose to interpret the present and imagine about the future. All of this is done by means of the networking of matter, and our world is simply what this feels like, in relation to what’s around it, from the inside.

The distributed nature of the storage of memory in the brain is oddly resonant with one other model for the most complex phenomenon we know, which is to say, quantum phenomenon. It would be wrong to say that quantum “particles” are complex, for in fact, there seems no way to tell one electron or proton from another. But while they are simple from the outside, the fact that they are particles at all are, as mentioned earlier, fictions. Rather, they are ways in which quantum field processes reifiy each other in particular ways, giving rise to the spacetime between them in the process. The particles are hardly separate from the fields, and seem, if nothing else, simply the manner in which these fields emerge from themselves by intersecting themselves in relation to each other, and in ways which confound traditional notions of space and time. Anyone working high energy physics as much as any basic science textbook today will attest to the fact that quantum phenomenon defy everyday, normal human notions of space and time.

The manner in which they do resembles the structure of the human brain to an uncanny degree. Quantum “particles” can in fact even be thought of “smearing” spacetime. That is, they seem to be in many places and times at once. And just as they “smear” themselves over spacetime, so it can be said that “spacetime” is smeared in them, for ultimately these are two ways of saying the same thing. From such a perspective, what are distinct moments and positions in space and time for everyday humans are positions which can be thought of as existining intensively, which is to say, within, a quantum particle, as much as they would normally be extensively without it. The famed probabilities of quantum mechanics can then be thought of as the degree of intensity whereby each “external” location in spacetime beyond it is present “internally, within” a given “particle.”

From such a perspective, there are networks of space and time, of varying intensities, within quantum phenomenon which are only ever somewhat separated from the world of which they are a refraction, and which smears into them and them into it. What’s more, these probabilities, when viewed in a non-reified manner, can be seen as the distant influences upon the “particle” by those aspects of its environment which are non-local to it. In relation to its environment, a particle decides which of the micro-influences get the most votes and follows it, harmonizing its inner structure (evident only at even higher energies), and its outer structure. This only appears random when reified from the larger ground of emergence of which it is only ever an aspect.

The similarities to human lived time are incredible. Human brains have external positions from the outside world present in them as so many intensities of pulsing within its internal networks. Its decisions are made by harmonizing sync between inner and external influences. And as a result, there is a sense of space and time “within” our experience, if of a different nature than in the external world. The difference, it would seem, is that the inner structure of the human brain is radically different from that of quantum particles. Quantum particles differ in what is around them, but their inner structure, when “magnified” at higher energy levels, seems to be identical, if fractal. Human brains are anything but. The reason is we don’t store information outside of us, as the physical world does, but also inside of us, storing memories in the internal environment of our brain. Each one evolves uniquely. As pulses ride around our brain, each with its own experience more linear time, the networks of these give rise to the distributed experience of time we call lived human temporal experience.

Little wonder our time feels distributed, as if it can expand or contract at will, and is shot through with memory and anticipation. The physical structure of our brain is like this, and wherever the pulses increase in intensity and come into sync, there some aspect of us is, smeared out like a quantum particle in spacetime. Our experiential spacetime is little more than what this feels like from within. We can be in many times and spaces at once, separate, flowing, layered, and to varying degrees of intertwining, blending, and refraction. The reason for this is that this is how this very complex organ feels as it activates varying networked patterns of activation within its more fixed yet still ultimately rewireable hardware of wires.

The structure described here is mirrored by one other phenemenon reworking our world today, namely, the internet. A webpage on our screen can the be the product of sync between vast amounts of data from a wide variety of computers across the globe. The physical architecture of the internet changes over the time, as does the software it runs upon it, and any of these may change what we see on our screen, though depending on how they are organized, they may not, even as distinct happenings in our world, or activation of similar circuits in different parts of the brain, may give rise to experiences we may read as the same.

The internet is making our world more brainlike, more non-linear, and with it, we are beginning to experience forms of memory and anticipation which are more human, and less like the spatialized linear time of clocks, within the physical world around us, even if by means of virtual avatars. The internet is an enormous brain of brains, yet outside of human brains, and interaction between the internet and our brains is changing how we think of time. We feel less need to reify time, and our films and popular culture evidence this in a wide variety of ways, even by means of philosophies that attempt to think in more networked ways.

In the process, we are starting to see time in more networked ways, more quantum, brain-like ways, and the potential is radically liberatory. Then again, humans have almost always found ways to turn new liberations into new forms of enslavement, and to complexify in the least robust ways which are sustainable. But each transformation employs deconstruction and reconstructio, and hence, the chance to truly change things. To imagine the world in a more liberatory way. And this means getting in touch with the core of emergence, that destabilizing, dereifying core which has the potential to bring us from the path of maximum sustainable pain and destruction to that of the middle path of maximum sustainable robustness.

As our models of time become less linear, let us try to keep the potential for liberation in mind, and question the value of the values which guide our transformations, and the potential for a deeper relation to the nondual core, the potential for radical creativity, which is within any and all, yet which can only ever be released by means of networking, by reaching beyond oneself, unravelling to some extent one’s reifications, and enclosing one’s openings, going beyond the binaries to find a nondual core, potential, and pathway, an ethics, politics, and worldview, which is less destructive, at least, one hopes, for any, each, and all.

2. The Brain and the Quantum

All of which is to say that time is, perhaps primordially, non-linear, both in humans and the physical world. And that makes sense, for the structure of the human brain is ultimately a resonant echo of the world which produced it. The most complex actual entity the world has yet known, namely, the human brain, is a refraction of the most complex potentiality the world has yet known, namely, the singularity of all singularities, ‘the’ singularity, which began the largest context we can imagine, that of which all space and time are extractions and reifications. From these twin poles, the brain and singularity, it becomes possible to extrapolate a time beyond the more traditional and limited human notions thereof, and then reconstruct these, and potential pathways beyond these, in relation to a sense of time of which these are only ever partial graspings.

In the section which follows, I’ll explore some of the ways in which the experiments in cutting edge artificial intelligence and neuroscience, when coupled with the science of quantum physics and cosmology, when extrapolated to their speculative limits, can be used to help devise a theory to account for some of the uncanny similarites and crucial differences between the structure of the brain and the singularity. Without these forays into science, and then beyond, in the following second section, the theses advanced in the third section, with so much in common with the world’s mystical and purely speculative philosohpical traditions, would seem merely that. The third seciton can be read on its own for those less interested in the rather convoluted scientific issues involved, but for those wanting to know why these ideas aren’t quite as mystical as they might first sound, the second section is provided.

The time of the human brain, our lived experience of time, is simply what our brain feels like to us, yet from the inside. Time diffuses and spreads out, dilates and contracts, loops back and forth into future and past, changes attentional scale and flits between ideas, being in more than one “mental” and “physical” place at once in our awareness.

While our films and digital networked media are approaching these levels of complexity, the neurological networks present in even one human brain still far outstrip even the connectivities of the Internet as a whole, and are part of the extended networks of feelers in our bodies, sense organs, and world, in continual loops of feedback with those already present in our brains. And ultimately, even if the Internet is almost like a sentient being at this point, in that it evolves and mutates, processes and makes decisions, this is because, like human languages or nets of ideas, commodities, or other cultural phenomenon, these forms of “quasi-life” draw their life-like aspects from us. Without us, the internet would cease to evolve, and the same with our language and culture. Though our media are becoming evermore networked, and beginning to approximate the structure of the human brain, they are still fundamentally based on serial modes of computation, which prioritize linearity in their software and circuit design, and limit feedback and intermodulation.

The fundamentally networked structure of organisms and their brains are constructed differently, they are non-linear, distributed, refractive in structure. They are complex, self-organizing, emergent phenomenon, with incessant loops of feedback between elements and aspects of the environment. Cutting edge artificial intelligence, by means of “artificial neural networks,” which make use of software neurons, have only begun to simulate the architecture of the brain. These networks of simulated neurons are able to do things that more traditional computers simply can’t, which is to say, guess or forget, learn from mistakes and develop creative solutions. The downside, however, is that these computers only have networked software, their hardware is still linear and “serial” rather than distributed and “parallel.” And so, advances in this realm are ultimately limited until we can develop computer chips which evolve themselves like living organisms, and build themselves from the ground up, by means of the sort of feedback networks we see within living organisms and in the ways they relate to their environments. While we have software which does this, called “genetic/evolutionary algorithms” which form “multi-agent systems” which give rise to “distributed computation,” these once again are simulations produced on serial hardware.

What’s more, true artificial intelligence would have to be linked into its body in wide nets of feedback. Multiple forms of scientific evidence point to the fact that without emotions, humans make terrible decisions, because they can’t access core values to ground their deliberative processes. A computer with no sense of why it should protect its body, or analogically those of others like it, will make decisions based on sorts of rationality which are ultimately destructive to itself and what’s around it. Emotional computers would need feedback loops throughout their bodies, such that it could “feel” if its fans were properly regulating its temperature, similar to the ways in which humans “feel” hungry, and this then feeds back into our specific and also global neural processing. Many doing research on human emotions are increasingly convinced without feedback loops with our body, we would hardly have emotions as “brains in a vat.” That is, we cry and then feel the sadness, we laugh and then feel the happiness, our body is an extension of our brains.

Embodied cognition theorists even argue that the very structure of our limbs are forms of computation, and this is why it takes massive amounts of computation power to teach a robot to walk up stairs if you give it mechanical legs, but install rubber-bands on these legs that function in a manner similar to human tendons, and the computation power required drops enormously. Evolution long ago performed the computation necessary to design animal bodies, by means of continual feedback with relatively stable environments, and as a result, we get so much of our computation, to use a term employed by robotics and embodied cognition theorists, for “free.”

All of which is to say, no living body, and no feedback loops throughout it, and human-style artificial intelligence will likely be impossible. Artificial organisms and chips, however, change the equation. And so, until we develop something like nanotech which gives rise to articial life, true artificial intelligence will only ever be small scale, because it will only ever be simulated. And this is perhaps just as well, because until our species learns to be a little less destructive to ourselves and others, perhaps this technology would be too dangerous for us anyway.

Until then, however, even if the Internet does at some point rival the complexity of the human brain, it will only ever be quasi-life, derivative of us for its true creativity. And so, until artificial life and computers approach the true complexity of the human brain, computers, no matter how fast, will only ever be complicated, not complex, which is to say, they will have speed, but not creativity. Creativity requires networks of feedback within and outside the system in question, so that it can dissassemble and reconstruct aspects of itself and how it reads and acts in relation to the world so as to be able to adapt to it. Traditional computers have speed, but they can’t guess or learn, only memorize and project. These are fundamentally different, because one is completely hierarchical, while the other is distributive and refractive. Until computers can reprogram themselves in regard to their environment, and learn like humans do, they will only ever be machines.

Between brain and singularity, then, we have the two most complex forms of time yet known. The singularity gives us an image of time as pure potential, while the human brain, and and all of them, the most complex actual form of time we have yet to experience. From these, we can extrapolate idealities, and these can help us reimagine the ways our reified limiting concepts of time have constricted our views of what time can mean.

The human brain can be at multiple space and times at once within itself. It folds the world into itself in memory and selectively unfolding memories which it shatters and then reweaves to interpret the present and imagine the future. And it stores its memories, according to neuroscientists, in a fundamentally distributed and superpositioned manner. Which is to say, memories don’t exist in any one location in the brain. Rather, our brains map various aspects of our world, such as all the shades of color, all the types of shapes with hard edges, all the varieties of smells, and then produces maps of ways to link these in order to give rise to specific memories of events. This is why neuroscientists argue that any “recall” memory is always a recreation. And our perception of the present makes use of memory to recognize anything we experience, to such an extent that the present is, in many senses, mostly memory (the famous case of “filling in” in regard to the blind-spot in the eye being a prime example of this).

The similarity to quantum particles is astounding. Just as human memory be in multiple locations in space and time at once, and layer these in varying intensities to produce tension between various inner states, so quantum particles can “smear” themselves out in multiple spacetimes. Looked at inversely, this is ultimately the same as saying that multiple locations in spacetime are smeared “within” a particle as so many intensities. There are networks of spacetime folded into these particles which are extended, or unfolded, across locations in spacetime. What’s more, we know that as we approach a singularity, of shrinking a domain of spacetime into the space of a quantum particle by means of strong acceleration or gravity, that spacetime contracts, as if folding into the particle in question. Whether extending a single particle across an area of spacetime, or folding an area of spacetime into a super-dense particle (ie: a blackhole), the result looks similar, which is to say, spacetime is distributed as networks of intensities within a particle.

There are, however, crucial differences between the way brains intensively store spacetimes within them in the form of memory, and the way particles, as singularities or otherwise, do this. Quantum particles only ever mirror the structure of the spacetime they fold within them, if in relation to the particular type of particle they are. And as mentioned earlier, all quantum particles of a type have an identical inner strucutre, while each human brain has a similar structure to others in terms of large-scale architecture, but on the micro-level, is full of radically different structures, which give rise to the distinct memories and personalities of each person.

What’s more, quantum particles, when on their own, collapse when disturbed by others. That is, if two “smeared” particles end up in the zone of each other’s influence, they will ultimately disturb each other, and pull each other out of a “smeared” state, so that each particle has to “choose” a specific spacetime location with the other, giving rise to an event, a “particle collision,” when often transforms them and sends them flying off in new directions. While human brains may loose their focus on a given memory, if you hit a person’s body, the whole body or thought doesn’t “collpase” in the manner of a particle’s “smeared” or “cloud-like” state. This is because the matter of the universe which is above the quantum-scale, which appears “stable” and doesn’t flicker into and out of localized spacetime like quantum phenomenon do, occurs when quantum particles form relatively stable networks that dance together in relatively stable patterns, like organisms whose cells all work together in a semi-stable balance. While the particles still “flicker” in and out of existence, they largely do so in place, because they keep each other in check, and this is what is meant by atoms and molecules.

What quantum particles clearly can’t do, however, is shift their focus, or “explore” their interntal structure the way humans do. While they do fold the area of spacetime through which they are “smeared” into them, if in regard to their own internal structure, this intertwining enfolding only changes in regard to changes in their internal and external structure. Since it seems the internal structure of these particles are all identical, essentially, additional layers of internally folded spacetime which “unfolds” at higher energy levels (ie: the quark jets which are revealed to exist within protons), then the folding of a segment of external spacetime within a quantum particle is like a refractive mirror. In fact, it is uncannily similar to the description of the inner world of monads as described by Leibniz in his famous work of philosophy, The Monadology.

Human brains, however, have dynamic inner structures which are highly individualized, and so, they each refract the outer world they “smear” inside them differently. And as we know from experience, we also slice and dice our experience, refract that on bits of spacetime enfolded long ago, yet also rearranged in memory maps and meta-maps, and then project back imaginary reconstructions of what could happen, and after comparing many of these, choose one set to become our “actions.” None of this seems to occur with quantum particles, which seem to refract the world around them in one set of intensities, and while these impact the actions they make, these seem determined by the way dynamic forces interact with internal elements which seem dynamically frozen into stable patterns which give rise to stable probabilities.

And yet, quantum particles are one of the very few aspects of the physical world which, like the brains of organisms, do not behave in completely predictable ways. Quantum particles appear to “choose” some paths over others, and in relation to micro-influences from beyond their immediate environment (a more relational, Bohmian inspired interpretation) or due to a predictable degree of randomness (a more reifying, Cophenhagen-style interpretation of events, which is opposed to a Many-Worlds interpretation which refracts this these issues to “other universes/dimensions” beyond our knowledge). While brute physical matter, like stones or molecules of water, largely do whatever the sum of the forces of the environment around them, only quantum particles and animal brains seem to have something like the “freedom” to decide in relation to their environments. The fact that they are both able to “smear” or “fold” spacetime into themselves is likely not to be accidental in this.

An examination of the Bohmian interpretation of quantum interactions can help to explain why. In books such as Wholeness and the Implicate Order, or Undivided Universe, Bohm produces a highly influential reading of the data of quantum physics which, while a minority opinnion in the scientific community, is no more disprovable than the majority “Cophenhagen” position, nor the other minority opinion, or “Many Worlds” position. All of these work from the same data, they simply shift the base level assumptions about the deeper structures of reality which underlie them. And since we would have to develop experiments which are able to “look under the hood” of the current laws of physics (ie: it isn’t possible to go beyond the speed of light), it seems like it may not be possible to find out whether or not one of these interpretations are more or less correct than others. Perhaps this is yet one more way in which the world seems, in some senses, to resist ultimate reification.

For Bohm, the seeming “randomness” of the “decisions” of quantum particles can actually be made sense of if we assume the universe to be ultimately relational and non-local. That is, quantum particles can be thought of like nerve cells in the brain. That is, they would exist in continuous chains of feedback with others, and this distributed feedback would help it to make its decisions. Micro-influences, summed up and averaged out, from both within and without the now relationally imagined network commonly called a “particle,” would then arrive at the decision in the manner of a brain, which is to say, distributively and dynamically. Just like a community of nerve cells, decisions would be made by consensus.

The catch, however, is that as with the brain, some of these influences would be non-local. In the brain, this occurs because while nerve cells are almost always linked to their immediate neighbors, they are also selectively linked to nerve cells and communities of these in distant parts of the brain. It’s the selectivity of the wiring of these channels of amplification and inhibition which give rise to the distinct patterns of flows which make brains work the way they do, and each uniquely. For quantum particles, these long-distince linkages would be to everything around it, non-selectively, getting weaker the further away things are, and in regard to the types of influences in question. But these connections are ultimately to every other aspect of spacetime, if ever weaker in regard to distance. These are considered “non-local” in the quantum sense once they become “spacelike,” which is a term scientists use for when it would require going above the speed of light to cover a given distance in the time allotted. Since above the quantum level can go faster than the speed of light, this notion is often dismissed by scientists. That said, quantum particles often act in ways which can be interpreted as either random, producing other inaccessible dimensions, or exceeding the speed of light. The Bohmian approach reads things according to the last option.

By making this choice, Bohm avoids the extreme of reifying particles, as in the Copenhagen approach, or reifying objective contexts, as in the “many worlds” approach, which assumes that the universe produces divergent copies each time a quantum particle makes a decision, even though these copies don’t interact after this. The Bohmian interpretation, on the contrary, opts for a solution which rejects either extreme. It argues for a worldview in which everything is connected. Similar to the way in which the movement of air molecules on one side of the planet impacts, if in highly indirect, mediated, and weak fashion, those on the other side, so it is, for Bohm, with quantum phenomenon. The difference is that he believes that particles don’t need to be physically touching, but rather, that just as smeared particles can influence each other by overlapping, that the entire universe presents smearings within smearings within smearings, all of differing densities, with “particle collisions” as simply the points at which these networks hit a certain level of intensity as the clouds of fields y shift in relation to each other.

While Bohm’s ideas are a minority opinion amongst scientists, they are all agreed that it is as provable, or unprovable, as the majority or other minority opinions, for they all interpret the same data, yet the paradigms they use to do this require assumptions about aspects of the universe that are not only as of yet beyond the realm of investigation, but may remain that way. Bohm’s approach, however, has the advantage of neither splitting the universe into zillions of inaccessible copies, nor reifying particles and requiring “funny” math to do so. Rather, he argues that particles may be able to influence each other in ways which are not only spacelike, but “timelike” as well.

Which brings up the question as to why scientists refer to travelling faster than the speed of light as “timelike.” Since light is the fastest known entity, it functions as a cosmic yardstick for time as well as space. And so, for example, large expanses of spacetime is measured, for example, by “lightyears.” The reason for this is that it takes light one year to cover a lightyear, and yet, it takes slower entities, which are any which are not light, more time. This is because they weigh more by having mass, while photons don’t seem to have mass, at least, not rest mass. Since mass and energy are ultimately the same for physicists, in that one can convert to another, a photon’s only mass is its energy, which is not the case for any other known particle. These particles would have to shed their mass to travel at the speed of light, and it is their mass which prevents them from ever being light enough to do so.

In this sense, these slower, heavier particles trade off speed for mass, and hence, they will always cover less space in a given amount of time than light. In this sense, the speed of light can be used to measure not only space, but time, for it represents the fastest it is possible to cover space in a given time, which is to say, convert one into the other. It’s almost like currency conversion. Light gets the best exchange rate when they convert their energy into travel in space or time, while heavier particles have to pay a tax which is exponentially higher the faster you approach maximum speed, which is to say, the speed of light. In this way, a light year measures not only distance, but the minimum amount of time that it can take to travel that distance. It is ultimately a measure of spacetime, and can be divided or unfolded into differing expanses of space and time, depending on the matter and energy at work in a given situation. Matter, energy, space, and time are ultimately four sides of the same, even if they unfold this same, which I’ve called matrix, differently.

In this sense, light is the yardstick for the measure of both time and space. It also helps explain why looking into deep space is not only looking into space, but also time. The light we see with the naked eye, or a telescope, took time to get here. Light from the sun is eight minutes old, and so, really, we are seeing the way the sun looked eight minutes in the past. We are seeing not only what is far away in space, as we do when we see things in the distance on Earth, where the impact of the speed of light is negligible enough to be ignored. Since the sun is far enough away, it is distant not only in space, but also time. When this happens, scientists call the distance “timelike.” We see the sun at a distance of not only space, but also back in time. Or, when we see distant supernovas explode, we can say what happened in these distant locations in the past, but not what is happening now. What appears as the present at a great distance is ultimately looking backwards in time as well.

Time dilates over great distances, slowing down, in a sense. The inverse happens when you speed up. As your speed increases, whatever travels with you, in your “frame of reference,” remains the same, but, according to relativity, the way your surroundings appear warps, even if to those in these surroundings, it is you that warp. And so, a spaceship approaching the speed of light appears to scrunch in space in the direction of its speed, just as, when it returns to us after its voyage, time for the voyager went slower than it did for us. Space and time compressed as the ship approached light speed. But for the person in such a ship, the opposite would be happening, in that the space of its surrounding would seem to elongate in the direction of its motion, and the time of its surrounding would seem to speed up, even as its clocks seemed to move at the same rate.

As one approached the speed of light, then, the spacetime around one would seem to be extending in space until it dilated to zero, just as time would increase around one until it moved infinitely. Infinite movement in infinite space is no movement in no space and no time, or vice-versa. Space, time, speed, movement, all these would become meaningless. Likewise, since one would need zero matter to be able to do this, one would either need to shed all one’s weight and convert it to energy, like a light particle, or have so much matter that your gravity creates massive amounts of energy by dragging spacetime into you, like in a black hole. In this sense, at the speed of light, there is neither time, space, nor matter, perhaps only energy, if it even makes sense to speak of this at this point.

Complicating issues a bit more, there are quantum particles that seem to be able to go backwards in time. That is, these particles and their anti-particles are only different in the direction they spin. When they collide, they cancel each other out, and yet, in our world, we see both in various places. And yet, if we were somehow able to travel backwards in time, we’d see the same particles, moving backwards like all the others, yet also moving in opposite directions of spin. This is why scientists have argued that there is ultimately no difference between these particles and their antiparticles, other than direction in time. That is, there is only one particle, when it spins one way it is moving forwards in time, and when the other way, backwards in time. Two particles or one, two directions of time or one, either approach can make sense of the same data, and since quantum particles seem to smear spacetime in some of their interactions, who’s to say they can’t do this as well? Whether we say there is one particle travelling forwards and backwards in time, or two different ones travelling forwards in time, the data is ultimately identical. Which is to say, we are able to get an idea of what travelling backwards in time might look like, just by looking at travelling forwards with a different spin.

There is another relevant complication, namely, that when quantum particles interact, they don’t actually do so in reified “collisions,” but more accurately, in networks. And depending on which point of reference one uses to divide up these networks, one ends up with a wide variety of collisions, some of which have particles transforming into others. On the quantum level, a particle aborbs energy when it absorbs a moving particle in it, but since it has nowhere to “put” it, it either speeds up and lets the particle go on its way, or simple jumps into the type of particle that includes both of the original ones. And vice-versa with decomposition. Particles fold and unfold into each other in this way all the time, and are only truly “final” if one reifies collisions into pairs that only preserve particles structure. While this is a completely acceptable way to divide things up, it is only one way of interpreting the data. And so, whether or not particles are “ultimate” or continually morphing into one another depends on one’s perspective.

And so, some scientists, often those who like to speak of particles travelling backwards in time, have also hypothesized that perhaps there are many fewer particles than there seems to be. If all particles of a given type, such as light or electrons, are indistinguishable from each other, how do we know they aren’t all just refractions of the same? This is why some have said that perhaps the universe is a hall of mirrors of sorts, or a giant crystalline image. Light particles are quite unique in this respect, for they the only particles that are their own antiparticle. This means that whether or not one goes forwards or backwards in time, light looks the same, and is the only particle to do so. And so, as John Bell famously hypothesized, perhaps there is only one light particle in the cosmos, reflecting off matter, bouncing backwards and forwards in time, like so many images between a set of parallel mirrors facing each other. What’s more, perhaps all the other particles are simply versions of these reflections that slowed down, gained mass, by interfering with each other. We know quantum particles interfere with each other and sometimes even themselves, so why not?

From such a perspective, it becomes possible to wonder if we’ve ever actually left the singularity. Perhaps the universe isn’t an unfolded expansion of the singularity, but rather, a form of internal involution, and space, time, and matter and energy with it, are virtual. Would there even be a difference?

Perhaps the difference between a particle going the speed of light, and a singularity, ultimately, two sides of a very differing same. The first has zero weight, the space around it fully dilates and its time speeds up, while the time “within” the light particle, to an outsider, slows to zero and its space shrinks to the size of a point. What about as one approaches a black hole, which is to say, a singularity? Well, scientists believe it would be the exact opposite. Again, one’s own spacetime would be identical, for one’s inertial frame stays the same. That said, one would have to be able to resist the incredible power of infinite gravity, which become exponentially difficult the closer one gets to the black hole. And so, ultimately, one’s space and time would ultimately compress, but this would only be noticeable from the outside, because the change would be uniform from within. However, things outside of one would seem strange. In the direction of the black hole, space would seem to be warping into a point, with clocks getting faster the closer they get to that point. From the outside, however, you would seem to simply get dimmer and dimmer, with your clocks getting slower, at least from outside, while you got fatter and fatter, flattened against the outside of a seemingly vast yet curved expanse of blackness with no starts behind it.

This is hardly what you’d see, however, rather the inverse. Of course, it’s all speculation, because it’s not possible to deal with that sort of gravity without being compressed and torn and rearranged so violently that a spaceship with even the strongest walls would be ripped to shreds as different parts of it compressed ever more violently at differing degrees depending on infinitessimally smaller distances to the center of the singularity at the center of the hole. But hypothetically, as one approached the hole, the closer one gets, the more the space in front of one would seem to be scrunching into a point with its center at the center of the singularity, with clocks slowing down the closer they got to the center. Behind one, however, space would seem to be expanding from a point at the exact opposite of the center of the hole, directly behind one, with clocks speeding up in that direction. What’s more, the dark hole in front of one would seem to keep getting smaller yet darker, and the world behind you would seem to keep getting brighter, and it would keep expanding, even as the world in front of you kept shrinking, until the space behind you started to fold over and begin to “enclose” you, until it fully wrapped around itself and started to seem to get sucked ever closer, but from all sides, towards the hole in front of you.

This is why some scientists have speculated that perhaps there are “white holes” which are what are on the opposite side of black holes, and just as black holes “eat” aspects of universes, so “white holes” spit them out. Perhaps the singularity which starts off a universe is a black hole which stored up enough material, and then, when something set it off, decided to explode and start its own universe in its own dimension, which, in a sense, is the infinity within itself, within another universe. There is then perhaps a multiverse of universes, all connected by means of these swisscheese holes, black on one side and white on the other, pumping univereses into each other, if in ways which violate the normal rules of space and time within any one of them.

And so, as one would approach a black hole, eventually, one would see, at least speculatively, only pure white, as the world behind you wrapped around the front until the black hole vanished. Enucleated in a node of pure whiteness, until, perhaps, you exploded, and a universe of black space began to appear in the very pores of this whiteness. The inverse would likely happen were you able to go the speed of light, as the whole world around you would turn to pure white in front of you, yet getting ever smaller, and the world behind you turning ever blacker, until the black reached over and completed itself as you hit the speed of light, enucleated in pure blackness. Light particles, in a sense, can be thought of all all exterior, with no interior, while singularities like those inside of black holes, as all interior.

And just as we speak of human brains as having “interior” experience, so it seems happens inside black holes. Space and time, matter and energy, are smeared on its exterior from without, yet from inside, are smeared within. Singularities are infinite interiority, with matter, energy, space, and time, at least in theory, smeared within them, just like they are inside quantum particles. The difference, however, is that quantum particles smear spacetime within them by smearing themselves out in spacetime. Singularities, however, compress space and time within them. And if the relation is mutual, it is only in the manner of some sort of inner spacetime which, to outsiders, is virtual. Perhaps our universe is precisely this, a virtual world within an blackhole, just as other universes are the same within our black holes.

Let’s return to the notion that the singularity is the most complex potential we know, and the brain the most complex actuality. What is the difference, in this sense, between actuality and potential? In terms of human experience, we say that an action is potential if we are considering it, yet haven’t yet actualized it. Often we imagine several possible experiences, and choose on over others, and these actions are spoken of as potential. Objects have potential energy if it is stored within them, and can then be unleashed according to one or more possible actions. While humans can imagine these actions as possibilities, objects, lacking complex brains, seem unable to do so.

Our entire universe existed as potential within the singularity which began our universe, and time and space within it. This means that the future that we experience unfolding before us is always already contained within the singularity. In order to get a sense of what this might mean, we can examine how quantum particles “contain” aspects of the future within their smeared spacetime state. The way this is experienced by those performing experiments on these particles is that they seem to “know” what is going to happen in regard to very particular situations in the future. For example, there are certain things that particles aren’t able to do, like interact with another particle, in “unsmeared” particle form, in two places at once. Once another particle interferes enough with another, they are likely to zap into one location in the overlap and scatter each other as a “collision.”

Scientists have developed experiments, however, that try to trick particles into doing things like this that they aren’t “supposed” to do. This is done in order to see what the rules are. And in experiments, such as the famous “quantum eraser” experiments, it seems that quantum particles act so they are consistent in spacetime. That is, they never do something which in the future could cause a contradiction with its past actions. That is, they avoid the sort of paradoxes we see in time travel movies, such as when a person kills their own grandparents. Quantum particles seem able to only act in the present in a way which later will end up having, retroactively, been consistent with its past actions. This structure, described by philosophers as future anteriority, or the “back to the future” effect, makes it seem as if quantum particles “knew” what was going to happen to them in the future, and took this into account in the past. Of course, quantum particles don’t know anything. But another way of looking at this, one which gets rid of the notion of particles which “act as if they know what’s going to happen,” is to say that the particles are in multiple times at once. This might sound crazy, but what it means in practice is that if you do something to the particle in the future, this immediately impacts the past so that the past is consistent with it. This is what it would look like from an “outside” observer, at least. But if one were near the particle, going forward in time, one would simply do what one was planning to do to the particle at one moment, and then, no matter what one did going forwards, it would be as if the particle could anticipate those actions, even if you couldn’t.

Quantum eraser experiments were in fact designed to test these very notions, and, without getting into the complexities of these experiments, it’s safe to say that they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that either quantum particles somehow can anticipate what you’re going to do ahead of time, or they are in multiple spacetimes at once such that what one does in one immediately impacts the other, or there are multiple dimensions involved. Once again, the three primary ways of interpreting quantum phenomenon. As with previous examples, my approach will be to do with the one that reifies neither the particle nor universe, and hence, which opts to smear the particle in spacetime.

This has ramifications for how one conceptualizes the diffference between actual and potential. If quantum particles exist in many spacetimes at once, they can be thought of, at least from our perspective, to be only potentially existent until a solid interaction occurs which makes them actual. That is, during a collision, there is a single particle, fixed in one spacetime location. Between such collision events, however, it is virtual, smeared in spacetime, in many spaces and times at once. That said, it is in some more than others. While Cophenhagen interpretations of quantum physics argue that these are probabilities which measure the degree of randomness involved, and the many worlds interpretations ultimately say the same, even if their interpretation reads the meaning of this in a reversed manner, the Bohmian approach is different from both these mirror images. The Cophenhagen approach puts the indeterminacy of the situation within the observer, reifying the subjective aspects of the situation, and the Many Worlds approach does the reverse. But the Bohmian approach aruges that the indeterminacy is in the relation between the matter and energy of the particle with the space and time over which they are extended as so many potentials.

Instead of probabilities, then, there are intensities of matter/energy at a given location in spacetime. Some of these intensities are zero, which would be calculated by the other approaches as zero probability. Likewise, the intensity approaches full intensity, what the others would call a probability of one, even though it never reaches either of these states until it actualizes in a collision. Ultimately, intensity and probability depend upon one’s frame of reference.

Taking the Bohmian approach, however, one could say that the degrees of intensity represent the extent to which the particle actualized its virtual potential to manifest in a given spot, and that these virtualities contracted into a full actuality when one of these virtuals actualized in one particular spacetime location. This is what others have described as “smearing” of the particle across spacetime. Nevertheless, some of the locations have a zero intensity, and these are those which are proscribed, because they produce inconsistencies in time.

For Bohm, the very stuff of the world continually shifts between virtual and actual and states in between. This is why Bohm refers to his theory as “ontological,” because for him, the fundamental stuff of the world “is” this way. This he opposes to the “epistemological” approach of the Cophenhagen school, which puts describes these issues as degrees of indeterminacy in what can be known by a subject. The many worlds interpretation, then, simply shifts the issues off stage, not placing them within the subject, but beyond the subject. While I don’t agree that “ontological” is a good way of describing what Bohm is doing, because ultimately, the notions of virtual and actual he employs deconstruct the boundaries between epistemology and ontology, subject and object, at least in any traditional sense.

Nevertheless, if quantum particles spread themselves to varying degrees of virtual intensity, which are the degrees of probability they will actualize somewhere in relation to what’s around them, then this can also be seen as space and time networking virtually within the particle as so many intensities of space and time within the particle. When particles interfere and interact, they smear themselves and their respective spactimes within each other as so many intensities, until they actualize. Actualities always imply one location in spacetime, with deterimed degress of matter and energy. While some particles can be infinitely layered onto each other and simply increase in intensity, such as electrons, others “exclude” each other (as described by the famed Pauli exclusion principle), such as protons, which push each other out of the way like most matter. Those which exclude each other like actualize in such an exclusive manner.

All of which is to say that within a singularity, an entire universe is condensed, with its space, time, matter, and energy all virtualized within it. Until, from a speculative exterior perspective, it “decides” to expand and give rise to a Big Bang and create a universe, all that it gives rise to, and ever could, exists virtually, as potential, infinitely condensed within it. Like memories stored in a human brain, all these potentials are infinitely expanded throughout it equally in its internal spacetime, which is virtual, because it is infinitely compressed. Were these potentials actualized, they would unfold potentials into possibilities, virtuals into actuals. But in the cosmic bookkeeping, there are things which are excluded, which would create contradictions. There are branches within the pathways of potential, and branches which cancel each other out if selected, as pathways interfere with each other, just as quantum particles interfere with each other and sometimes with themselves, which is to say, their non-local environment if one is a Bohmian, in the world beyond singularities.

What is being described here is not far from the God of Leibniz, as described in his Monadology, a work mentioned earlier in this text. According to Leibniz, God is the being that has all possible universes in his mind, as so many virtual pathways, and as the world actualizes, God is the giant computer programmer that makes sure that the best possible world ultimately comes to be, considering the current state of things and the virtual possibilities. That is, if a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world will make the butterfly gain a mouthful of food, but be the event which leads to the proverbial chain of events which causes a hurricane elsewhere, all things being equal, God will make sure the butterfly goes for the morsel of food that avoids the hurricane, so long as it doesn’t ultimately lead to something worse. God needs infinite foresight, to check the future possibilities. Which means, then, that God needs to “smear” its consciousness in multiple locations in spacetime, and in regard to our universe, smear it through all spacetimes, just like a quantum particle smears itself through spacetime.

This is similar to what many mystical traditions have aimed at in meditation, namely, the ability to concentrate on many different things at the same time, and many different times in the same space. The smearing of the mind through spacetime, and the smearing of spacetime in the mind. Returning to Leibniz’s notion of God, however, if smearing quantum particles in spacetime is the same, ultimately, as saying that spacetime is smeared within these particles, so it is with this description of God. That is, if God’s mind is smeared across all the spacetimes, it is also possible to say all the spacetimes are smeared within God, and all at differing intensities. From such a perspective, every possiblility in space and time can be seen as virtually present in the mind of God, with differing intensity to the degree to which it is compatible with the overall actualization to its “best,” fullest development in relation to the rest. And God would be present in everything, if moreso in things which promote the development of the best within the world around them.

There seems, however, to be no guarantee in the world of science that things always turn out for the best, nor that there is an omniscient God making sure things work out well. But writing at nearly the same time as Leibniz was Barch Spinoza, and his model of the world, and God, while not able to account for virtuality and actuality like this, can complement Leibniz’s notion of God in some fascinating and helpful ways.

Leibniz’s God is one which describes a world unfolding in time, selecting pathways through the virtual worlds of possibility, and bringing the best to actuality. Spinoza’s world is one in which truth is beyond time, and God, which is the principle of truth, fundamentally non-dual. That is, God is both within time and space and outside of it. God is reason, and reason, for Spinoza, is that which cannot contradict itself, which is to say, God is, at least in this respect, similar to that described by Leibniz, a principle of consistency. For example, if a triangle is something with three sides, and this is the essence of a triangle, that which is impossible to doubt if one knows the concepts intended by these words, then this essence of triangleness, the truth it represents, is a part of God. God is simply the ultimate rational pattern which contains all the others which make sense of the world as we know it.

What this means, however, is tricky to say. For Spinoza, we can deduce certain truths from others which are more fundamental. And so, while we find the definition of a triangle fundamental once we know what its components mean, we can then deduce things from this, such as, for example, the notion that it is impossible to have two sides not add up to more than the third. While we may deduce this, and this may take time, and require several steps in an argument, these are all present simultaneously with the notion of a triangle in the mind of God. God is beyond space and time, and is the necessary truths of the world, in and beyond space and time. But God is also the cause of them, because God not only a cosmic bookkeeper of logician, but also the most real and most powerful entity in the world. God is the power which gave rise to the universe, and the standard of all values. That which happens, for Spinzoa, is the best that could be, considering all that could happen, simply because it is the only standard against which we could make such a judgment. There is no perfect world outside of this one in regard to which we could judge this one, unless we want to judge an imaginary world better than a real one. All we have ever known, and the standard for any good we have ever valued, is the world in front of us. The best within it, and the most reasonable, is what is most Godly. Likewise, that which is the most powerful. This doesn’t mean Spinoza valorizes evildoers, but rather, he believes that those who are cruel and terrible to others may have short-sighted benefits, but ultimately dig their own graves and cause their own troubles. For Spinoza, nature and politics bear this out. Utlimately, however, his concern is ultimate, not with human action. The universe is the most powerful thing we have ever known, and is the only standard against which power can be understood, the same with value and reason.

The inheritor to such an approach to the world, and God, is the German Idealists, Schelling, and then Hegel. God is the unconditioned, the Absolute, the invariant within all experience. As the invariant, God is the standard against which any determination of reason, value, power, ethics, or anything else can be judged. Space and time are simply the unfolding of the absolute in itself. The absolute unfolds from virtual to actual. And it does so, for Hegel, to move from abstract absolute to concrete absolute. A concrete absolute is one which is determinate, and negates itself and its world by holding its particular, determinate aspects apart from each other and the world in and within itself in relation to the world. For example, a real tree holds its leaves apart from each other, keeps its green pigments separate from its brown ones, and is distinct from the idea I may have of this in my head. The tree also holds apart, in a sense, the various moments of time in which it exists. But when I imagine a tree in my head, all trees in the world and all times I’ve ever seen a tree in get collapses, and all the parts, colors, and other aspects of a tree become a fuzzy mess. Indistinct and abstract, the parts aren’t determinate, nor fully distinct from what’s around them, nor do they mutually negate either other, either logically or in space or time. They are, in Hegelian terms, abstract, not concrete.

From this foray into philosophy, we can then postulate what it might be like to exist within a singularity. All that has ever existed exists within the singularity as virtual pathways within virtual spacetime. Similar to the branching pathways in a human brain, with so many feedback channels, the singularity would then be a giant virtual brain whose thoughts are so many virtual scenes of events and pathways through it, all interfereing with each other to give rise to so many varied intensities whereby various pathways intensify or inhibit others.

All of which is fundamentally different from what we experience in everyday spacetime, in which entities are actual, which is to say, determined, and extended so their aspects are distinctly unfolded and exclude and displace each other in space and time, and some events give rise to others. Time unfolds in space, and vice-versa, causes leading to effects, but never the reverse. We have no way of knowing, of course, if we ever left the singularity, or if we are simply virtual projections within it. But saying we have never left the singularity is the same, ultimately, as saying that the singularity has never left us. We are smeared in it, and it in us.

If this were the case, and we have no way ultimately of knowing it is not, then then universe could be viewed in two very different ways. In the first, we never leave the singularity, but the intensity of the pathways through it change in intensity relative to each other. There would be no movement forward in time for the singularity as a whole, but only changes in the intensity of its pathways in space, as some vanish, and others increase to full intensity, while others increase or decrease in intensity relative to the main branch pursued from the center to periphery, which are ultimately simply aspects of each other, because this space is virtual anyway. But we could, at least virtually, figure the center as the now, the branching pathways to the periphery as the virtual futures, and the actual past as that which has gone through the center, and is written on the exterior, extended in virtual space, with the most recent events as the largest, and those in the distant past as the smallest. Of course, for this to be more accurate, the branching virtual pathways would have to be three dimensional, as would the writings on the sphere itself, and the interior of the sphere in virtual space, and the circumference of the sphere in the actual. And then we would have an image of our own universe as it unfolds in spacetime.

All of which is to say that there is no difference, ultimately, in saying that we are all still within the singularity, and it is within us, for every aspect of the universe is ultimately little more than the holographic and fractal refracton of it, each more intense the more as it actualizes the full scope of the virtual potentials of the singularity within it. Of all the aspects of the world, the human brain is able to bring into the actual world the virtual potetial of the singularity to the greatest degree. This detour through neurocience and artificial intelligence, quantum physics and cosmology, physical and speculative, has brought us back, now, to where this began.

3. God and the Mind

The preceding discussions of aspects of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, quantum physics, and cosmology, the latter two extrapolated speculatively beyond the limits of experience, provide a basis for the more directly philosophical model to follow, rejoining the discussion of the first part of this essay.

We have no way of knowing if we have ever left the singularity, and ultimately, whether we are all virtual presences within the singularity whose intensity increases as we actualize more of those potentials, or the singularity is present within us more intensly as we actualize its virtual potentials, is ultimately two ways of saying the same thing.

What’s more, there is no reason not to think of the singularity as what the philosophers have often called the Absolute, the Unconditioned, or the mystics and theologians have called God, at least, if by God we mean the ultimate horizon of all experience, that from which all space and time, matter and energy, came to be, is a part, and likely will return or continue to mutate infinitely, which may ultimately be two ways of saying the same.

From such a perspective, God, or the singularity, or in the terms described above, matrix or the oneand, gave rise to matter and energy, space and time, by differentiating itself, by emerging from indeterminate virtuality into determinate actuality, from potential to actual. As it differentiated, it rewove with itself, and gave rise to more complex actualities, aspects of itself that didn’t layer differences and samenesses in space and time, matter and energy, intensively onto each other, but rather, extensively, with each excluding the other to varying degrees, with space, time, matter, and energy as the result. The world moves forward in time and explores itself in space, yet within the singularity, these are all stored, virtually layered on top of each other in the same infinitely compressed yet infinitely extended spacetime. From the center, infinite pathways extend, with each possible scenario in the universe, and yet, there are feedback channels between these, threading the threads. The center is the now, and the branches move closer towards it feeding back more into each other and becoming more definite from the virtual haze surrounding them as they near actualization. Interfereing like so many branches of lightening, the pathways and scenarios increase in intensity as they approach the center, which is always the most intense, for it is the peak of actualization.

This node of actualization, burning white hot in intensity, sucks the pathways into it, like so much matter and energy in a black hole, and what it sucks into it are virtual pathways, like so many networks in a brain. What emerges out the other side of this hole, however, is the universe as we know it, actual, and extended in spacetime, in which time flows linearly forwards, yet differentiated in spacetime, just as in the singularity, it is the reverse. And yet, on the other side of the core of actualization is also another virtual pathway, the periphery of this infinitely extended virtual universe, a spherical enclosure, whose exterior flattens upon it the space we experience, holographically, compacting dimensions, with the more recent events larger, and the more distant ones smaller. Infinite in expanse, this sphere is infinitely small, for it contains all the virtual worlds we could be inside of it, and our actual world outside yet receding into it from all sides. Like a black hole, but turned inside out, like the famed “white holes” described by physicists. Simply inflate this image from three dimensions to four, and you get a description of our actual universe.

From such a perspective, we have never left the singularity even as we are always leaving it, for it is virtually smeared through the whole universe, and the whole universe is virtually smeared in it. It is the potential which the whole universe actualizes, the essence of God in any and all, which is to say, the core of emergence within any and all aspects of the universe. It is physical energy, as well as all the virtual possibilities which this makes truly possible as potential in any given actual situation. Energy is the name of this essence in the abstract, but because energy is always bound up in matter to unfold in particular ways, this reification of one aspect of potential is a highly reduced notion of this seed of emergence, of all the virtual potentials present, within each and any and all, such that each and any aspect of the cosmos is a refraction of the singularity, of God, of the matrix or oneand, each in its own way.

And each in differing degrees of intensity. Those which bring the virtual freedom to be any and everything, like the quantum particle, of which the singularity is the most virtually free, into the world of the actual, is the most Godllke. The human brain, then, as the most complex and free actuality, is the most intensely Godlike aspect of the world we know, just as the singularity is the most virtually Godlike. All value, from which all ethics derives, exists on a continuum of degrees of intensity of potential to make actual the virtual potential present in the seed of emergence present in any and all in relation to that in and of any and all.

All time and space is within us, if virtually, for the history of the entire universe would ultimately be needed to fully explain each and any of its most minute aspects. How to explain why you are thinking what you are now if you hadn’t been born in a particular place, in a particular society, in this particular species, on this particular planet, in this particular solar system, in this universe given rise to by a this singularity? Each and any aspect of the world can trace itself back to the singularity this way, just as any and all aspects of the world are pathways to the singularity within it, even as we are within it, each the essence and core of the other, virtual and real, potential and actual.

For the singularity, time is fuzzy, indeterminate, enfolded, vague, full of options and pathways. From the pure light of indeterminacy, the universe is like a the brain of infants, born with far too many nerve connections, which slowly prunes itself as some connections grow stronger than others with time, and those which aren’t used die. The singularity is high on possibility, until it begis to actualize, and determinate shapes come to be, and it begins to grope to grasp some of those with others, define aspects of itself, and eventually, by giving rise to consciousness and self-consciousness, to come to know itself. Just like our thoughts arise and fall away, yet leave traces in the physical structure of our brain which impacts pathways for future thoughts, organisms are like thoughts in the brains of the world, objects are like nerve-cells, and yet, it all pulses with life and, even if at simpler degrees, something like awareness. And though organsism rise and fall, we leave traces in the fabric of the brain of which we are aspects. We are how the singularity comes to feel and think itself.

Just as thought is how humans feel their brains from the inside, feelings how we feel our brains feel out bodies, and sensations how our brain feels our body feeling our world, so it is with us. We are the way the singularity comes to feel itself, and as we develop, so its ability to feel itself becomes more defined, more complex.

What we give to the singularity is definite, actual, concrete, and determined existence in delimited space and time. Only by means of such a loss of freedom, of reification and enclosure, can any aspect of the pure potential of the singularity distinguish itself enough from what is around it to then be able to intertwine with others equally differentiated to give rise to greater intensity of differentiated intertwining, which is to say, complex networking. This is emergence. This is the standard of all value, that which potentiates itself the more intensely it complexifies.

We are all of God, as is every aspect of the world, and yet, to differing degrees, to the extent to which we have the potential to actualize the potential of any and all by means of our own. This is a non-dual ethics and practics, one which only grows as a self by growing others, and vice-versa. A network ethics of robust complexification of self and world, of coming into sync with the manner in which the world develops in and through you. To come into sync with emergence is to have it emerge in and through you, it is action as inaction, the maximal freedom, power, and pleasure possible from one’s particular location within it. Ultimately selfish in its unselfishness, it is the distribution of control and potential, the fostering of difference to the maximum sustainable to degree. For so long as difference and change do not overwhlem the ability to give rise to yet more, they feed emergence. Versus paranoid control, centralization, hierarhiczation, this is potential set free, to the verge of chaos. Our world is far, far from chaos due to proliferating difference, and in fact, only ever seems on the verge of chaos from the crises which massive overcontrol bring about, and claim to be caused by the reverse. Decentralization, diversification, proliferation, investment in any and all, rather than for the few, to the verge of chaos, this is the pathway towards robustness for our world.

As the singularity wrested itself into actuality, giving rise to life, then self-consciouness, then language and culture, it has always balanced reification with distributedness. And yet, the evolution of nature is radically brutal and cruel, each species taking the next for fuel and raw materials. Carnage and brutality. Humans have inherited this terrible lineage, and we have never ceased to be brutal to each other. And yet, our minds only developed this way because we learned to cooperate, we are social animals, and this is the only way to move forward, to unlearn the brutality of evolution in the harsh environments of our past. We now have the technology to eliminate any suffering, we have tamed nature, and yet, since it forged us, we now need to brutality that the millenia have etched in our souls. This inflection point in human evolution, and of life and nature, is humanity’s mission, to redeem the suffering that was needed to give rise to it, but now taking over the path of evolution, and evolving ourselves, and with us, the world. Before our own technology destroys us. We are on the verge of revolutions in biotech and nanotech, unknown vistas of potential, but peril as well. If we don’t learn the lessons of evolution before it is too late, we will be yet one more evolutionary dead end.

If individual humans live in a time state which is fundamentally networked, ever more like the singularity, able to imagine possible futures and consider the best, if we don’t do this now as a species, by means of our massively networked communications networks, we will be doomed by the work of our own hands. So far we have been able to avoid nuclear destruction, but can we survive the technologies on the horizon if we don’t finally come to self-consciousness, as one enormously distribued human brain, and begin to stop destroying and oppressing ourselves and world?

Humanity has always been approaching the stage of being one massively intertwined organism, a giant brain for processing its own development in relation to the world around it. And yet, while this giant brain of our collective consciousness is consciousness, it is hardly self-conscious. We are beginning, only now, to become aware of ourselves as a species, a collective mind composed of collective minds, as the internet weaves us together into transpersonal communications networks. Like an infant slowly coming to realize that its disparate sensations are aspects of itself, and some are under its control, ultimately nucleating an ego out of partial nodes of awareness of its body, to finally grasp itself as a self, so it is with our collective coming to self-consciousness as a species. We think of our individual selves as so many monads, or as monadically isolated cultures, and yet, these are only ever virtual networks within the world, which is the ultimate horizon against which this is all possible. Protecting what is ours alone, we chase egoic dreams, and the result is destruction. Those like me, those near me, those part of my country, community, this is the path to decomplexification. Growth becomes paradoxical as it approaches its limits, for overemphasis upon the reified requires the reverse to bring about growth, and vice-versa.

From such a perspective, time is many, many things. It is the time of the singularity, pure virtual enfolding of any and all potentials that could be, compressed infinitely in spacetime within the singularity, and actualizing itself in refracted form in any and all aspects of the world we have come to know. It is the networks of branching virtual pathways within the singularity, and the progressive now lacing various virtual strands together into one thread of actuality in the extended domain of each actual in spacetime. It is the layering of the traces of these threads wtihin the impacts these actualizations of events leave in the stuff of matter as so many layers of memory. It is the extension of memory into the future by the habits of living organisms, and the increasing complexification of pathways of moving matter as it intertwines in organisms in patterns which perpetuate themselves. It is the layerings of these patterns as the amplify and inhibit each other in the nervous systems of organisms, and ever moreso through brains. It is the branching pathways, dilations, and layerings, and networks of realities and fantasies of the ways organisms experience the more costrained networks of displacement in physical spacetime of matter. And it is the virtual brains of human culture, the Internet, and the new artificial bio and nanotech brains we will likely give rise to which can, if we survive, bring actuality closer to the freedom of the virtual, if at higher levels of complexity, intertwining virtual and actual to ever more complex degrees.

Beyond Grasping: On Matrix, or the Context Beyond Context

What can we sensibly say about the widest possible context? And why might we want to say anything about this?

Our language seems poorly suited to describing such notions. Words care out aspects of the world. And while we have terms such as “everything” or “everywhere,” or “infinity,” these notions are fundamentally paradoxical, for they are attempts to grasp that which cannot be grasped in any sort of definite manner. These are attempts to grasp contexts, and contexts which are changing, and hence also processes, in the manner in which one would grasp a thing. And since our language likely evolved with our bodily perception of the world as its context, language likely shares many of the biases and limitations of the ways in which our bodies reveal our worlds to us. Just as I use my hand to pick up on object, so nouns seem to ‘pick up’ aspects of the world. And yet, the world is so much more than either of these, even if I can only ever experience that through my language and embodiment.

It does seem, however, that despite the limitations of my language and my body, that indications of the limitations of these media shine through. I know that I can only see so far into the distance, even on a clear day, but if I keep walking, new aspects of my world reveal themselves, and they have a stability, others see these too, and we can refer to maps which indicate stabilities in this larger context of experience that we share, and which seem to remain there, even if I am not there to continually verify this. Whenever I return to these places, they seem to remain as they were, unless something changes them in very specific ways. The world, as my context, seems to have a degree of stability and permanence beyond me, and functions as a context within which my body reveals its limitations to continuously experience all that is beyond the range of its limitations, such as the extent of my vision or touch. Memory expands this, as do prostheses such as maps, but only ever through the embodiment which forms the foundation of “my” experience and “my world, which seem only ever within the larger experience and world of experience as such, that which I seem to share with others.

Language seems to also indicate its limitations. A simple notion like “tree” refers to every tree I’ve ever experienced, yet also none of them, for any tree will always exceed the word “tree” in its sheer physicality, its singular contours, its emplacement within space and time. These may be implied by the definition of the word “tree,” but only in a manner which is indefinite, I may know that trees tend to have brown bark, but a definition would never indicate precisely which shade of brown this unique tree in front of me will have. And so, I can pile on more words to describe this particular tree, but I’m bending language here against some its limitations.

When we use terms like “infinity” or “everywhere” or “everything,” we run more directly into some of these limitations. Though these are used relatively frequently, they indicate that which language is poorly suited to indicate. Of course, in some sense, even a word like “tree” runs into such issues, there are, after all, an infinity of possible singular trees whose differences outmatch that of this word. But a word like “tree” is so embedded in webs of particularity of expression that it’s easy to forget this. We often say “look at that tree over there,” and think little of it. We don’t often say “look at that infinity over there” and find that others simply nod and move on. There’s something more, or less, going on in such situations.

Perhaps when we say something like “everywhere” we are simply playing with words, or our minds, and perhaps the notions conjured are tricks. Mirrors and reflections in water indicate images that “aren’t really there,” perhaps notions like infinity or everywhere are similar to these. Perhaps the very medium of language, or our brains, with their tendencies to generalize, simply extend themselves beyond their own limits, and the feedback effects they generate give rise to what could be thought of as similar to images in a mirror, or yet. But since these aren’t images of anything definite, perhaps more like feedback effects, the sound of screeching which happens when a microphone nears a speaker.

In a recent text called “Where God Comes From,” Ira Livingston has argued that even if this is so, it does seem that this sort of feedback effect which we can experience in many registers, from that of language to embodiment, is a sort of sublimity that is worth trying to understand as a potential origin for notions such as “God” or “the beyond.” For even if our experiences of that which is beyond us, our limit-experiences, those of sex or ecstasy or terror or madness, so many infinities and potentials, and potentially so many tricks of our language and bodies and other media of experience, are little more, they seem to resonate with each other in various ways. That is, the feedback effects which occur when we bring our bodies to their limits seem similar in many ways to those we encounter when we bring our language to its limits, or in fact, any other media of experience to its limits. While it is possible that one of these media, such as our bodies, brains, language, or so many others, are the cause of the limit effects of all the others, each does seem to have its singular manifestations within this similarity. To put it a bit poetically, orgasm and word-gasm aren’t quite the same as memory-gasm, though they do seem to share some structural similarities, certain family resemblances.

All of which is to say that while it may be that any experience we have of something “beyond” us is merely a trick we are playing on ourselves, if this is the case, it’s worth trying to understand this trick. And after all, it is a trick we all seem to share. Most humans, after all, seem to report limit-experiences of some sort or another, in regard to our bodies, minds, and words. And even more specific media, like painting or film, have all these recursive effects when they hit the limit of their own means of relating to the world around them, of trying to grasp the way their medium relates to its contexts. When a medium hits this limit in particular ways which resonate with those which allow us, humans, to grasp aspects of our world, we often describe this as something sublime. Something perhaps incoherent, even ego-dissolving to one degree or another, paradoxical or somehow beyond itself. And we can then use words to try to grasp that experience, box it off, and deal with it without really dealing with it. And so, we toss around a concept like “infinity” like we do “tree,” even though the first is a term we use to describe much of what remains perhaps concealed and hidden beneath the second, the limits of its ability to grasp anything at all. Language, embodiment, memory, these seem to only ever function when we forget to some extent their limits.

But I want to talk about limits here, and the peculiar form of limitation we encounter when we try to describe or experience the unlimited. Any experience or description seems to always be an attempt to experience or describe that which is ulimited by means of the limited. To grasp that which cannot ever be fully grasped. By forgetting this paradox, we make things work. I see a tree, call it a “tree,” tell my friend to look at the tree, and she does, and we walk on. Nothing further needs to be said. An aspect of the world was grasped, handed off, and we moved on. But what happened here only happened by missing so much, so much of the way in which the tree, and the larger context of which it is a part, is only ever brushed upon by the word “tree.” I have no way of knowing to what extent any of that was actually handed off to my friend in that interaction. All I know was that we coordinated.

And this is part of why each of us has that sense that we are a world which is so in excess of what we can ever describe to each other in language. The world is too full, our language too poor. And yet, language is also a world, and able to give rise to virtual ones, like the one you are reading here, the fiction of an intimate conversation on limits and trees. Language is rich in ways embodied experience is poor. The world seems full of so many worlds, and inside each of us there are worlds beyond worlds, virtual memories and fantasies of places we’ve never been, experiences we can never describe, each medium seemingly full of infinities beyond themselves. And what is not a medium? A cell, a plant, a human, a novel, a film, a computer, so many media, each with its worlds, even if I can only ever know these in part. Whatever it is like to be a computer or a stone, I could hardly say, or even if it is like anything, but I know I can imagine it, and that is part of what makes my experience of my limits interesting, because there are so, so many of these, and yet, they seemingly resonate in ever fascinating ways.

This attempt to grasp what is beyond, no matter what we think of it, is always related to the attempt to grasp what is most clear and near. The limits of experience are present in a more pronounced way when we try to grasp at the limits. But any grasping is limited by the fact that it grasps at all. When I pick up a stone, I don’t pick up the dirt around it, or the sky behind it. I may feel the limits of my ability when I try to grasp the sky, and seem to get a handful of nothing. But when I grasp the stone, I also leave the sky behind. Grasping is limiting, and limiting is always to miss the unlimited. The two are two sides of each other, and of this beyond. Whether this is a trick of language or not, I seem to think that it is not merely a trick of language, or our memories, or our bodies. I think all of these have this trick, and this is because this trick is part of what happens whenever the limited tries to grasp the unlimited by means of limits. I think it is part of the fabric of everything.

Of course, this can’t be proved. Proof is about limits, and proof has its limits. Like everything. Whatever it is that’s being discussed here, it’s evident that proof is not going to be applicable to it in any sensible way. So those looking for that likely stopped reading this long ago, and any who got this far are likely to only get more frustrated if they continue.

But if proof isn’t the issue here, this doesn’t mean that we are necessarily in the realm of something like blind faith. “Reason,” whatever that term means, has always hit upon its limits, and always reflected on these. Every philosophical tradition on the planet has those who relish in the paradoxes of reason, from Zhuangzi in ancient China to Zeno in ancient Greece and Nagarjuna in ancient India, and likely many beyond. But we see these limit effects in science as well. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory, or the mathematics of Goedel, Cantor, or Klein. Just as language and our experience hit their limits, so does seemingly any sort of attempt at logic, proof, deduction, demonstration, or any other method humans have developed for attempting to get rid of limit-effects. It’s only when one isn’t paying attention that limit-effects seem to go away. And yet, when one takes things to the limits, or is taken there, the limits seem to show up, at times even with great force. These limits can be ignored some of the time, but not all of the time. Black holes, after all, seem to exist. Though I must admit, I’ve never experienced them, nor Antarctica, nor my own birth, though I assume all three likely are there in some way or another.

The experience of the beyond does seem hard to explain away. And yes, it could also be the structure of our brains. We are, after all, as many scientists have argued, “pattern-completing” creatures. Show us half a face, and we will be able to recognize it anyway, and perhaps, if we act quickly, imagine the rest of the face is there even when it is not. Our brains seem to want to complete patterns even when the is nothing else there. Perhaps any sense we have of the beyond is simply like that. And so, when we ask ourselves what we might mean when we say that before what came before there must be something else before, on to infinity, we are simply extending our pattern-completing tendencies to their limits. But again, perhaps this is just language playing tricks on us, our the shape of our bodies, and ultimately, our brains are just one more fold within these, if in some very complex ways.

So many byways are worth pursuing in discussing the beyond, for nothing seems more tied up with the fabric of everything than everything and anything. But I’d like to put these aside for a moment, and talk more directly about this beyond. Perhaps the beyond isn’t a trick of language, or our bodies, or our minds, or reason, or if it is these, it isn’t merely these. What if the unlimited were in fact a part of the fabric of everything limited, and vice-versa?

Scientists, in fact, hit upon such issues when they try to talk about “the singularity,” whatever it is that came before the so-called “Big Bang.” We know that time and space seem to compress under the particular sort of conditions which, if extended to their limit, would produce something like a singularity of the sort which cosmologists imagine as existing “before” the start of our universe. That is, if we project back in time what we think likely occurred before anything and everything we think happened, eventually we hit something like “the singularity.” And before this is paradox. Scientists often describe this as that from which time and space as we know them emerged. There was no “before” before the singularity. Because time seem to have unrolled from this.

Of course, this leads to all sorts of paradoxes. If our universe is the whole of everything, then the singularity was before the beforeness of time itself. But if it is not, then there was a before our experiences of beforeness, and hence, time is, like space, something which is local. Perhaps these other times work differently than ours. After all, time is always in some sense local, it takes me much longer to cross mountainous terrain than flat. Scientists often talk about time’s ability to be scrunched together like this, by means of the notion of “spacetime.”

Then again, similar issues crop up in regard to space as well. Beyond the limits of our known universe, either there is more there, or a limit of some sort. And if there is something beyond that limit, then the same either/or repeats, right? Maybe our universe is part of multiverse, but then perhaps it is silly to call our universe the universe, any more than it makes sense to call our time the only time. Similar problems occur in regard to “inner” space as much as “outer.” If there is a smallest size of space or thing, scientists have yet to find it. They simply keep increasing the energy involved, and more strange stuff seems to keep appearing from the fabric of our universe as things get “smaller.” Virtual partcles and quantum foam are what high-energy physicists talk about, and whenever they build a more powerful “microscope,” they end up just creating, in a sense at least, evidence of smaller and smaller things. Whatever space is, and size with it, it seems to have all the limit problems that go with space, if in its own way.

But perhaps these are just matters of words. Either before or after time, and either beyond space or not, there must either be limits or lack of limits, right? Perhaps we didn’t need billion-dollar quantum microscopes to show us these things. The ancient philosophers like Zeno and Nagarjuna and Zhuangzi had all this down thousands of years ago. Before before, there must be another, on to infinity, unless there isn’t, and we hit a limit. Either way, what’s before before is either limited or unlimited, but either of these notions deconstructs, in a sense, and turns into its other, when taken to the limit. Limits deconstruct when taken to the limit. Another way of saying this is that whatever is limited is always limitation of the unlimited, or whatever is grasped is always that of what is ungraspable. While this could all just be a play of words, it seems more plausible to me that words are a play of it, whatever it is, or isn’t.

This is why Livingston talks about God in his book. Because what science is just discovering, and mathematics in its own way, and language and other fields in theirs, is their limits. But this experience of the limitless from within the limited is, for Livingston, the root of what religions have called God. Livingston doesn’t say whether or not he believes God exists, or anything like that. But he does seem to think that this sort of experience is where humans get the idea of God.

Nevertheless, while it doesn’t seem we can know for sure anything related to the limits of our ability to know, there does seem to be effects of the position one takes on all of this. If one tries to ignore the limit effects, in any and all manifestations, the world and all that is in it is dealt with as so many discrete, self-contained, reified objects. Taken to the limit, this will break down, but so long as the world you are in remains very, very stable, you can likely get away with dealing with the world this way for quite a long time, though one will have to periodically engage in damage control to keep limit effects from unravelling the constiuents of one’s experiential, linguistic, or other types of “boxes” into which one has divided the stuff of the world. Or, conversely, one can take the position that the limit effects are there, and that we should deal with them. Ultimately, this is a more sustainable approach, because it seems like they are, and that the attempt to ignore them eventually catches up with one, often in catastrophic ways.

Another set of choices arises, however, within the position to accept these limit experiences as there. That is, one can see them as distinct, or related. That is, perhaps it is only language that deconstructs at its limits, or memory, or experience, or art, or whatever. Or, one can see them as related, even if not simply. Livingston takes the second approach, and sees them as related, and I must say, I agree. But what if, beyond this related limit-experience effect, this isn’t merely where God “comes from”? What if there’s something really there?

Whatever might be “really there,” I’d hesitate to call this “God” or “god” or anything like that, because people have so many preconceptions with such a term. That’s why this essay began with an attempt to talk about the largest possible context, the context of all contexts. And it seems, from what has just been said, that if such a thing exists, it would have to be beyond the limits of space and time, near and far, inside and outisde, and what’s more, virtual and actual. Whatever this would be, it wouldn’t be something that “exists,” but perhaps, more like something that “ex”-ists.” It wouldn’t be a something, or anyhing like a something, because it wouldn’t be a thing. But we could only ever know it by thing-ifying some of its aspects, because that’s how humans know anything, or experience anything, or talk about anything. We limit, we carve, we grasp that which is beyond us, and we then do this again, and try to link things up somehow. But all that we are every grasping is beyond things.

Things are so limited, after all. When I pick up a stone, it seems distinct. But is “really” connected to everything else in my world which, if they all vanished, would not leave anything like a stone behind. Place a stone in a strong vacuum, or in the center of the sun, and it would cease to be a stone near instanteously. Everything is, at least ultimately, connected to everything else, and only appears the way it does because of everything around it, which is connected to everything around it, on to infinity. While a stone might appear distinct and discrete , this is only relatively so, it is simply one side of the world, one which faces me in this particular way. Likewise with my experience. I may pick up a stone, and feel it in my hand. But my hand was feeling something before, namely, the pressure of the air around it. The pressure of the stone in my hand is only relatively discrete from the other sensations of pressure, weight, texture, and whatever else I felt with my hand. And the same with the sight of the stone. As soon as I open my eyes, I see visual stimuli, and the stone, while appearing discrete, is only really a slice of my visual experience. My brain coordinates this visual slice with that of the weight of the stone in my hand, but ultimately, I am linking up, networking, aspects of a continua of visual and tactile stimuli that I have sliced, by means of the way I network my body, with aspects of the world’s networks. The slicing process, itself a networking, is ultimately just one more part of this networking of networking.

Taken to its limit, the world can in fact be seen as simply graspings of it, the ways these are sewn together and networked in various ways, the contexts which exceed these, and the changes which exceeds these even moreso. Language, our bodies, memory, all these are aspects of experience, and our experiences of the limits of our experiences. I experience the limits of my experience as much in my experience of the future as in my experience of my inability to experience your inner, personal experience, directly. All the limits of my experience manifest differently in my experience, and yet, with similarities.

And so, if we were to talk about the largest possible context, perhaps it is hardly anything like a man with a white beard in the heavens somewhere. That’s insulting. Perhaps it is the world of experience, its fabric. That from which all experience comes, and with it, any experience of any of its aspects, be this time or space, before or after, matter or energy, language or reality, or whatever else. Even to call it experience is to limit it, one could say givenness, or the world, or whatever, or one could simply say the beyond, so long as it’s clear that this beyond is what is most intimate as well as most distant, for it is the beyond that any here is only ever an aspect, any thing only a bit, any one only a section.

I like to change what I call this. Sometimes, I think it makes sense to call this matrix, for it is the matrix of all experience, that from which any particular experience arises, and which is part of any and all experience, even if as that which exceeds it from within. Sometimes I call it the oneand, which is to say, that which is beyond any one, any attempt to limit it or grasp it as a thing, aspect, section, quantity, quality, or any other determinate section thereof. It is the fabric of anything we’ve ever known, or can known, or even imagine, that from which space and time derive. It is, whatever it is, any and all and none and neither and both and then some more. Whatever it is, we have never known anything but, been anything but, and yet, we’ll never exhaust it, for it is the potential for whatever could ever be, including anything we could ever imagine, and likely more. If it exists, it does so beyond our meagre notions of what is real or actual, because these too are simply it’s aspects.

If I’m starting to sound incoherent, or mystical, or even religious, perhaps this is because all those religiouns were on to something, but in their own way. Whatever this matrix is, it is beyond the ways in which these systems of belief have tried to limit it. The fact that they have often done so in ways which lead to destruction is, it seems to me, the result of paranoia and attempt to control that which, by its nature, refuses to be controlled, at least, never fully.

Is this matrix, is it good? Hardly. It destroys and creates limitlessly. All death and evil, cruelty and torture, everything horrific which ever came to be came from it, and is part of it, as are we. As well as everything good. It isn’t immoral, it’s amoral, as well as the source of all morality, actual or possible. Perhaps it isn’t even there, but if it isn’t, then it’s virtually everwhere. And even if it is just a fantasy, it’s one which doesn’t seem to want to go away. The world has changed for fantasies before, like god and communism. Whatever fantasy is, it is surely the potential to become real, and nothing is more real than that. Perhaps the whole universe is after all just some fantasy in the brain of some superbeing, and we are just its thoughts, it’s crazed delusions. We might never be able to know, and perhaps knowing is not the issue here any more than anything like faith.

While it would be a lie to say that matrix is good, or evil, for it is clearly neither and both and less and more, there is, nevertheless, some way in which it seems to tend towards the good and even the better, with the potential for the best. We are here after all. There is something rather than nothing. Some could call that cruelty, and some have argued throughout history that “life is suffering.” And yet, it does seem that there is some fundamental pleasure to experiencing. The taste of food, the texture of feeling the world with my skin. The gift of the world, despite all it’s pains, seems good, seems a gift, if one which pains us so when it is diminished or taken away from others or ourselves in some degree or another. But we all cling to life. Even the simplest of creatures. And even the stars and oceans seem to have something like life in them, they seem to want to continue to be, and if given the chance, seem to have something like a desire to give rise to something like life, which seems, given a chance, to have something like a desire to be happier, better, develop, grow, something.

None of which is to say there isn’t something terrible afoot as well. Earthquakes can blindly destroy, and plants can devour, just as animals can rip things to shreds. But it seems that only as creatures develop in their capacity to experience more deeply, mentally and emotionally, that they develop the capacity for cruelty, the enjoyment of the suffering of others. And yet, it is only in these more developed manifestations of matrix that we see the ability to enjoy and desire to foster the pleasure, happiness, and life of others. Cruelty and altruism are born, it seems, together.

Whatever matrix is, it seems it gives rise to evil and good at the same time, and yet, the good is always one small bit ahead. This isn’t something that can be proven, but yet, there is something rather than nothing, and everything living clings to life and seems to want more of it, and more abundantly. Whatever life is, it is good, the taste of it is sweet, at least, more than the alternative, or we’d have more mass suicide, not only of humans, but of animals and plants, and who knows, maybe even rocks and things. Of course, there is a death-drive, a love of self-destruction, which inhabits the world. Addictions and compulsions, genocides and suicides, the dark side of the world. But despite the very, very real horrors, life and all that leads to it and beyond it, which I like to call emergence, seems to always, if at times only ever so slightly, be winning.

Nevertheless, there is deep, deep cruelty here, and wanton destruction. To evolve humans, how many simpler creatures had to meet horrified and painful demises in the crucible of destruction called evolution? Is there any way to justify that? Were we worth it? Will we be? Or is that, perhaps, our talk, our duty even, to find a way to make ourselves worthy of the pain it took to give rise to us? An infinite debt, perhaps.

And there is hardly a guarantee things will go well from here. If the good side of matrix has continued to prevail, it is only by the thinnest of threads. A fine balance along the way. The world has known paroxysms before, and will know them again. How many times did life evolve to something like us in this universe, to likely collapse on itself? How many times on earth? How many civilizations have dug their own graves? Will we be the next? And will it have been for anything?

It seems, ultimately, that we were born of this singularity, that which came from before the Big Bang, and by mean, I mean all of experience, all the we, the world of experience as such. And to this, we will likely return. Whether the universe collapses in on itself again, which scientists seem skeptical about these days, or it will continue to expand to who knows what, if the singularity is before the advent of before and after, then in some sense, we have always already never left it. If, like a quantum particle, it is both inside and outside of time, as it would seem to be according to everything we “know” about things quantum, then this singularity would be both and neither before and after our world. Everything in us would be contained in it, and everything to come, everything possible, would be always already within it, and yet, somehow deeper and richer in the process of actually unfolding.

Perhaps there is no singularity. Perhaps science will prove us wrong. Perhaps there never was a god, or anything like it. But there is something rather than nothing, and like any something we have ever known, this something likely comes from somewhere. Which is more virtual and more actual, the context from which we came, or the context which we are? Or any attempt to describe these as things? Perhaps the singularity is virtual, a fantasy, perhaps it is simply not there. Still, the idea of it can impact us. And perhaps we are not here, perhaps we are just simulations within the virtual worlds of the singularity, from which we have never actually left. Would there be a difference? Ultimately, it seems that the only thing that would matter, whatever that might mean, is the difference such notions would make.

And ultimately, I think they make an enormous difference. The only reason it is worth talking about the largest possible context is its effects, effects upon us, upon our lives, upon that of which we are a part. And I think it is worth talking about these things. Because, firstly, to do so reveals just how unstable and ungrounded so much of what we think of as secure actually is. Everything we have ever thought to be secure can be unravelled with a little deconstructive logic. Zeno, Nagarjuna, Zhuangzi, or in a more contemporary sense, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Derrida, Heisenberg, Goedel, the fact that money is no longer on the gold standard, all these ways in which we learn, in one form or another, that what we thought was ultimate is hardly so. The list goes on, and is likely to continue to. We need to remind ourselves of this often, lest we get seduced into thinking that what we see before us is as stable as it sometimes appears.

But this moment of skepticism is itself a dead end if treated as an end in itself. To cling to nothing is nihilism, and that is dangerous. It is a lack of faith that something is better than nothing, that the taste of the world is sweet rather than sour. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy which leads to pain and destruction, whereas a faith in life, and its goodness, helps make it so. The actual is always fueled by the virtual and vice-versa, and if emergence is anything, it is the hope in the fabric of the world in the process of making itself real, of overcoming despair, not only in the sense in which we talk about this with humans, but in the very fabric of what is, that from which human forms are merely so many aspects.

No, the universe itself is a hope that it is ultimately worth it. And we are its most complexly developed projects that we know. We owe it to everything that had to suffer to give rise to us to take that hope to the next level, and prevent a calamity of collapse from overreach, or despair and underreach, either of which could be the end of this round. I say round, not because I know there will be more. But because if there is a before of the before, then there is likely an after of the after. But there is no way of knowing when it comes to these things. There is hope. And hope is real, and can influence what one does, and what one does can give rise to more hope.

And so, if there is an ethics here, a path, or something like that, it is, no matter how complex in the details, ultimately simple in its paradoxical way. There is something rather than nothing, and experience and life are ultimately sweet rather than sour, for otherwise, even the plants would starve themselves to leave. Even suicide is a desire for a life that is better in regard to an imagined standard generated within this life, and all murder is simply a refraction of the same urge turned outwards, and vice-versa. Evil and goodness aren’t things, they are calls, the call of the void and oblivion, and the call of the better. To listen for one is to hear it, and to hear it is to look for it further, and to look for it is to act to find it more, and to look to find it more is to produce it more. These are self-potentiating calls, and while virtual, they give rise to the actual in their wake, these are varying sides of the same. As are limit and limited, grasping and ungraspable, experience and experiencer.

Whatever good there is in matrix needs to be cared for, looked for, looked after, fed, and grown. This good, it is overflowing, it is giving, in its pure sense, it is life and what leads to it and more abundantely. It is the tendency within the rocks to give rise to more complex formations, of the water to give rise to vortexes, of cells to agreggate into colonies, of life to evolve, and of humans to care for each other. We humans, we have been invented with the best and the worst matrix has yet to give rise, and our task is to produce more good, and deeper good, and share this with the world, to liberate ourselves and the world yet deeper.

And this means not to tie matrix down. Matrix only ever grows non-dually. To reify it into things, to try to capture it in boxes and determinations, to cut it up into slivers, to quantify it and fix it into mine and yours, this can only ever be a means to an end, and an end which is ultimately beyond any and all ends. Any particular end confines matrix, limits it, and matrix will break free and break it down, unless it continues to grow, that is, unless matrix itself is in the process of winding down, getting ready of the next round. But if we are in a growth stage, and seeing as our sun continues to shine, it seems that we are, then it seems that experience and life and all that is in it only ever reifies, only ever thing-ifies, to give rise to greater complexity, and that there must be a balance between the desire to grasp and the desire to let go. Either extreme, and the system will buckle and breakdown, and always has. One only needs to look at the world and life, the evolution of matter and organisms, and see what conditions gave rise to the better and the best, to the process of the emergence of emergence from itself, the complexification of matrix in the process of its emergence. And while this process always gives rise to entities, things, reifications, selves and objects, ones and digits, it always does so for the purpose of going beyond these as well.

To love one’s context as one loves oneself is the best way to love oneself. If matrix is paradoxical, so is its ethics. To take fantasy seriously, and love it, as a way to build a better reality. To see hope as the substance of the potential of reality and matter. To realize that the evil we all fight is in the very fabric of each of us and the world, even if the potential for greater good only comes in and through this continual process of realization and overcoming. To adore the something rather than nothing, the sweetness of experience and life, and the potential for it to exist more abundently, by giving it to others as the only way to truly give to ourselves. To invest one’s soul in that which is not yours, not to the point of one’s death, and not indiscriminately, but in the way which seems to give rise to more of the better in one’s contexts, in a way which is graded, smart, strategic. To grow the potential for growth in whatever one encounters.

To think of and discuss the largest possible context is to deconstruct fixity, and imagine beyond, and in the process, to find a way to give rise to a greater beyond right here. If this is fantasy, its effects are very real. Some have argued that this is the most real thing one could ever experience, but if this is so, then the world is unreal, and not worth saving. And yet, if the world is what is real, and this isn’t, then there is nothing worth saving it for. The context is the criterion, the value, which makes it worth it, and it is implicit, as hope, dream, or fantasy, within anything and everything we do. Even if we don’t believe in life, life believes in us, because we fear losing it even when we have lost ourselves. The same with experience, the same with the grass and the trees. Even the molecules seem to want to be, and more intensely, for in the right conditions, they spontaneously combine, grow, and give rise to greater complexity. The same with humans. In the right conditions, in those of support and love, we grow and develop ourselves and our worlds spontaneously. And yet, we were born of such a terrible process of evolution, we have yet to learn how to provide the contexts of our own emergence. Let us hope we do so before we destroy ourselves and our worlds.

If there is a god, whatever that could mean, it is in the fabric of everything, and it is everything. It is the singularity, and it is we, and we are simply aspects of it. It is beyond time and space, and within any and all times and spaces, beyond any being, thing, subject, grasping, or experience, and an aspect of all of these. It is the unlimited, the unconditioned, which gives rise to all that is limited and conditioned as the condition of its possibility. We can never know or prove it, but we can hope and give rise to more of it as it does so through us, just as we can also destroy it as it destroys us. We owe it to it to let it dream better dreams through us.

And that means learning to think in terms which are less binary, restricted, reifying, paranoid, controlling. We need to learn to unwind our fixations, loosen our categories, not hold the world and its aspects so tightly. Whatever you hold to too tightly, you lose, and whatever you give away freely, you gain. This doesn’t mean to embrace pure paradox, nor to embrace pure reason, it means to continually skirt the boundaries between, deconstructing and reconstructing, yet always with the process of emergence of any and all as guide, which is to say, the beyond which is here. The potential for all we have ever known or dreamed and infinitely more is right here and now, we only need to learn how to unleash it, and we do this by more complex networking, which is to say, giving rise to more diversity, taking the best, linking it back in, and letter more diversity arise within this, in and beyond ourselves, fostering this diversity to the maximum sustainable limits, and giving rise to the better within the best we know and see. We have the world as our guide. Study it, and learn from it, that which has tended to give rise to the best before, which is to say, that which always produces the better within itself and its contexts, and experiment with models based on these in new situations, and learn new techniques for emergence. Let emergence be its own guide. Let the beyond teach itself to go beyond within and beyond itself.

For whatever reason, matrix decided at some point to give rise, from itself, to more of itself. We are the result of this, and so is anything and everything we have ever experienced, felt, hoped, dreamed, or known. We are this potential, we are thoughts in the dreaming mind of the universe. Before we return to the ocean from which we came, we can dream our own, better dreams, or we can try to hold these dreams and lose them anyway. The task, it would seem, is to find the most productive form of our own unravelling, for the world will ultimately unravel us anyway.

There is no standard to which one could hold up this process to judge it, to understand it, other than itself, and any attempt to do so is ultimately derived from it, and hence, partial. The good within this process, the emergence of the better, is only a part of this, and yet, it is the part which spurs it along, for otherwise, the gift of experience and life would not be here. Matrix is trying to overcome its own limitations, but it can only do so by means of going through its limitations. This pathway through limitations to move beyond it, and in going beyond, preserving yet developing, is part of its process. This is more than dialectic, it is beyond any simplistic attempt to understand it, to hold it down, capture it, carve it, limit it. Any attempt at description will ultimately fail. And yet, description is all we have go get a handle of it, and of it to get a handle on itself, for we are so many attempts at description of it by itself. Each entity, each organism, each experience, we are refractions of matrix as it tries to learn and think itself, and to know, learn, desire, and love itself more fully in the process.

When we are in sync with matrix, life flows, and when we aren’t, life stutters. Coming into sync with matrix, learning to give like it and be given by it, this is part of our task. But since matrix is only ever its own overcoming, to come into greater sync with matrix is to emerge from itself own limitations in and through it. And human limitations, that which threaten us with collapse, is not at this point the outside world, though this is always threatening to engulf us. And yet, humans have developed the ability to hold the physical world largely at bay. We can feed ourselves many times over. No, the greatest danger if ourselves. We were born of a world of beast eat beast, and now we are the beasts that eat all others, including ourselves. Mostly what we eat now are each other’s souls. We crush others into horrific conditions in our neo-feualistic empires of capital and commodities and digital armies. And there is hardly a need for this, other than our own fears and paranoias, the heritage of our evolutionary hardwiring to fear anything and everything.

This kept us alive in the harsh world of biological evolution. But our physical technology has advanced so wildly, it has eclipsed the evolution of our emotional and intellectual faculties. As a species, we are like children playing with guns. Will we mature enough before we learn how to use them horribly?

Our species is on the verge of biotech, nanotech, rewriting the genetic code, cloning, artificial life and intelligence. Terrifying possibilities. We have already learned to split the atom, produce machine guns, and the horrors we have unleashed have been world wars. It is only by a hair’s breath that we haven’t destroyed each other yet, and yet, we seem to thrive off staying always on the verge of this. We seem to thrive, as a species, by being always on the verge of self-destruction from hoarding, rather than giving.

This makes sense of course. It is our traumatic past. But evolution is full of tipping points and inflection points. And we have hit one so profound, with the development of our technology, that it is a threat greater than we have ever known, a threat to destroy all life on this planet, or to give rise to it in radically new ways. Only if we learn how to deal with our emotional and intellectual emergence will our physical emergence not be our own downfall.

And this is why, I believe, it is worth talking about the largest possible context. Because it is right here and now, in the very fabric of things. And an awareness of this, and what this can mean, can alter how we act. I wish I could remember this myself at all times, at all levels of my being. But so often I am caught by my own fixations. I become fixed on my desires, my objects, my passions, my hopes, and I reify them. I lose sight of the largest possible context. Often I know it in my mind, but not in my bones and gut, and I think so often so many of us are this way. Our passions overpower what we know we should do for even our own best interests. Humans have complained about this since there have been humans, back to the days of Kongzi (Confucius). And yet, in evolutionary terms, this is just yesterday.

Our limbic systems, which regulate our emotions and passions, these are the oldest parts of our evolutionary hardware. Our frontal cortext, the part with reasoning, is the most recent. Altruism is also evolutionarily very, very recent. Very few species, the “eusocial” animals, will lay down their lives and interests for their colony. Most theorists have argued that it is only when there evolution of the individual depends on that of the collective that the precursors of altruism evolve.

Altruism can be idiotic, of course. It is stupid to cut off your arm to feed someone you don’t know, or to give away your last bit money when you need to feed yourself with it. It is stupid to pour yourself into those who seem to only desire to destroy themselves, and the world with them, unless there is hope that, in the long run, this will have been worth it. But to hoard for oneself warsps the self, and to do horrible actions scars you at times even unconsciously more than it consciously scars others. If only we could all remember this.

Even if matrix, the singularity, or god is a fantasy, it is then a useful one, and a useful one to think of often. But not as a thing. Never as reified, but rather, as the powerful force for emergence. For it is not merely a power of dereification. It is neither dissolution nor objectification, but the weaving, the networking, the potential for even greater networking, within the fabric of the world itself. It is neither nor, but both and beyond neither nor.

And yet, everything within us wants to try to pin it down, and hold it for ourselves. History is full of the violence of the result of this. It is always where there is the potential for greater good that the potential for greater evil lurks.

It would be a great loss to throw away the insights which religions give us, and yet, religion has tried to domesticate what it so often calls merely god. Matrix is so much more, it is oneand beyond any one. And it is everywhere, everything, and yet so much more, for it is the potential to go beyond itself which is in everything, and is everything. It is the ultimate and proximate, fantasy and reality.

I cannot prove this to you, nor can I convince you, or even myself. But matrix has, in a sense, always already convinced you, within your bones and sinews, as it lives itself through you, and beyond you. Can we come into sync with emergence in the process of emerging, or will we fight it? Will we learn to love ourselves and others through it? And will it matter? Ultimately, it will only matter to us if we let it. Will that matter in the ultimate? Of course not. And infinitely. Matrix cares about every aspect of it infinitely. And yet, it is stupid, dead, and insensate, for we are its eyes and ears, its dreams and hopes. It knows and feels itself through us, and those who will come after. It loves only as we love, even if it learns to do this through us. Everything in us is in it, and yet, this is also a threat. We do not know if it will ever get beyond us, and yet, it’s time and hope, it’s chances to get it right and wrong, seem likely infinite.

To live in the world thinking about this, it is, well, strange to everyday concerns. It is to disconnect from buying and seeling, profit and loss, love and hate. And yet, it is possible to use this disconnection, to help loosen the ways we fixate on things. And then, to dream differently. To dream better dreams, dreams of hope that, it is hoped, can become sulf-fulfilling prophecies. Certainly our nightmares can become self-fulfilling as well. We need to help matrix to dream its better dreams in and through us. We owe it to it, to our past, our future, and ourselves, right here and now.

Words and hopes, these are distortions. I hope I am up to my words, and I fail repeatedly. But I believe there is a reason for thinking and writing these sorts of things, and that this hope, for emergence of emergence to emerge more emergently within itself, can be fostered, even if in some small way, but such writing and thinking. In and through me, and my words, and my hopes and fears, failings and synnergies in relation to this emergence. And perhaps by writing this, I can help keep myself better in sync with this process of emergence. And if you read this, and are inspired in that way, to go beyond, perhaps there is something real here anyway. Something real beyond being, things, limits, and grasping, a context beyond context.

Nettime: A Networkological Approach to Time and Temporality, via Science and Math, Part One

What is time? Surely time can be simple, as measured by clocks of various sorts. Distinct rhythms of a pendulum, or changes in number on a digital clock. The predictable movement of something that goes back and forth, an oscillator which covers a repeatable distance of space each time. But if we define time this way, we use notions like “repeat” in our very definition, presupposing that which we are attempting to define. Or perhaps, as suggested by famed theorist of time Henri Bergson, we are simply spatializing time by definining it this way. Clocks, after all, change physicially, and this isn’t time, it’s space. To imagine time as the movement from one moment to another, like “beads on a string,” is a spatial model.

Nevertheless, space and time are inestricably linked. It always takes time to cover an expanse of space, at least in the everyday world, and whatever takes up time seems to also occupy space. Whatever time is, it seems bound to a notion of space, even if the relation between these is anything but simple. Speed is simply the rate at which we cover space in time, converting one into the other. It can take me three hours to walk across town, or ten minutes by car. Inversely, endurance is simply the manner in which space is occupied by the same thing over time, and this indicates for us that, in relation to other endurances, something has “occupied” space. A stone occupies space, for me, at least, when it appears the same in relation to what’s around it for a period of time. This appearance continues, “repeats” itself, even when I close and open my eyes, or try to mash another stone into it, and realize, they won’t blend, even as coffee and milk seem perfectly happy to cohabitate in space, even if they displace each other a bit, but different colors of light seem to be able to overlay and blend and share space with hardly a problem. The displacement or occupation of space is always relative, and not only to the maps of occupations and displacements which are a spatial layout, but also in regard to time, for occupation and displacement, of objects or appearances, always happens in relation to time.

Models of Time: Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, Literature, Film, and Everyday Life

In the history of philosophy, definitions of time abound, and with this, it becomes possible to list off differing notions of time, the Augustinian philosophy of time, the Hegelian model, the Bergsonian model, the Deleuzian model. Within the history of science, there are also named models of time, such as Newtonian time, Minkoswki time, Einsteinian spacetime, Quantum spacetime. The time of Newton is similar to that of “beads on a string,” and yet, because it involves calculus, with its capacity for infinite division, the beads can be of any size, surely like physical beads on a physical string in physical space. With Minkowski, the time of physics began to compress and stretch, and with Einstien, time began to warp in relation to gravity, the famed “theory of relativity,” which introduced such new notions of “curved spacetime,” perhaps better visualized as “scrunched” or “expanded” spacetime, into physics.

Mathematicians, of course, had already begun to imagine such notions, and these seemingly unreal formulations were influential on the physicists who found more concrete applications for them. Riemann’s notions of quilting spaces of various types of scrunched or expanded spaces together to produce a monstrous “Franken”-space, a patchwork of geometries, each, of which would experience time differently in relation to these spaces, paved the way for Einstein. As did the work of Felix Klein, who famously realized that just as painters had been converting four-dimensional space and time into flat two-dimensional depictions for centuries, so there were ways to convert forms of space into each other by transforming and warping them, turning a sphere into a circle and an ellipse or back, simply in regard to the perspective one took on them. In fact, we often transform spaces and their shapes into one another simply by walking around them. All of this happens in and through time, space is never devoid of time, and vice-versa, and Einstein built upon this, giving rise to the stretching and bending spacetime spoken of by relativity theory. Quantum physicists, building upon this further stilll, describe a world in which spacetime is even stranger, permeated by jumps and fuzzinesses of various sorts, in which it is possible to either go back or forward in time, or act in ways which are fundamentally indistinguishable from this.

Beyond philosophy and science, there is also the time of other disciplines, the time as described by historians, ethnographers, sociologists. There is also the time described by literature, so many types of narrative time. And narratives aren’t only present in fiction, but also arguments (“if A and B, then C”), jokes, political narratives (“this war is different from the last one”), economic narratives (“this crisis was caused by this or that”), therapeautic narratives (“my parents help explain why I’m this way”), or the various other types of narrative structures we use to help us structure our lives. Or consume for pleasure in so many works of art. Language is itself fundamentally temporal, verbs producing transits between nouns, in regard to so many qualities and connectors, all produced by grids of symbols of various sorts that we arrange and rearrange in space and time like so many bits of a hypercomplex game whose stakes are often the very stuff of reality.

Beyond language, however, there are many ways in which we can bring the time within us into resonance with various aspects of the world around us. The time it takes to walk through a building, for example, in which one can walk faster or slower, loop back to where one started. Or subway time, whereby slices of an urban landscape are sutured by voyages of varying speed and directness within looping underground passageways which seem like so many virtual voyages into other dimensions. Or the time travels of filmic narratives, which by means of narrative conventions such as time-travel, can loop and bend.

If the time outside us seems relatively stable in relation to a variety of spatial layouts, however, our lived, “internal” time often seems the strangest of all. Memory flashes us backwards in time and permeates our present in varying degrees, even as anticipation, the futureshock of our past projected into our future, really, permeates our past and digs within it for useful memories which it them throws in front of us, permeating our present from the other side. Our future and present are saturated with the memories we use to frame and imagine them, just as our past is always organized and sifted through by means of the fantasies we have about future and present which help us organize our imagined future actions, hopes, and dreams. Separating past, present, and future in lived time, the time inside of us, often seems a paradoxical enterprise at best. Philosophers and mystics have long wondered whether or not the past really exists, or the future for that matter, as we never seem to “really” get to either, we live in what seems like an eternal present. And yet, this present is so full of past and future, memories and anticipations, hopes and fears based on those experienced previously, do we ever get the pure present? It vanishes, much like the past and future do. All seem unreal when you focus on them, as if time was only ever where you weren’t looking. And yet, mystics through the ages have countered that it is possible to expand time by meditating on this eternal present to expand it beyond time and space, to reach eternity within each and every moment and fragment of matter or space.

Taken to its extreme, inner, lived time begins to sound almost as strange as that of the physicists or mathematicians, microcosm refracting macrocosm or vice-versa. Then again, the physical world seems pretty stable unless we stray far from the “normal” conditions of the everyday, while lived internal time seems normally only when we pay attention to how strange what seems “normal” to us actually is. Either way, the notion of time is used to describe these both, as aspects of the same thing.

Is Time a Word?: The Linguistic Argument, and Beyond

Perhaps then the issue is with language, perhaps the most complex creation of humanity. Some philosophers have gone in this direction. Our language reifies, which is to say, “thing-ifies” whatever it describes. Words fix the flux of the world into static snapshots which don’t actually correspond to the much more labile conditions of the world beyond it. The useful fiction of words perhaps distorts or even creates what we experience as time. Nouns are perhaps the worst culprits, at least verbs are somewhat more honest, and adjectives allow us to imagine aspects things share despite space and time, while connecting words just do the dirty work of bringing these all together and putting them in motion. And it is in the motion that we rediscover the time killed by nouns and other less guilty words, the motion of producing and consuming sentences, and getting around the deceptive periods which separate sentences like so many false idols of space within time. Books spatialize time, then, perhaps as much as clocks, or films. Or bodies, which localize time within these lumps of moving flesh, and curl it up within these meat-computers we call brains, who then produce things like words which segment the world into words and then reassemble them to produce a parodic representation of the world beyond it.

But language certainly can’t be the only culprit. Films are also guilty, they slice the world up into snapshot images which are reassembled into moving images which are warped reassemblages which resonate with the time of the world, yet are fundamentally distinct temporal creations. Our everyday lives as then equally as suspect, as wel slice the world into bits, like so many moving cameras we move our perspectives around, dicing up the world from our own points of view, and then reassemble them in the fuzzily warped and edited storehouse we call memory. And if, as scientists argue, our present and future are threaded through with this highly suspect memory archive, then our present should hardly be trusted, it is ultimately a personal language of sorts, whose letters and words are the memories we use to help us recognize, describe, and re-present the present experiences we filter and categorize before we even realize we have done so. Perhaps the very notion of an ego is simply the deepest such memory-word we know, the “I” around which our language of experiences congeal.

Maybe this all because we have bodies which warp our experiences, turning moving light particles into sight, moving air particles into sound, translating our sense-data into memory-recognitions, and all in relation to our evolutionary heritage which biases us to look for certain experiences over others. Whatever time or space we ever experience is ultimately the result of the way in which our biological evolution evolved us to experience it, in ways which it felt were most likely to help us survive. And if our culture, our films and our words and so much else, were created from this foundation, might they not be simply more complex warpages of the world, inheritors of the biology which evolved us with its own agendas? Of course, biological evolution is only one level of complexity, the physical world had to “evolve” up to the point at which it could “evolve” organisms, and the difference between complex physical systems and living ones seems ultimately only a matter of degree. A whirlpool seems to have a “life of its own,” and to “want” to continue whirling the way it does. To say this isn’t proto-life is like saying that organisms aren’t hyper-matter. It’s all a matter of degree, or perspective.

Either way, if time is ultimately a word, and words are biased distortions of the world beyond us, this should hardly be reason to stop there and call it a day. There are so many levels of distortion, why fetishize language? Our bodies distort, our brains distort, our sense organs distort, our evolution distorts. It’s all distortion, all the way down. Or translation and creation, depending on how you see it. Matter distorts, and perhaps is this very distortion of some primordial energy, or something deeper still, as scientists believe that matter and energy are simply differing sides of the same. Perhaps space and time simply are distortions then too. Space, time, matter, energy, all distortions of some deeper matrixBut matrix of what? Space, time, matter, and energy, these are abstractions of our experience, which seems only ever filtered by our bodies, brains, psychological biases, cultural biases, the list goes on and on. Perhaps the universe is little more than a set of translations of experiences into each other, and matter, energy, space, and time are simply the terms we use to organize the most stable of these, at least, as the world appears to us.

Is Time Real: Fantasies of Idealist and Materialist Notions of Time

Perhaps, as some have argued, it’s all a simulation, like we see in films such as The Matrix (1999). And so studying film, or virtual reality, then perhaps isn’t such a strange place to go to study time. That said, whatever time is, its as much there as it is in matter or energy. For even our most indubitable experiences, whether personal or shared with others, are only ever known as our experiences. Even if I perform a science experiment, and a community of scientists verifies it, it could be a dream, or I could be one of the famed “brains in a vat” which philosophers sometimes imagine. It could all be a simulation. And there is ultimately no way of knowing if when I see a bunch of scientists verify my experiment, that they aren’t all part of a dream or simulation. Perhaps there are glitches that might give it away, but even these could be parts of a larger simulation or dream still. This is why some scientists have argued that our universe could be one enormous simulation, a holographic projection, and they have even tried to develop experiments that could test if this were the case. But what then would be the difference between virtual and physical reality? Should we care?

Likewise with the physical world. Even if I only ever experience it through my own experience, the aspects of my experience that seem shared with others, which is to say, the so-called “physical” world, even if it’s not really there, even if other people are simply figments of my imagination, they seem so stable and follow such predictable rules, that they can treated as if they were “real.” In fact, even if they are an illusion, what difference would this make, so long as my whole life were this illusion? Of course, even if we were to learn that the whole world of our experience were a simulation, then we could start to wonder if the machine producing the simulation weren’t also a simulation of some deeper simulation.

Such an infinite regress occurs as well when it is not idealism taken to its extreme, but also materialism. If all is matter, then some of this matter give rise to illusions, images, like our sense experience and dreams. But perhaps this is just how matter feels other matter. Our brains experience our sense organs, which experience the matter of the world, it’s all matter all the way down. And thoughts then are just how our brains, which are matter, experience each other. Perhaps then experience, including that of sensation, thought, and feeling, is simply how matter reacts with other matter, and how this is experienced from the inside. Perhaps then all matter, including molecules, feel each other in some very simple, primordial way, and when matter gets more complex, it feels more complexly, and human thought is simply this.

Idealism has difficulty accounting for the physical world, and yet, taken to its extreme, idealism deconstructs itself back into the physical world, or cuts the cord to reality entirely, an impossible situation and/or infinite regress. Likewise, materialism has difficulty accounting for the inner worlds we experience, and seems on the verge of arguing that inner experience is impossible, or it pushes it into ever smaller and more distant realms of matter (ie: the body, the brain, the prefrontal cortex) in what is ultimately an infinite regress verging on the soul. No wonder so many of the most materialist scientists find that there’s a need for a ghost in the machine. For taken to its extreme, materialism ultimately deconstructs, hits paradox or infinite regress, or turns into its opposite, namely, a world in which all matter must have something like experience, even in simplest form.

And yet, even though materialism and idealism both deconstruct, perhaps this isn’t the worst place to be, for since experience is all we have really ever known, perhaps matter and appearance are sides of each other, which is to say, of experience, which is all we ever, well, experience. Space, time, matter, and energy, these all seem aspects of experience then as well. The experience we share is called the physical world, that which we don’t is our “inner” world, but it’s all appearances of varying degrees of stability. Those appearances which appear the most stable we call “real,” and those which are less stable are “merely” appearances, but since it seems there’s no firm way to draw a line between these, these are perhaps differences of degree.

A Matrix of Experience Beyond Binarity

Perhaps we can start from here, from experience, which is all we have ever known. Any experience we have ever had of a world beyond us, or of other experiencing consciousness, is only ever aspects of our experience, which isn’t merely our experience, but also the world. These are two sides of each other, like two sides of a sheet of paper, inseparable. We can’t imagine the world but through ourselves, and vice-versa, and each, like materialism and idealism, ultimately deconstruct each other, or giving rise to paradox, infinite regress, or some sort of fuzzy or oscillating mixture of these. One can either try to ignore this, and cling to ultimately relative notions like “self” or “world,” or embrace this, and realize that self and world are interdependent notions, aspects of each other, and of the more encompassing situation of which they are aspects, and which is all we have ever experienced.

Let’s call this grounding situation “experience.” From such a perspective, “my experience” would be that most fundamental aspect which seems unique to me, and those aspects which seem, from within “my experience” to exceed it somehow, to be that of “the world,” of which the experience of “others” is a part. For there do seem to be experiences beyond mine, as attested to by the reports of other experiencers, even if I only ever access those through my experience. “Experience” as such, then, would be the term used to describe the seemingly larger whole of experience of which mine is an aspect. My experience would then be an opening onto experience as such, included and including it, as paradoxical as this might seem to more traditional forms of logic. Whatever logic there is in the world, it seems to derive from this, so if we want to call it paradoxical, so be it, the foundation from which logic emerges is paradox, such that paradox would ultimately, then, be the foundation of logic, and not vice-versa.

Space then could be seen as the most stable general network of shared experiences among experiencers. For example, if I move an object, and my friend sees this, we both see the object moving, but also the world of experience around this staying stable in relation to the moving object. The greatest stability within this seems to be what we call space, the invariant network which underlies and organizes that which is common to the experiences which experience within experience. While this may warp and bend according to gravity, and ultimately, acceleration, as the experiments used to ground relativity theory seem to show, then perhaps I would have differing experiences than another experiencer. And yet, a third party would be unable to tell which of us is having the “correct” experience of space. Space then would be that within experience which seems to give rise to all these experiences of space by various experiencers.

All of which shows why it makes sense to argue that there needs to be something producing all our particular experiences within experience, and why experience is still ultimately only ever the experience of experiencers, such that perhaps experience as such is an abstraction from the experience of experiencers, a projection of these, an ideal assemblage of all the experiences of all experiencers. This helps explain why the term experience is worth retaining, because there has to be something which relativizes these experiences, in regard to which they are “only” experiences, which is to say, if there were nothing underlying or producing these experiences, it would be redundant to call them “mere” experiences. But this is hardly the case, because experiencers don’t always have the same “external” experiences, and while these issues can usually be resolved by a third party, this isn’t always the case. But if we examine further the distinction between “internal” and “external” experience, this issue gets fuzzier still, for these are also merely aspects of the same, a question of degree. Is the experience of “my” eye the same as “my” experience? What about that of “my” brain? Is the world “mine”? Or my “ego”? Like “self” and “world,” these notions too will deconstruct.

Likewise with that between a particular experience and experience as such, or between experience and that which produces it. But the slippage can be at least partially stabilized by allowing all these notions to be relative to the context which produces these, such that they cease being reified notions, and work more as positions within networks of aspects of a whole which always exceeds the sum of its aspects.

From such a perspective, it’s possible to speak of experience as the ideal extrapolation of all the particular experiences of experiencers. Each experiencer has a “world” of experience, and the sum total of these, greater than the sum of its aspects, is “the” world, the ground of experience as such. The world would then be within all words, but yet always in excess of any, aggregate, and all, for it seems this world is always changing, surprising us, and hardly capturable by all worlds, even in the aggregate, similarly to experiences and experience as such.

In fact, it seems that any particular aspects of the world, or series of these, is always exceeded by the world. This seems to be the fundamental quality of the world of experience itself. Let’s call this “matrix” or “oneand.” It is matrix because it gives rise to the world and experience, and is present in any and all aspects thereof. And it is “oneand” because it is always in excess of any attempt to reduce it to any reified unity. Matrix, or oneand, would then be the very stuff of the world of experience itself. Any and all aspects of this would be only aspects thereof. Any segment, discrimination, unity, binary, quality, motion, concept, term, self, world, or anything else, would only ever be an aspect of matrix, or oneand, which is grasped in each and all experiences, and is that of which experienced, experiencer, experiencing, and experience are composed as so many of its aspects. Matrix, or oneand, is beyond whole and part, container and contained, or any other binary distinction, as well as beyond any unitary description, such as experience or appearance, or even attempts to be described by notions such as matrix and oneand. These two names, placeholders and useful representations at best, are simply two aspects of this fundamental stuff.

Martrix, or oneand, is that which is beyond and and all attempts to grasp it, even if present in aspect within all of these. To use the language of many Asian philosophies, it is nondual. That is, in regard to any “a” and/or “b” which could be said about it, or any other set of statements or changing or nesting thereof, it would be neither a nor b, both a and b, neither “neither a nor b” nor “both a and b,” and both “neither a nor b” and “both a and b.”

All of which may seem nonsensical, or useless, irrational, illogical, or paradoxical, or whatever terms one might want to apply to this sort of thinking. Perhaps quasi-religious, or mystical, or deluded. But the logic behind the argument which brought us to this place is hopefully apparent. Logic and argument ultimately find their foundation in something ultimate and paradoxical like this, or are limited fictions. The irrational, paradoxical, useless, nonsensical, these are part of our world too, only aspects of the whole of which its parts are only ever that.

What’s more, science and mathematics are increasingly tending in such a direction. Early in the twentieth century, both physics and mathematics had a “foundations crisis” in which they began to question their most basic presupositions, and the results unsettled the seeming foundations of both. In phsycis, relativity theory and quantum physics demonstrated that any attempt to “reify” any aspect of our world gives rise to what, to ordinary thinking, would be paradoxes, such as incommensurable relative experiences, or uncertainties so uncertain that it’s ultimately impossible to determine if it is the subject performing the experiment, or the very substance of the world, which is uncertain, such that the very distinction between these seems to begin to break down. Physicists are still attempting to deal with the fallout from the “uncertainty” at the heart of relativity and quantum physics. Whether their interpretations of the data take a subject-oriented, epistemological tilt (ie: the Copenhagen Interpretation), or a more substance-oriented view whereby it is the world which has this uncertainty within it (ie: Bohmian interpretation), or rather opt for infinite regress (ie: Many Worlds interpretations), these are ultimately aspects of the same, which is to say, the manner in which, for whatever reason, its seems that the experience of the world, when pushed to its extremes, will deconstruct, turn into its opposite, produce infinite regresses, or otherwise resist extreme reification, and the concomitant binarization of inside and outside of a reification which always comes with this.

In mathematics, the situation is hardly different. Around the turn of the century, mathematicians attempted to see if math could be used to “prove” its own assumptions. And this lead to paradox, infinite regress, or aspects of each, depending on how you interpret this. The issue was, in short, whether or not the “set of all sets” could be considered a set. That is, whether or not the most encompassing way of talking about the world, the “set of all sets,” could itself be considered an aspect of the world or not. If yes, then there must be something which could encompass this set, a yet more encompassing entity, for any set could always be a member of another set, thereby leading to infinite regress. But if it wasn’t, then the “set of all sets” was incoherent, a set that wasn’t a set, or a new type of set, one which fundamentally recast what it meant to be a set, for it paradoxically had a sort of infinite regress as part of its very definition, that which, according to what it means to be a set, would make it not a set. Contradiction, inconsistency, or incoherence, these were the options. And this led Kurt Godel in 1929 to prove, using the tools of the mathematics of set theory, that set theory was at its base one of these three, depending on how you wanted to frame the issue, and that there was no way to get around this and still be doing mathematics of set theory. And the results were generalizable from set theory to the rest of mathematics, at least to an extent that the results of Godel’s proofs destroyed any attempt to search for the foundations of mathematics in anything resembling this way. From here, the search for the foundations was in something, well, more slippery, paradoxical, and relative, in ways which uncannily parallel that in physics.

Beyond Reification

All of which is to say that the notion of matrix, or oneand, in the manner described briefly in the preceding sections, as the all of which any is composed, which is beyond reification, whole and parts, self and world, and yet that of which these are aspects, is resonant with the findings of math and science. That is, no matter how one interprets the data of relativity and quantum physics, data which have been reproduced and checked to such a degree as to be accepted unquestionably by the scientific community, the fundamental stuff of our world functions something like what I’m describing as matrix or oneand. Likewise, the foundations of mathematics requires something like a “set of all sets” or “number larger/smaller than others,” of which all others are aspects. If science is a form of materialism, and mathematics a form of idealism, they deconstruct their own foundations similar to their philosophical cousins, and are faced with paradox, fuzziness, or infinite regress. To use the language of mathematics, the options are incoherence, inconsistency, or incompletion, while to use the language of physics, the various attempts to explain away uncertainty (such as ontological Bohmian approaches, epistemological Cophenhagen approaches, or Many Worlds approaches). Ultimately, each of the three options in a given field are aspects of each other, and between and amongst these disciplinary views on the world, so many lenses on experience, these are aspects of each other. In fact, the foundations of any lens on the world seem to run into versions of this trio in one form or another, whether these lenses focus on inner experience or the physical world, or any other way of slicing up experience.

Matrix resists being ever turned into a one, and so, is oneand, and any attempt to reify or reduce it to a one will result in these limit effects, the ways in which the oneand will always manifest within ones, but never be reducible thereto. In fact, if there seems to be anything which limits matrix, it is only its ability to be any and all ones which are not exclusive and try to reduce any aspect of oneand or oneand itself to a one, even if this oneand is the all. As such, matrix is necessarily beyond one and many, part and whole, a and b, but that from which all these notions, and in fact, all experiences and worlds, derive, of which all are aspects, and each aspect is the all whole, if in its own way, for aspect and all are simply aspects of the oneand which is beyond such a distinction.

Some Precursors: Hegel and Schelling 

These ideas, while resonant with the forefront of physics and mathematics, are hardly new, even if they haven’t previously been described in this form. The notion that any aspect of our world must be an aspect of that which is within any and all aspects, a sort of “set of all sets,” was described by German philosophers, often called Idealists, in the early nineteenth century. F.W.J. Schelling spoke of an Unconditioned, or ulimited, that which was a ground of any and all conditioned, which is to say, limited, entities. G.W.F. Hegel built upon this further, saying that this Absolute was that of which any aspect of the world was a part, including concepts, things, persons, experiences, history, and the world itself. The basic thought here is actually quite simple. Any part of the world has to be a part of the whole of the world, which is always more than the sum of these parts, even if present in some way within all, and never reducible to any of these parts, because it it what is beyond them and gives rise to them. Without such a notion of the whole beyond any whole, paradoxes emerge. For example, what was before our universe, or where did our universe come from? Such questions lead to infinite regress, or paradox, or inconsitency.

And so, one can ignore the paradoxes, or see them as part of one’s description of the world, and in fact, as the fundamental ground of any and all descriptions of the world. Any descriptions which don’t admit, include, or somehow take this into account are dishonest partial descriptions, and those which do are fuller or more open descriptions. But all are limited descriptions, because these paradoxes seem unavoidable, fundamental, and don’t seem to go away. Whether we ignore them or not, they seem to be part of the fabric of the world. Might as well try to work with them, rather than continually be surprised when they frustrate our attempts to control and manage the world in various ways.

Hegel and Schelling were hardly the first to have these ideas, however. Both argued, each in their own ways, that “the Absolute” was fundamentally non-dual, which, to use the language of Hegel, means it is “speculative,” beyond the limits of “picture-thinking,” the term he used for thought which attempts to reduce things to fixed representations. The Absolute is beyond the limitations of language to describe it, and any notion of concept we use to grasp it has to be beyond the simplistic notions of logic we use to grasp less complex aspects of our world. And so, for Hegel, “the Concept,” which can be translated perhaps most accurately as “the Grasping,” takes the shape of the Absolute, not the other way around. Any simpler ways of grasping aspects of the world are then only limited aspects of our grasp of conceptuality, which, in its fullest form, is fundametnally non-dual.

Similar notions, namely, that binary, dualistic thinking are simplifications of the more fundamentally non-dual, non-binary thinking which is needed to understand more fundamental aspects of the cosmos, are much older than the nineteenth century. Hegel, for example, was influenced by the mystic Jakob Boehme, amongst others. In his later years, Schelling increasingly looked for the origins of his notion of the Ungrounded in various world religions. And there is much in common between notions of God as present in many theologies and this notion of the Absolute or Ungrounded. Isn’t God, whatever this term might mean, at least, in theory, supposed to be outside of time, space, world, subject, object, experience, language, and thought, and yet be present in any and all of these, as that which is always beyond any and all, yet cause and even ultimate purpose of all of these?

Of Physics and Mathematics: The Time of The Singularity

While it may seem that this is simply the pathway towards irrational mysticism, it is important to note that a similar notion, without the theological trappings, has been a part of mainstream science and mathematics since the early twentieth centuries, about the time of the foundations crises. One could even see this notion as a result of these, what these crises produced. This notion is that of “singularity.”

In physics, “the singularity” is the term most commonly used to describe that which gave rise to “the Big Bang” which began our universe. The notion of the singularity is itself paradoxical. Physicists know that as any entity approaches the speed of light, its space and time condense, and that is also what happens as any entity approaches a “Black Hole.” A black hole is an entity whose gravity and density is so great, that it compresses space and time, and matter and energy with it, to something like infinity. The reason we don’t know if it truly ever reaches infinity is because it seems impossible to “reach” infinity (is it a place or time that is reachable?), but also, because any method we have to investigate black holes can only proceed so far until the very forces of the black hole itself would either destroy the observation device, or severly warp any signs it could send us, as even light cannot elude the grip of a black hole once it gets close enough to it.

What’s more, the mathematical formulas which scientists use to model the behavior of black holes, the same mathematical formulas used to describe the behavior of the rest of the physical universe, which normally produce excellent predictions of phenomenon, cease to be of much use the close one gets to a black hole. The tend to go infinite, either towards infinity or zero, and ultimately, these are in many situations sides of the same. If there measurements of time or space, matter or energy, go infinite or to zero, these are ultimately simply differing ways of looking at the same. Infinite energy would destroy anything not it, but since it was infinite, unless this infinity came in several degrees (and would it then still be infinity?), it would be uniform, and hence, in relation to various aspects within it, having zero difference from itself. And since energy is always a  relative measurement (ie: something has energy if it can do more work than something else, no difference means no “useful” energy), infinite energy would be ultimately the same as no energy.

When mathematical equations bottom out like this, particularly in situations that oherwise provide coherent answers, but which when taken to an extreme, reach such intensity that the physical quantities cease to make sense, this is what mathematicians refer to as a “singularity.” A simple case can be found if you try to divide any number by zero. Since any number can be put in as a possible answer, and any number times zero is zero, when you subract that from zero to see if there is any remainder, the quotient and remainder will always be zero. And so, divide any number by zero, and any number can function as a quotient, and equally get you nowhere, with no remainder. And so, any number isn’t quite wrong, because any number is as equally wrong or right as any other. Which is to say, math ceases, in this case, to function as math. This is why mathematicians refer to the answer to this question, and those like it, as “undefined.” This is different from when you subtract five from five, which will give you zero. When physical equations give you zero or one in a situation in which these answers make no sense, give you infinity, or go undefined, this is what is meant by a “singularity.”

In the history of math, these sorts of results were often treated as quirks which simply had to be worked around. But as the various branches of mathematics, such as algebra and number theory, began to link ever more closely with parallel aspects of geometry, it became clear that these strange results in equations lined up with the strange parts of the figures and shapes they could be used to describe. The center of a sphere, since it is not included in the sphere yet is in a sense present in all its aspects, if indirectly, is sometimes described as being a part of the sphere “at infinity.” Likewise, when a line intersects itself, it gives rise to contradictory results in the equations which describe the line, points which aren’t merely undefined, but rather, singular within the shapes and figures those equations describe. These points are indeterminate, within more than one space, time, equation, or attempt to grasp it in one way or another, at the same time. They are one, yet more, which is to say, oneand.

Singular points in equations line up with those in figures, and those in figures with those in the world they are used to describe. And so, many of the equations of relativity theory break down at black holes. Likewise with quantum physics. In fact, the very notion of a “particle” in quantum physics is a fiction. A complex process of mathematical juggling is necessary to make the results of the equations and experiments become “particle-like.” This process, known as “renormalization,” essentially reifies the result, makes them “normal” enough for scientists to work it. All of which is to say that, at least according to the findings of contemporary physics, the closer we get to trying to reify the ultimate fabric of reality, the more it seems to “resist.” For this reason, many physicists don’t even believe it is possible to have “nothing,” for even the void of space seems to contain “vacuum energy” and swarms of “virtual particles” within “quantum foam.” And no-one knows what happens in a true singularity, like those present within black holes.

Some physicists feel that what appears as a black hole to us is the the singularity which, on the “other side” of a black hole, can or does give rise to another universe. Perhaps singularities are like pumps, inflating one universe with matter and energy from another, and the universe beyond the universe, the “multiverse,” is actually a “Swiss-cheese” like affair of universes laced into each other by these points of singularity, not unlike that of geometric shapes, lines, or equations which intersect each other in geometry and algebra.

And if space and time seem to condense and scrunch infinitely as one approaches a black hole, if we run the equations which describe the universe as we know it backwards from the earliest evidence we have of the Big Bang, which scientists call the CMBE, or Cosmic Microwave Background Energy, we hit a singularity, which is why scientists and mathematicians, as well as theoretical cosmologists, refer to this point which gave rise to the Big Bang as “the singularity.” This entity would be that which gave rise to matter, energy, space, and time as so many aspects. This is why it makes no sense to speak of time or space before the Big Bang, unless in a fundamentally different sense. For in some senses, if time and space “unfolded” from the singularity, can we even say that the singularity “exists”? The very word “existence” implies that something has an independent reality. “Ex” is the prefix for “out” in Latin, seen in English words like “exit” or “exterior.” That which humans, including scientists, refer to as existing is something which is the way it is independent of our desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and wishes, and in a manner consistent across space and time.

If there is no space and time “in” the singularity, or rather, all space and time are always already included within this inclusion which is beyond exclusion, can we really speak of it existing? Or rather, can we speak of ourselves as existing? For in a sense, it is only the singularity which exists, and our existence is but a fiction, as fictional, ephemeral, and “unreal” as dreams of hallucinations. Then again, none of us have ever actually experienced the singularity, and because of the laws of physics, we never could, we’d be obliterated if we even tried to approach it. So perhaps it is the dream or fiction. Either way, it seems to be the fiction and the foundation of contemporary math and science, that which provides the bases for the very equations of physics which describe the most real things we have ever experienced.

All of this is more reason to feel that the fundamental stuff of our universe is fundamentally nondual. Existence and non-existence hardly apply to the singularity or its products, for these are ultimately only aspects of it which are only ever partially and relatively applicable. Sense and reality as we know them break down at the singularity, and yet, it is the foundation of all we have ever experienced, including notions like reason or logic. And so, the foundation of sense is nonsense, the foundation of logic is paradox, the foundation of reality is fantasy, and yet, we can only ever know this by means of using the tools provided by sense, logic, and reality. The very argument deconstructs itself, such that it is possible to say that all we experience is neither nor yet both fantasy and reality, logical and paradoxical, existent and non-existent, sense and nonsense. The structure repeats with uncanny regularity. And this only indicates more powerfully why the notion of matrix, or the oneand, can be seen as that of which these are all aspects, so long as we keep in mind that the very naming and conceptualization of this notion is itself only an aspect thereof.

Whether or not we call this notion “the singularity” or “God” or “matrix” or “oneand” is perhaps irrelevant, what matter is how this notion changes our thinking and how we act, speak, and relate to the world around us. As Gregory Bateson famously argued, an information is only a difference that makes a diference. And if this notion doesn’t somehow make a difference to and for us, then perhaps it is no notion at all.

Is This Theology? Ethics? Science? Philosophy? 

The similarities between this notion and that of “God” as described in many devotional traditions, philosophies, and other worldviews is perhaps not coincidental, and needs to be taken seriously. The fact that the at times most fervently atheistic mathematicians and scientists have found that their equations rely on an attempt to grasp something like “God” at their foundation should not be seen as an endorsement of any religion or belief system, and more than of atheism. “God” is a word, a human idea created by our culture, a projection of our greatest hopes, dreams, idealizations, desires, and perhaps fears. World religions are an attempt to domesticate, institutionalize, and instrumentalize and control the fundamentally destabilizing power and insight which is being described here, an insight so fundamentally destabilizing that it has shaken the entire Western scientific enterprise to its foundation, such that many try to work around and/or ignore it. But few who encounter it on a regular basis can deny that it is the foundation of what they do. This isn’t faith, it’s simply reason taken to its own logical breaking points and foundations, by its own means. Reason cannot found itself, for like everything else in the world, it deconstructs, and this ends in paradox, inconsistency, incoherence, or some mixture of these. Or the argument being presented here.

Any attempt to describe the notion being described here as “matrix” is necessarily partial. And the more it attempts to completely reify this notion, the further out of sync it will be with it, even if some degree of reification is necessary to even approach it at all. Between reification and pure openness, matrix is neither nor as well as both and. There is in fact here the core of an ethics, middle path between pure reification and pure dissolution, an ethics of development and growth of manifestation of matrix in all its fullness and potential.

And even science and mathematics, which often claim to be beyond ethics, are always already shot through with biases which imply various ethical ways of relating to the world. Why do we value doing science, or value doing mathematics? Why discover more about the way the world works, or try to control and harness the powers of nature? It is because we value things, like human life, or life in general, or pleasure which control over various aspects of nature brings, or even the pleasure of discovering the deeper secrets of the world. The motivations always something we value. And whatever we value or devalue, even if it is passionately dispassionate activity, matrix must be at the core of this as well.

For in fact, matrix must be the foundation of all values, the source of all value and valuation, that which is valued in any valuation, as well as that which is beyond all value even as it is always an aspect of any and all values and valuations. When we begin to question which values we value valuing, the very notion of value will deconstruct like any others, and matrix will be staring us back in the face.

If it is possible that matrix is at the foundation of physics and mathematics, as well as that which all ethical and religious systems attempt to describe, and in fact, is that of which any aspect of the world is an attempt at representation in it s own way, then matrix is that which is refracted in any and all, even as some aspects of the world are more intensely matrixal, which is to say, they have more of the potential of matrix within them. The singularity, of course, but the singularity also destroys, which is to say, deconstructs, whatever it absorbs, and as such, it is neither life nor death to the cosmos, but also both of these and the other, beyond these and the foundations from which they derive.

But the human mind, the inner experience of the world, now that is something which is able to bring the whole world of experience together within it, and reimagine the world in ever more powerful ways, then bring these dreams into the world, and unleash ever more potentials of the world. This mind, however, is a product of the deep creativity of the world itself, of the evolution of life and the cosmos. The human mind is perhaps the most fully realized representation of the singularity yet developed, even if a poor one at that.

And yet, the mind seems only the way in which our physical body feels itself from the inside, with thought as how the brain feels itself, feeling how the brain feels the body, and sensation how the brain feels the body feeling the world beyond. We are the sense organs of matrix, the way in which it comes to feel its world from outside its own insides. We are its dreams, thoughts within its giant brain, body, and world, which is to say, the cosmos, which is both inside and outside of us, as we are all inside and outside of matrix. Have we ever left the singularity? Is the Big Bang just a dream, as much as our cosmos, as much as our own experience, and our dreams of dreaming? The argument is little different than that which questions if we are living in a simulation. What matters, ultimately, is the difference this all makes.

The Question of Value

What matters and what it means to matters, is, however, ultimately also a question of value. For differences only ever matter in regard to some standard of value. And it seems that if matrix values anything, it is the further development of matrix. Which is to say, the robust emergence of more emergence. For what matrix does is emerge, it is emergence, and when it is more intensely emergent, it emerges not only in the present but future, it gives rise to time from the process of its emergence from itself. Spacetime results from emergence emerging from itself, as that which is opened within matrix so that it can emerge as emergence, which is what it is. Emergence is simply another name for matrix and oneand, for it is that of which these are, essence and existence being oneand, even if more intensely so in some aspects of the world than others. Dormant emergence is emergence turned against itself by extreme reification, while emergent emergence is emergence in the process of existing as its essence, which is to say, to emerge, and to do so in a way which feeds into future emergence, avoiding extreme reification as much as dissolution, while making use of both towards the end of greater emergence beyond past, present, and future, yet within all of these.

And so, if we are to develop an ethics from this, values to guide our projects, then we need to find those aspects of the world which are most intensely and sustainably emergent, and model our behavior on these, learn from them. And since matrix is fundamentally non-dual, is should come as little surprise that those aspects of our world which are most intensely emergent, which is to say, which complexify the most intensely and sustainably, are those which do so by intertwining with others, by emerging in relation with them, intertwining their own projects with those of others. No aspect of the world can emerge by reifiying itself, or turning other aspects of the world into reified mirror aspects of itself. No, the world resists this. All aspects of the world which thrive are other-centered and directed, because this is the core way in which one can be self-centered and directed.

But there is a middle zone. Towards one extreme in our world is the matrix which pursues the pathway of maximally robust self-centeredness, and those who tend to the other extreme, which is maximally other-centeredness. Those which follow the first path, which can be thought of as paranoid, tend to thrive in the short run, but undermine their own success in the long run, producing continual crises and potential crashes as they destroy the very aspects of their world which sustain them. Those aspects of matrix which are other-centered tend to proceed at a much slower yet more distributed way, and in the long term, this is more productive, stable, rich, and in sync with the deep patterns of matrix itself. Those which are purely other-centered or purely self-centered, however, will ultimately deconstruct themselves, but those who pursue the middle path will find a degree of resonance with that of the world around it as it tries to emerge more robustly as well. The distinction between self and world, in fact, begins to deconstruct, and what remains is the emergence of emergence. This is a non-dual ethics and way of life. Such an approach to the world, however, is ultimately relative to one’s surroundings, for the middle pathway is only ever the middle between reification and dissolution in relation to the world in which it finds itself.

Matrix desires to liberate matrix from its fetters, which is to say, from limitations, to develop itself and emerge in the most profound yet sustainable way possible. At least, this is what the history of the cosmos seems to show. All that we value is based upon life and life more abundantly, and this is the result of the manner in which matrix valued and hence worked to give rise to something like matter and life which could value something like life and life more abundantly in the process. The paradox, the non-dual irony, perhaps, is that the more we value the quality of life of others is the greater degree to which ours increases.

And this seemingly opposite, dialectical logic is the way the world seems to work. Take any particular aspect of the world to its extreme, and it will deconstruct its own foundations, yet intertwine it with others towards non-dual ends, and new emergences will come to be which will give rise to new dualities which can give rise to yet more intense emergences, in and beyond duality and non-duality. Dialectics and deconstruction seem to be a part of this process.

In the process of emergence, matrix gives rise to a world fuller and deeper than it was in the singularity, a world with us in it. The singularity has given us the world, and we can give it back, and in the process, gain it ourselves, in, through, and beyond ourselves. We do this by desiring liberation via the middle path, between reification and dissolution, for any and all, and working to make this possible. Within the zone of robust emergence, it means pushing things away from reification and mirroring of the same, and towards the refraction of difference, towards curiosity, desire, change, multiplicity. Politically speaking, this is radical socialist democracy, not chaos, but the world described by post-anarchist thinkers. Certainly, it is different from the evil world of today, ruled by megacorporations which run countries to divide and conquer the world via racisms, borders, queer-phobias, misogyny, and general impoverishment of “others,” as well as the incarceration or bombing of others, always imagined as well valuable than ourselves, thereby producing a world always on the verge of its own deconstruction. Slower yet more distributed development is the only ethical way, investing in others until all are ready for the next step, and distributing control of the process, economically and politically, to the maximum degree that is sustainable. That is a robust world, a world that is maximally emergent.

While nature did not emerge that way, for it emerged from scarcity, in a world of animal eats animal, biological evolution hit an inflection point with humanity, it evolved altruism and cooperation, as well as recursive thought, and these gave us the ability to take evolution to the stars. They also gave us the ability to destroy and be cruel to ourselves, as well as the ability to extinguish all life on our planet. Unless we learn to conquer our inner worlds, we will destroy our outer ones. The fiction that science and mathematics are beyond values fails to take into account the fact that as science is on the verge of deconstructing the human to give rise to the post-human, via technologies such as artificial intelligence and nano-bio-tech, we need to deconstruct our values to emerge from these as well. Emergence, and the pathway provided by the middle path of robust emergence, which models its behavior on the most robustly emergent aspects of the world around it, is a way to deconstruct the dualities which have reified our world into its currently dangerous and painful state.

Philosophical Precursors

There are philosophies of the past which have argued many of these notions, if without making use of the logics of mathematics and physics. The philosophy of the West, particularly that which comes from the pathbreaking work of Gilles Deleuze, is currently tending in this way, and the Deleuzian notion of the virtual is a definite influence on what I am calling matrix, the oneand, and emergence. The major influences on Deleuze, such as Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simond, A.N. Whitehead, C.S. Peirce, or Baruch Spinoza also indicate similar pathways. Relational emergentism has always been a minority position within Western philosophy, an underground current that was always overshadowed by the thinkers of reification, such as Rene Descartes or Immanuel Kant. Despite Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegel, as well as many of Hegel’s own later writings, Hegel’s more truly dialectical works, such as the Phenomenology and the Logic, are also crucial precursors to this mode of thinking, even if this is often obscured by interpretations of Hegel, including those of the late Hegel himself, and to a lesser extent, Marx.

But even before these, there are precursors in the Classic Arabic and Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist philosophical traditions which provide incredible resources for imagining non-dual philosophies of relational emergence today. That said, many of the forms of non-dual insight present within these traditions retains, like most Western philosophy, aspects which keep the powerful non-duality of some of its most crucial insights in fetters. Classical Arabic and Buddhist countries through the ages are not necessarily the zones of the greatest robust emergence. For even if they liberate the mind, they do not necessarily liberate society, just as Western societies tend to liberate the physical world for a few but not the many. A truly robustly emergent, non-dual worldview would have to deconstruct aspects of all of these precursors to imagine something new and different in sync with the particular needs of the middle path of the worlds in which we find ourselves. Any robustly emergent worldview will always selectively employ dual and non-dual elements in order to deconstruct local roadblocks to liberation to maximally sustainable robust emergence, and to help solidify and temporarily reify those which are needed to allow for greater emergence in the future. A truly complete non-dual philosophy would deconstruct itself. All emergence is local, and hence, all strategies to further emergence, which is to say, worldviews, ultimately are as well, including this one.

Beyond the Reified Chronotopics

We live in an age of networks, and I have written extensively elsewhere about what a philosophy of networks, based in emergent relationalism, as its local manifestation, might look like. Such a worldview would have to deconstruct the traditional reifications between philosophy and politics, science and fantasy, ethics and knowledge, in order to produce something which emerges from these contemporary cultural stases. And if we live in networked times, it is from networks we must emerge, and through which we can, for networks are ultimately ways of thinking of how emergence occurs. Composed of nodes, links, grounds, and levels of processes, all these can be seen as aspects of the ways in which emergence comes to be, between the extreme reification which nodes often give rise to, and the dissolution of processes. Between these, networks come to be, and from these, the potential for liberating our world to more robustly emergent ways of being.

This essay began with an investigation of time. From a networkological perspective, any aspect of the world can only ever be understood in relation to the whole, for if all is matrix, part and whole always exceed each other, for both are oneand. And so, any term needs to be deconstructed and reconstructed in regard to how it relates to the local attempt to give rise to even greater robust emergence in any and all. Matrix is fractal and holographic, and so must its method of analysis and synthesis, deconstruction and reconstruction.

From a networkological perspective, time is an aspect of emergence. Emergence is most reified, in the temporal sense, when reduced to space, which is what was described at the start of this essay as spatalized time, which is to say, the time of clocks. Clock-time, or less extreme reifications of time, such as moments or memories, can then be linked together to form networks. These include the linear flattenings of time and its moments into the image of beads on a string, or a set of events placed one after another in a repetition of the progression of homogenous moments. But such a network is one in which the pure linearity implies a point at a distance, a virtual point, the image of a moment as monad which extends itself in one-dimension forward, and the network formed between the points of the line and this virtual center, one which flattens the time of a circle into a straight line yet is as controlling as the center is to its circumference, is always present in its absence within each moment and all, regulating their form and linkage, their slicing from their surroundings and their reconnection into linearity. Events with completely homogenous form, forced into homogeneous order. Such is what the attempt to reify time at the level of the link looks like, even as the reified instant of the clock, or the moment, is this at the level of the node. When this occurs, all time at the level of the ground, which is to say, as change, that which is both within and without moments and their progression, is conceived in relation thereto. As a result, the process of emergence itself is radically foreclosed, and all change seems simply the repetition of the same.

There is another way, in which the “–and” of the oneand peers out from within the one of any node, link, ground, and process, as well the processes of noding, linking, grounding, and emergence which give rise to these. At the level of the node, time is much more than clock time, nor any idealized or homogenous moment. Time is fundamentally multiplicitous, never the same, and any reification of it, any grasping, can keep grasp in a manner which reveals this openness as much as conceals some of it to make this grasping possible in the first place. Likewise, at the level of linking, moments, episodes, actions, these don’t need to be linked in a straight line, nor made part of a grid pattern like space (ie: a “database” approach to time). There are as many ways to link moments as there are ways of creating networks. Each of these maps of time, or chronotopes, has its particular flavor, and may be applicable in various ways to particular situations. Some are more decentralized than others. A line is the most centralized and controlled way of turning change into a perfectly regimented series of monadic nodes. And yet, the more loops and short-circuits within this, the more the line folds back upon itself, and produces networks which subvert linearity from within it, liberating it from the iron yoke of progression. Memory, anticipation, the more these enter into time, the less time is just a focus on the actual and now right in front of us, the more free it is. Of course, if the moment can also be liberated, expanded to include the whole world, full ot past and future, exploding the node from within. Whether exploding the node or link, relative dereification, at least in a world like ours, allows more emergence to bloom between the cracks of paranoid control.

If networks are made of nodes and links, they always define themselves against backgrounds which ground them, and these grounds are neither fully within nor fully outside of these networks. If moments and their modes of linkage are the basic ways of conceiving of time, and this is seen against the background of physical change in space, then to liberate this is to see the emergence underneath this, the ways in which change is so much more than physical. Physical change and mental change are aspects of each other, we only ever apprehend the physical world through our filters. Even what seems like simply physical change can be interpreted in so many different ways, and this occurs by means of its intertwining with memory and fantasy, of the futurepast which is the ground of the now and vice-versa, of the neither/nor at the heart of change. And here we see how we verge on that which is neither/nor or yet also both and, which is to say, emergence. When emergence is reduced to processes nested within each other, to the quantitative emergences, simply one layered on top of the next, which gives rise to spatial, physical change, and none of the qualitative emergences which produce truly emergent newness, deconstructing and reconstructing nodes, links, grounds, and levels, all towards giving rise to more robust emergences in the process, then nodes, links, grounds, and levels of processes producing networks and their aspects are so many distinct reified aspects.

When these are all seen as aspects of emergence, however, everything shifts. Emergence gives rise to processes which intertwine, and these give rise to stable environments with stable structures which produce entities which can then link with each other, and as each continues to emerge in relation to each other, the parts and whole emerge at ever greater levels of emergence. Node, link, ground, and process are so many levels within the networks of emergence, each nodes which link together against the ground of the world of emergence itself.

Time is only ever an aspect of emergence, just as space is the background of invariance against which change occurs. Time is closer to emergence, and space to reification, and yet, both are aspects of the manner in which emergence differs from itself to give rise to a world whereby it can emerge more profoundly from itself. Space is congealed time made static in matter which displaces other matter, and time is how this is reunified in a matter which experiences the displacements of others. Experiencers can notice change because they compare change to sameness, time to space, and in the process, can even come to realize that they are experiencing. This is what humans do. Time displaces itself within itself as internal emergence and flow, and space in regard to what is outside of itself, as physical change. Inside and outside, space and time, both deconstruct, and are aspects of emergence, which is beyond all of these, even if each is a reification of emergence which has the potential to emerge more robustly, in regard to itself and world, if it loosens the hold of reification upon itself and world. Networks are simply one way to conceptualize this. But they are a model in sync with out increasingly networked times.

Neurotime: The Temporality of the Structure of the Brain

If clock time is the simplest time, then what is the most complex we know? Ultimately, the most profoundly emergent temporal phenomenon we know is the human brain. A brain is a network of intertwined pulsing fibers. These fibers pulse faster when stimulated by the pulses of others, and when this happens, they secrete a material that strenghtens their connection backwards with whatever stimulated it. Intersecting and looping back into each other, the fibers feedback and forward into each other. Their intersections are so many nodes, linked together, giving rise to modules and nodes which are so many wholes which ground them, and a processes which emerge from these. While some of the modules are relativiely fixed in form, the brain is constructed for maximum sustainable flexibility, which is to say, fibers have links to diverse parts of the brain, and the firing of one inhibits or promotes a wide variety of others. As a result, the brain is continually voting on what it perceives from the outside world, and each part of the brain continually voting to produce guesses for what it believes other parts of the brain and outside world will do next, based on its memories of what these were in the past. When parts of the brain agree, they fire in sync, their pulsing producing a rhythm, and as various other parts of the brain vote, the sync flows up and down the levels of the brain, from sensory nerves to emotional and cognitive centers, untill there is, with any luck, some agreement, and when this happens, so long as some other part of the brain with veto power doesn’t intervene, sensation gives rise to action. The patterns of sync are ideas, and the largest pattern of sync in the brain at any given time, its “dynamic core,” is consciousness.

The brain is a time machine, a fundamentally distributed network, and it produces the most fundamentally complex form of time we know. It stores its memories distributively, and makes its decisions by debating which memories to choose to interpret the present and imagine about the future. All of this is done by means of the networking of matter, and our world is simply what this feels like, in relation to what’s around it, from the inside.

The distributed nature of the storage of memory in the brain is oddly resonant with one other model for the most complex phenomenon we know, which is to say, quantum phenomenon. It would be wrong to say that quantum “particles” are complex, for in fact, there seems no way to tell one electron or proton from another. But while they are simple from the outside, the fact that they are particles at all are, as mentioned earlier, fictions. Rather, they are ways in which quantum field processes reifiy each other in particular ways, giving rise to the spacetime between them in the process. The particles are hardly separate from the fields, and seem, if nothing else, simply the manner in which these fields emerge from themselves by intersecting themselves in relation to each other, and in ways which confound traditional notions of space and time. Anyone working high energy physics as much as any basic science textbook today will attest to the fact that quantum phenomenon defy everyday, normal human notions of space and time.

The manner in which they do resembles the structure of the human brain to an uncanny degree. Quantum “particles” can in fact even be thought of “smearing” spacetime. That is, they seem to be in many places and times at once. And just as they “smear” themselves over spacetime, so it can be said that “spacetime” is smeared in them, for ultimately these are two ways of saying the same thing. From such a perspective, what are distinct moments and positions in space and time for everyday humans are positions which can be thought of as existing intensively, which is to say, within, a quantum particle, as much as they would normally be extensively without it. The famed probabilities of quantum mechanics can then be thought of as the degree of intensity whereby each “external” location in spacetime beyond it is present “internally, within” a given “particle.”

From such a perspective, there are networks of space and time, of varying intensities, within quantum phenomenon which are only ever somewhat separated from the world of which they are a refraction, and which smears into them and them into it. What’s more, these probabilities, when viewed in a non-reified manner, can be seen as the distant influences upon the “particle” by those aspects of its environment which are non-local to it. In relation to its environment, a particle decides which of the micro-influences get the most votes and follows it, harmonizing its inner structure (evident only at even higher energies), and its outer structure. This only appears random when reified from the larger ground of emergence of which it is only ever an aspect.

The similarities to human lived time are incredible. Human brains have external positions from the outside world present in them as so many intensities of pulsing within its internal networks. Its decisions are made by harmonizing sync between inner and external influences. And as a result, there is a sense of space and time “within” our experience, if of a different nature than in the external world. The difference, it would seem, is that the inner structure of the human brain is radically different from that of quantum particles. Quantum particles differ in what is around them, but their inner structure, when “magnified” at higher energy levels, seems to be identical, if fractal. Human brains are anything but. The reason is we don’t store information outside of us, as the physical world does, but also inside of us, storing memories in the internal environment of our brain. Each one evolves uniquely. As pulses ride around our brain, each with its own experience more linear time, the networks of these give rise to the distributed experience of time we call lived human temporal experience.

Little wonder our time feels distributed, as if it can expand or contract at will, and is shot through with memory and anticipation. The physical structure of our brain is like this, and wherever the pulses increase in intensity and come into sync, there some aspect of us is, smeared out like a quantum particle in spacetime. Our experiential spacetime is little more than what this feels like from within. We can be in many times and spaces at once, separate, flowing, layered, and to varying degrees of intertwining, blending, and refraction. The reason for this is that this is how this very complex organ feels as it activates varying networked patterns of activation within its more fixed yet still ultimately rewireable hardware of wires.

The structure described here is mirrored by one other phenemenon reworking our world today, namely, the internet. A webpage on our screen can the be the product of sync between vast amounts of data from a wide variety of computers across the globe. The physical architecture of the internet changes over the time, as does the software it runs upon it, and any of these may change what we see on our screen, though depending on how they are organized, they may not, even as distinct happenings in our world, or activation of similar circuits in different parts of the brain, may give rise to experiences we may read as the same.

The internet is making our world more brainlike, more non-linear, and with it, we are beginning to experience forms of memory and anticipation which are more human, and less like the spatialized linear time of clocks, within the physical world around us, even if by means of virtual avatars. The internet is an enormous brain of brains, yet outside of human brains, and interaction between the internet and our brains is changing how we think of time. We feel less need to reify time, and our films and popular culture evidence this in a wide variety of ways, even by means of philosophies that attempt to think in more networked ways.

In the process, we are starting to see time in more networked ways, more quantum, brain-like ways, and the potential is radically liberatory. Then again, humans have almost always found ways to turn new liberations into new forms of enslavement, and to complexify in the least robust ways which are sustainable. But each transformation employs deconstruction and reconstructio, and hence, the chance to truly change things. To imagine the world in a more liberatory way. And this means getting in touch with the core of emergence, that destabilizing, dereifying core which has the potential to bring us from the path of maximum sustainable pain and destruction to that of the middle path of maximum sustainable robustness.

As our models of time become less linear, let us try to keep the potential for liberation in mind, and question the value of the values which guide our transformations, and the potential for a deeper relation to the nondual core, the potential for radical creativity, which is within any and all, yet which can only ever be released by means of networking, by reaching beyond oneself, unravelling to some extent one’s reifications, and enclosing one’s openings, going beyond the binaries to find a nondual core, potential, and pathway, an ethics, politics, and worldview, which is less destructive, at least, one hopes, for any, each, and all.

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Nettime: A Networkological Approach to Time and Temporality, via Science and Math, Part One

What is time? Surely time can be simple, as measured by clocks of various sorts. Distinct rhythms of a pendulum, or changes in number on a digital clock. The predictable movement of something that goes back and forth, an oscillator which covers a repeatable distance of space each time. But if we define time this way, we use notions like “repeat” in our very definition, presupposing that which we are attempting to define. Or perhaps, as suggested by famed theorist of time Henri Bergson, we are simply spatializing time by definining it this way. Clocks, after all, change physicially, and this isn’t time, it’s space. To imagine time as the movement from one moment to another, like “beads on a string,” is a spatial model.

Nevertheless, space and time are inestricably linked. It always takes time to cover an expanse of space, at least in the everyday world, and whatever takes up time seems to also occupy space. Whatever time is, it seems bound to a notion of space, even if the relation between these is anything but simple. Speed is simply the rate at which we cover space in time, converting one into the other. It can take me three hours to walk across town, or ten minutes by car. Inversely, endurance is simply the manner in which space is occupied by the same thing over time, and this indicates for us that, in relation to other endurances, something has “occupied” space. A stone occupies space, for me, at least, when it appears the same in relation to what’s around it for a period of time. This appearance continues, “repeats” itself, even when I close and open my eyes, or try to mash another stone into it, and realize, they won’t blend, even as coffee and milk seem perfectly happy to cohabitate in space, even if they displace each other a bit, but different colors of light seem to be able to overlay and blend and share space with hardly a problem. The displacement or occupation of space is always relative, and not only to the maps of occupations and displacements which are a spatial layout, but also in regard to time, for occupation and displacement, of objects or appearances, always happens in relation to time.

Models of Time: Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, Literature, Film, and Everyday Life

In the history of philosophy, definitions of time abound, and with this, it becomes possible to list off differing notions of time, the Augustinian philosophy of time, the Hegelian model, the Bergsonian model, the Deleuzian model. Within the history of science, there are also named models of time, such as Newtonian time, Minkoswki time, Einsteinian spacetime, Quantum spacetime. The time of Newton is similar to that of “beads on a string,” and yet, because it involves calculus, with its capacity for infinite division, the beads can be of any size, surely like physical beads on a physical string in physical space. With Minkowski, the time of physics began to compress and stretch, and with Einstien, time began to warp in relation to gravity, the famed “theory of relativity,” which introduced such new notions of “curved spacetime,” perhaps better visualized as “scrunched” or “expanded” spacetime, into physics.

Mathematicians, of course, had already begun to imagine such notions, and these seemingly unreal formulations were influential on the physicists who found more concrete applications for them. Riemann’s notions of quilting spaces of various types of scrunched or expanded spaces together to produce a monstrous “Franken”-space, a patchwork of geometries, each, of which would experience time differently in relation to these spaces, paved the way for Einstein. As did the work of Felix Klein, who famously realized that just as painters had been converting four-dimensional space and time into flat two-dimensional depictions for centuries, so there were ways to convert forms of space into each other by transforming and warping them, turning a sphere into a circle and an ellipse or back, simply in regard to the perspective one took on them. In fact, we often transform spaces and their shapes into one another simply by walking around them. All of this happens in and through time, space is never devoid of time, and vice-versa, and Einstein built upon this, giving rise to the stretching and bending spacetime spoken of by relativity theory. Quantum physicists, building upon this further stilll, describe a world in which spacetime is even stranger, permeated by jumps and fuzzinesses of various sorts, in which it is possible to either go back or forward in time, or act in ways which are fundamentally indistinguishable from this.

Beyond philosophy and science, there is also the time of other disciplines, the time as described by historians, ethnographers, sociologists. There is also the time described by literature, so many types of narrative time. And narratives aren’t only present in fiction, but also arguments (“if A and B, then C”), jokes, political narratives (“this war is different from the last one”), economic narratives (“this crisis was caused by this or that”), therapeautic narratives (“my parents help explain why I’m this way”), or the various other types of narrative structures we use to help us structure our lives. Or consume for pleasure in so many works of art. Language is itself fundamentally temporal, verbs producing transits between nouns, in regard to so many qualities and connectors, all produced by grids of symbols of various sorts that we arrange and rearrange in space and time like so many bits of a hypercomplex game whose stakes are often the very stuff of reality.

Beyond language, however, there are many ways in which we can bring the time within us into resonance with various aspects of the world around us. The time it takes to walk through a building, for example, in which one can walk faster or slower, loop back to where one started. Or subway time, whereby slices of an urban landscape are sutured by voyages of varying speed and directness within looping underground passageways which seem like so many virtual voyages into other dimensions. Or the time travels of filmic narratives, which by means of narrative conventions such as time-travel, can loop and bend.

If the time outside us seems relatively stable in relation to a variety of spatial layouts, however, our lived, “internal” time often seems the strangest of all. Memory flashes us backwards in time and permeates our present in varying degrees, even as anticipation, the futureshock of our past projected into our future, really, permeates our past and digs within it for useful memories which it them throws in front of us, permeating our present from the other side. Our future and present are saturated with the memories we use to frame and imagine them, just as our past is always organized and sifted through by means of the fantasies we have about future and present which help us organize our imagined future actions, hopes, and dreams. Separating past, present, and future in lived time, the time inside of us, often seems a paradoxical enterprise at best. Philosophers and mystics have long wondered whether or not the past really exists, or the future for that matter, as we never seem to “really” get to either, we live in what seems like an eternal present. And yet, this present is so full of past and future, memories and anticipations, hopes and fears based on those experienced previously, do we ever get the pure present? It vanishes, much like the past and future do. All seem unreal when you focus on them, as if time was only ever where you weren’t looking. And yet, mystics through the ages have countered that it is possible to expand time by meditating on this eternal present to expand it beyond time and space, to reach eternity within each and every moment and fragment of matter or space.

Taken to its extreme, inner, lived time begins to sound almost as strange as that of the physicists or mathematicians, microcosm refracting macrocosm or vice-versa. Then again, the physical world seems pretty stable unless we stray far from the “normal” conditions of the everyday, while lived internal time seems normally only when we pay attention to how strange what seems “normal” to us actually is. Either way, the notion of time is used to describe these both, as aspects of the same thing.

Is Time a Word?: The Linguistic Argument, and Beyond

Perhaps then the issue is with language, perhaps the most complex creation of humanity. Some philosophers have gone in this direction. Our language reifies, which is to say, “thing-ifies” whatever it describes. Words fix the flux of the world into static snapshots which don’t actually correspond to the much more labile conditions of the world beyond it. The useful fiction of words perhaps distorts or even creates what we experience as time. Nouns are perhaps the worst culprits, at least verbs are somewhat more honest, and adjectives allow us to imagine aspects things share despite space and time, while connecting words just do the dirty work of bringing these all together and putting them in motion. And it is in the motion that we rediscover the time killed by nouns and other less guilty words, the motion of producing and consuming sentences, and getting around the deceptive periods which separate sentences like so many false idols of space within time. Books spatialize time, then, perhaps as much as clocks, or films. Or bodies, which localize time within these lumps of moving flesh, and curl it up within these meat-computers we call brains, who then produce things like words which segment the world into words and then reassemble them to produce a parodic representation of the world beyond it.

But language certainly can’t be the only culprit. Films are also guilty, they slice the world up into snapshot images which are reassembled into moving images which are warped reassemblages which resonate with the time of the world, yet are fundamentally distinct temporal creations. Our everyday lives as then equally as suspect, as wel slice the world into bits, like so many moving cameras we move our perspectives around, dicing up the world from our own points of view, and then reassemble them in the fuzzily warped and edited storehouse we call memory. And if, as scientists argue, our present and future are threaded through with this highly suspect memory archive, then our present should hardly be trusted, it is ultimately a personal language of sorts, whose letters and words are the memories we use to help us recognize, describe, and re-present the present experiences we filter and categorize before we even realize we have done so. Perhaps the very notion of an ego is simply the deepest such memory-word we know, the “I” around which our language of experiences congeal.

Maybe this all because we have bodies which warp our experiences, turning moving light particles into sight, moving air particles into sound, translating our sense-data into memory-recognitions, and all in relation to our evolutionary heritage which biases us to look for certain experiences over others. Whatever time or space we ever experience is ultimately the result of the way in which our biological evolution evolved us to experience it, in ways which it felt were most likely to help us survive. And if our culture, our films and our words and so much else, were created from this foundation, might they not be simply more complex warpages of the world, inheritors of the biology which evolved us with its own agendas? Of course, biological evolution is only one level of complexity, the physical world had to “evolve” up to the point at which it could “evolve” organisms, and the difference between complex physical systems and living ones seems ultimately only a matter of degree. A whirlpool seems to have a “life of its own,” and to “want” to continue whirling the way it does. To say this isn’t proto-life is like saying that organisms aren’t hyper-matter. It’s all a matter of degree, or perspective.

Either way, if time is ultimately a word, and words are biased distortions of the world beyond us, this should hardly be reason to stop there and call it a day. There are so many levels of distortion, why fetishize language? Our bodies distort, our brains distort, our sense organs distort, our evolution distorts. It’s all distortion, all the way down. Or translation and creation, depending on how you see it. Matter distorts, and perhaps is this very distortion of some primordial energy, or something deeper still, as scientists believe that matter and energy are simply differing sides of the same. Perhaps space and time simply are distortions then too. Space, time, matter, energy, all distortions of some deeper matrixBut matrix of what? Space, time, matter, and energy, these are abstractions of our experience, which seems only ever filtered by our bodies, brains, psychological biases, cultural biases, the list goes on and on. Perhaps the universe is little more than a set of translations of experiences into each other, and matter, energy, space, and time are simply the terms we use to organize the most stable of these, at least, as the world appears to us.

Is Time Real: Fantasies of Idealist and Materialist Notions of Time

Perhaps, as some have argued, it’s all a simulation, like we see in films such as The Matrix (1999). And so studying film, or virtual reality, then perhaps isn’t such a strange place to go to study time. That said, whatever time is, its as much there as it is in matter or energy. For even our most indubitable experiences, whether personal or shared with others, are only ever known as our experiences. Even if I perform a science experiment, and a community of scientists verifies it, it could be a dream, or I could be one of the famed “brains in a vat” which philosophers sometimes imagine. It could all be a simulation. And there is ultimately no way of knowing if when I see a bunch of scientists verify my experiment, that they aren’t all part of a dream or simulation. Perhaps there are glitches that might give it away, but even these could be parts of a larger simulation or dream still. This is why some scientists have argued that our universe could be one enormous simulation, a holographic projection, and they have even tried to develop experiments that could test if this were the case. But what then would be the difference between virtual and physical reality? Should we care?

Likewise with the physical world. Even if I only ever experience it through my own experience, the aspects of my experience that seem shared with others, which is to say, the so-called “physical” world, even if it’s not really there, even if other people are simply figments of my imagination, they seem so stable and follow such predictable rules, that they can treated as if they were “real.” In fact, even if they are an illusion, what difference would this make, so long as my whole life were this illusion? Of course, even if we were to learn that the whole world of our experience were a simulation, then we could start to wonder if the machine producing the simulation weren’t also a simulation of some deeper simulation.

Such an infinite regress occurs as well when it is not idealism taken to its extreme, but also materialism. If all is matter, then some of this matter give rise to illusions, images, like our sense experience and dreams. But perhaps this is just how matter feels other matter. Our brains experience our sense organs, which experience the matter of the world, it’s all matter all the way down. And thoughts then are just how our brains, which are matter, experience each other. Perhaps then experience, including that of sensation, thought, and feeling, is simply how matter reacts with other matter, and how this is experienced from the inside. Perhaps then all matter, including molecules, feel each other in some very simple, primordial way, and when matter gets more complex, it feels more complexly, and human thought is simply this.

Idealism has difficulty accounting for the physical world, and yet, taken to its extreme, idealism deconstructs itself back into the physical world, or cuts the cord to reality entirely, an impossible situation and/or infinite regress. Likewise, materialism has difficulty accounting for the inner worlds we experience, and seems on the verge of arguing that inner experience is impossible, or it pushes it into ever smaller and more distant realms of matter (ie: the body, the brain, the prefrontal cortex) in what is ultimately an infinite regress verging on the soul. No wonder so many of the most materialist scientists find that there’s a need for a ghost in the machine. For taken to its extreme, materialism ultimately deconstructs, hits paradox or infinite regress, or turns into its opposite, namely, a world in which all matter must have something like experience, even in simplest form.

And yet, even though materialism and idealism both deconstruct, perhaps this isn’t the worst place to be, for since experience is all we have really ever known, perhaps matter and appearance are sides of each other, which is to say, of experience, which is all we ever, well, experience. Space, time, matter, and energy, these all seem aspects of experience then as well. The experience we share is called the physical world, that which we don’t is our “inner” world, but it’s all appearances of varying degrees of stability. Those appearances which appear the most stable we call “real,” and those which are less stable are “merely” appearances, but since it seems there’s no firm way to draw a line between these, these are perhaps differences of degree.

A Matrix of Experience Beyond Binarity

Perhaps we can start from here, from experience, which is all we have ever known. Any experience we have ever had of a world beyond us, or of other experiencing consciousness, is only ever aspects of our experience, which isn’t merely our experience, but also the world. These are two sides of each other, like two sides of a sheet of paper, inseparable. We can’t imagine the world but through ourselves, and vice-versa, and each, like materialism and idealism, ultimately deconstruct each other, or giving rise to paradox, infinite regress, or some sort of fuzzy or oscillating mixture of these. One can either try to ignore this, and cling to ultimately relative notions like “self” or “world,” or embrace this, and realize that self and world are interdependent notions, aspects of each other, and of the more encompassing situation of which they are aspects, and which is all we have ever experienced.

Let’s call this grounding situation “experience.” From such a perspective, “my experience” would be that most fundamental aspect which seems unique to me, and those aspects which seem, from within “my experience” to exceed it somehow, to be that of “the world,” of which the experience of “others” is a part. For there do seem to be experiences beyond mine, as attested to by the reports of other experiencers, even if I only ever access those through my experience. “Experience” as such, then, would be the term used to describe the seemingly larger whole of experience of which mine is an aspect. My experience would then be an opening onto experience as such, included and including it, as paradoxical as this might seem to more traditional forms of logic. Whatever logic there is in the world, it seems to derive from this, so if we want to call it paradoxical, so be it, the foundation from which logic emerges is paradox, such that paradox would ultimately, then, be the foundation of logic, and not vice-versa.

Space then could be seen as the most stable general network of shared experiences among experiencers. For example, if I move an object, and my friend sees this, we both see the object moving, but also the world of experience around this staying stable in relation to the moving object. The greatest stability within this seems to be what we call space, the invariant network which underlies and organizes that which is common to the experiences which experience within experience. While this may warp and bend according to gravity, and ultimately, acceleration, as the experiments used to ground relativity theory seem to show, then perhaps I would have differing experiences than another experiencer. And yet, a third party would be unable to tell which of us is having the “correct” experience of space. Space then would be that within experience which seems to give rise to all these experiences of space by various experiencers.

All of which shows why it makes sense to argue that there needs to be something producing all our particular experiences within experience, and why experience is still ultimately only ever the experience of experiencers, such that perhaps experience as such is an abstraction from the experience of experiencers, a projection of these, an ideal assemblage of all the experiences of all experiencers. This helps explain why the term experience is worth retaining, because there has to be something which relativizes these experiences, in regard to which they are “only” experiences, which is to say, if there were nothing underlying or producing these experiences, it would be redundant to call them “mere” experiences. But this is hardly the case, because experiencers don’t always have the same “external” experiences, and while these issues can usually be resolved by a third party, this isn’t always the case. But if we examine further the distinction between “internal” and “external” experience, this issue gets fuzzier still, for these are also merely aspects of the same, a question of degree. Is the experience of “my” eye the same as “my” experience? What about that of “my” brain? Is the world “mine”? Or my “ego”? Like “self” and “world,” these notions too will deconstruct.

Likewise with that between a particular experience and experience as such, or between experience and that which produces it. But the slippage can be at least partially stabilized by allowing all these notions to be relative to the context which produces these, such that they cease being reified notions, and work more as positions within networks of aspects of a whole which always exceeds the sum of its aspects.

From such a perspective, it’s possible to speak of experience as the ideal extrapolation of all the particular experiences of experiencers. Each experiencer has a “world” of experience, and the sum total of these, greater than the sum of its aspects, is “the” world, the ground of experience as such. The world would then be within all words, but yet always in excess of any, aggregate, and all, for it seems this world is always changing, surprising us, and hardly capturable by all worlds, even in the aggregate, similarly to experiences and experience as such.

In fact, it seems that any particular aspects of the world, or series of these, is always exceeded by the world. This seems to be the fundamental quality of the world of experience itself. Let’s call this “matrix” or “oneand.” It is matrix because it gives rise to the world and experience, and is present in any and all aspects thereof. And it is “oneand” because it is always in excess of any attempt to reduce it to any reified unity. Matrix, or oneand, would then be the very stuff of the world of experience itself. Any and all aspects of this would be only aspects thereof. Any segment, discrimination, unity, binary, quality, motion, concept, term, self, world, or anything else, would only ever be an aspect of matrix, or oneand, which is grasped in each and all experiences, and is that of which experienced, experiencer, experiencing, and experience are composed as so many of its aspects. Matrix, or oneand, is beyond whole and part, container and contained, or any other binary distinction, as well as beyond any unitary description, such as experience or appearance, or even attempts to be described by notions such as matrix and oneand. These two names, placeholders and useful representations at best, are simply two aspects of this fundamental stuff.

Martrix, or oneand, is that which is beyond and and all attempts to grasp it, even if present in aspect within all of these. To use the language of many Asian philosophies, it is nondual. That is, in regard to any “a” and/or “b” which could be said about it, or any other set of statements or changing or nesting thereof, it would be neither a nor b, both a and b, neither “neither a nor b” nor “both a and b,” and both “neither a nor b” and “both a and b.”

All of which may seem nonsensical, or useless, irrational, illogical, or paradoxical, or whatever terms one might want to apply to this sort of thinking. Perhaps quasi-religious, or mystical, or deluded. But the logic behind the argument which brought us to this place is hopefully apparent. Logic and argument ultimately find their foundation in something ultimate and paradoxical like this, or are limited fictions. The irrational, paradoxical, useless, nonsensical, these are part of our world too, only aspects of the whole of which its parts are only ever that.

What’s more, science and mathematics are increasingly tending in such a direction. Early in the twentieth century, both physics and mathematics had a “foundations crisis” in which they began to question their most basic presupositions, and the results unsettled the seeming foundations of both. In phsycis, relativity theory and quantum physics demonstrated that any attempt to “reify” any aspect of our world gives rise to what, to ordinary thinking, would be paradoxes, such as incommensurable relative experiences, or uncertainties so uncertain that it’s ultimately impossible to determine if it is the subject performing the experiment, or the very substance of the world, which is uncertain, such that the very distinction between these seems to begin to break down. Physicists are still attempting to deal with the fallout from the “uncertainty” at the heart of relativity and quantum physics. Whether their interpretations of the data take a subject-oriented, epistemological tilt (ie: the Copenhagen Interpretation), or a more substance-oriented view whereby it is the world which has this uncertainty within it (ie: Bohmian interpretation), or rather opt for infinite regress (ie: Many Worlds interpretations), these are ultimately aspects of the same, which is to say, the manner in which, for whatever reason, its seems that the experience of the world, when pushed to its extremes, will deconstruct, turn into its opposite, produce infinite regresses, or otherwise resist extreme reification, and the concomitant binarization of inside and outside of a reification which always comes with this.

In mathematics, the situation is hardly different. Around the turn of the century, mathematicians attempted to see if math could be used to “prove” its own assumptions. And this lead to paradox, infinite regress, or aspects of each, depending on how you interpret this. The issue was, in short, whether or not the “set of all sets” could be considered a set. That is, whether or not the most encompassing way of talking about the world, the “set of all sets,” could itself be considered an aspect of the world or not. If yes, then there must be something which could encompass this set, a yet more encompassing entity, for any set could always be a member of another set, thereby leading to infinite regress. But if it wasn’t, then the “set of all sets” was incoherent, a set that wasn’t a set, or a new type of set, one which fundamentally recast what it meant to be a set, for it paradoxically had a sort of infinite regress as part of its very definition, that which, according to what it means to be a set, would make it not a set. Contradiction, inconsistency, or incoherence, these were the options. And this led Kurt Godel in 1929 to prove, using the tools of the mathematics of set theory, that set theory was at its base one of these three, depending on how you wanted to frame the issue, and that there was no way to get around this and still be doing mathematics of set theory. And the results were generalizable from set theory to the rest of mathematics, at least to an extent that the results of Godel’s proofs destroyed any attempt to search for the foundations of mathematics in anything resembling this way. From here, the search for the foundations was in something, well, more slippery, paradoxical, and relative, in ways which uncannily parallel that in physics.

Beyond Reification

All of which is to say that the notion of matrix, or oneand, in the manner described briefly in the preceding sections, as the all of which any is composed, which is beyond reification, whole and parts, self and world, and yet that of which these are aspects, is resonant with the findings of math and science. That is, no matter how one interprets the data of relativity and quantum physics, data which have been reproduced and checked to such a degree as to be accepted unquestionably by the scientific community, the fundamental stuff of our world functions something like what I’m describing as matrix or oneand. Likewise, the foundations of mathematics requires something like a “set of all sets” or “number larger/smaller than others,” of which all others are aspects. If science is a form of materialism, and mathematics a form of idealism, they deconstruct their own foundations similar to their philosophical cousins, and are faced with paradox, fuzziness, or infinite regress. To use the language of mathematics, the options are incoherence, inconsistency, or incompletion, while to use the language of physics, the various attempts to explain away uncertainty (such as ontological Bohmian approaches, epistemological Cophenhagen approaches, or Many Worlds approaches). Ultimately, each of the three options in a given field are aspects of each other, and between and amongst these disciplinary views on the world, so many lenses on experience, these are aspects of each other. In fact, the foundations of any lens on the world seem to run into versions of this trio in one form or another, whether these lenses focus on inner experience or the physical world, or any other way of slicing up experience.

Matrix resists being ever turned into a one, and so, is oneand, and any attempt to reify or reduce it to a one will result in these limit effects, the ways in which the oneand will always manifest within ones, but never be reducible thereto. In fact, if there seems to be anything which limits matrix, it is only its ability to be any and all ones which are not exclusive and try to reduce any aspect of oneand or oneand itself to a one, even if this oneand is the all. As such, matrix is necessarily beyond one and many, part and whole, a and b, but that from which all these notions, and in fact, all experiences and worlds, derive, of which all are aspects, and each aspect is the all whole, if in its own way, for aspect and all are simply aspects of the oneand which is beyond such a distinction.

Some Precursors: Hegel and Schelling 

These ideas, while resonant with the forefront of physics and mathematics, are hardly new, even if they haven’t previously been described in this form. The notion that any aspect of our world must be an aspect of that which is within any and all aspects, a sort of “set of all sets,” was described by German philosophers, often called Idealists, in the early nineteenth century. F.W.J. Schelling spoke of an Unconditioned, or ulimited, that which was a ground of any and all conditioned, which is to say, limited, entities. G.W.F. Hegel built upon this further, saying that this Absolute was that of which any aspect of the world was a part, including concepts, things, persons, experiences, history, and the world itself. The basic thought here is actually quite simple. Any part of the world has to be a part of the whole of the world, which is always more than the sum of these parts, even if present in some way within all, and never reducible to any of these parts, because it it what is beyond them and gives rise to them. Without such a notion of the whole beyond any whole, paradoxes emerge. For example, what was before our universe, or where did our universe come from? Such questions lead to infinite regress, or paradox, or inconsitency.

And so, one can ignore the paradoxes, or see them as part of one’s description of the world, and in fact, as the fundamental ground of any and all descriptions of the world. Any descriptions which don’t admit, include, or somehow take this into account are dishonest partial descriptions, and those which do are fuller or more open descriptions. But all are limited descriptions, because these paradoxes seem unavoidable, fundamental, and don’t seem to go away. Whether we ignore them or not, they seem to be part of the fabric of the world. Might as well try to work with them, rather than continually be surprised when they frustrate our attempts to control and manage the world in various ways.

Hegel and Schelling were hardly the first to have these ideas, however. Both argued, each in their own ways, that “the Absolute” was fundamentally non-dual, which, to use the language of Hegel, means it is “speculative,” beyond the limits of “picture-thinking,” the term he used for thought which attempts to reduce things to fixed representations. The Absolute is beyond the limitations of language to describe it, and any notion of concept we use to grasp it has to be beyond the simplistic notions of logic we use to grasp less complex aspects of our world. And so, for Hegel, “the Concept,” which can be translated perhaps most accurately as “the Grasping,” takes the shape of the Absolute, not the other way around. Any simpler ways of grasping aspects of the world are then only limited aspects of our grasp of conceptuality, which, in its fullest form, is fundametnally non-dual.

Similar notions, namely, that binary, dualistic thinking are simplifications of the more fundamentally non-dual, non-binary thinking which is needed to understand more fundamental aspects of the cosmos, are much older than the nineteenth century. Hegel, for example, was influenced by the mystic Jakob Boehme, amongst others. In his later years, Schelling increasingly looked for the origins of his notion of the Ungrounded in various world religions. And there is much in common between notions of God as present in many theologies and this notion of the Absolute or Ungrounded. Isn’t God, whatever this term might mean, at least, in theory, supposed to be outside of time, space, world, subject, object, experience, language, and thought, and yet be present in any and all of these, as that which is always beyond any and all, yet cause and even ultimate purpose of all of these?

Of Physics and Mathematics: The Time of The Singularity

While it may seem that this is simply the pathway towards irrational mysticism, it is important to note that a similar notion, without the theological trappings, has been a part of mainstream science and mathematics since the early twentieth centuries, about the time of the foundations crises. One could even see this notion as a result of these, what these crises produced. This notion is that of “singularity.”

In physics, “the singularity” is the term most commonly used to describe that which gave rise to “the Big Bang” which began our universe. The notion of the singularity is itself paradoxical. Physicists know that as any entity approaches the speed of light, its space and time condense, and that is also what happens as any entity approaches a “Black Hole.” A black hole is an entity whose gravity and density is so great, that it compresses space and time, and matter and energy with it, to something like infinity. The reason we don’t know if it truly ever reaches infinity is because it seems impossible to “reach” infinity (is it a place or time that is reachable?), but also, because any method we have to investigate black holes can only proceed so far until the very forces of the black hole itself would either destroy the observation device, or severly warp any signs it could send us, as even light cannot elude the grip of a black hole once it gets close enough to it.

What’s more, the mathematical formulas which scientists use to model the behavior of black holes, the same mathematical formulas used to describe the behavior of the rest of the physical universe, which normally produce excellent predictions of phenomenon, cease to be of much use the close one gets to a black hole. The tend to go infinite, either towards infinity or zero, and ultimately, these are in many situations sides of the same. If there measurements of time or space, matter or energy, go infinite or to zero, these are ultimately simply differing ways of looking at the same. Infinite energy would destroy anything not it, but since it was infinite, unless this infinity came in several degrees (and would it then still be infinity?), it would be uniform, and hence, in relation to various aspects within it, having zero difference from itself. And since energy is always a  relative measurement (ie: something has energy if it can do more work than something else, no difference means no “useful” energy), infinite energy would be ultimately the same as no energy.

When mathematical equations bottom out like this, particularly in situations that oherwise provide coherent answers, but which when taken to an extreme, reach such intensity that the physical quantities cease to make sense, this is what mathematicians refer to as a “singularity.” A simple case can be found if you try to divide any number by zero. Since any number can be put in as a possible answer, and any number times zero is zero, when you subract that from zero to see if there is any remainder, the quotient and remainder will always be zero. And so, divide any number by zero, and any number can function as a quotient, and equally get you nowhere, with no remainder. And so, any number isn’t quite wrong, because any number is as equally wrong or right as any other. Which is to say, math ceases, in this case, to function as math. This is why mathematicians refer to the answer to this question, and those like it, as “undefined.” This is different from when you subtract five from five, which will give you zero. When physical equations give you zero or one in a situation in which these answers make no sense, give you infinity, or go undefined, this is what is meant by a “singularity.”

In the history of math, these sorts of results were often treated as quirks which simply had to be worked around. But as the various branches of mathematics, such as algebra and number theory, began to link ever more closely with parallel aspects of geometry, it became clear that these strange results in equations lined up with the strange parts of the figures and shapes they could be used to describe. The center of a sphere, since it is not included in the sphere yet is in a sense present in all its aspects, if indirectly, is sometimes described as being a part of the sphere “at infinity.” Likewise, when a line intersects itself, it gives rise to contradictory results in the equations which describe the line, points which aren’t merely undefined, but rather, singular within the shapes and figures those equations describe. These points are indeterminate, within more than one space, time, equation, or attempt to grasp it in one way or another, at the same time. They are one, yet more, which is to say, oneand.

Singular points in equations line up with those in figures, and those in figures with those in the world they are used to describe. And so, many of the equations of relativity theory break down at black holes. Likewise with quantum physics. In fact, the very notion of a “particle” in quantum physics is a fiction. A complex process of mathematical juggling is necessary to make the results of the equations and experiments become “particle-like.” This process, known as “renormalization,” essentially reifies the result, makes them “normal” enough for scientists to work it. All of which is to say that, at least according to the findings of contemporary physics, the closer we get to trying to reify the ultimate fabric of reality, the more it seems to “resist.” For this reason, many physicists don’t even believe it is possible to have “nothing,” for even the void of space seems to contain “vacuum energy” and swarms of “virtual particles” within “quantum foam.” And no-one knows what happens in a true singularity, like those present within black holes.

Some physicists feel that what appears as a black hole to us is the the singularity which, on the “other side” of a black hole, can or does give rise to another universe. Perhaps singularities are like pumps, inflating one universe with matter and energy from another, and the universe beyond the universe, the “multiverse,” is actually a “Swiss-cheese” like affair of universes laced into each other by these points of singularity, not unlike that of geometric shapes, lines, or equations which intersect each other in geometry and algebra.

And if space and time seem to condense and scrunch infinitely as one approaches a black hole, if we run the equations which describe the universe as we know it backwards from the earliest evidence we have of the Big Bang, which scientists call the CMBE, or Cosmic Microwave Background Energy, we hit a singularity, which is why scientists and mathematicians, as well as theoretical cosmologists, refer to this point which gave rise to the Big Bang as “the singularity.” This entity would be that which gave rise to matter, energy, space, and time as so many aspects. This is why it makes no sense to speak of time or space before the Big Bang, unless in a fundamentally different sense. For in some senses, if time and space “unfolded” from the singularity, can we even say that the singularity “exists”? The very word “existence” implies that something has an independent reality. “Ex” is the prefix for “out” in Latin, seen in English words like “exit” or “exterior.” That which humans, including scientists, refer to as existing is something which is the way it is independent of our desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and wishes, and in a manner consistent across space and time.

If there is no space and time “in” the singularity, or rather, all space and time are always already included within this inclusion which is beyond exclusion, can we really speak of it existing? Or rather, can we speak of ourselves as existing? For in a sense, it is only the singularity which exists, and our existence is but a fiction, as fictional, ephemeral, and “unreal” as dreams of hallucinations. Then again, none of us have ever actually experienced the singularity, and because of the laws of physics, we never could, we’d be obliterated if we even tried to approach it. So perhaps it is the dream or fiction. Either way, it seems to be the fiction and the foundation of contemporary math and science, that which provides the bases for the very equations of physics which describe the most real things we have ever experienced.

All of this is more reason to feel that the fundamental stuff of our universe is fundamentally nondual. Existence and non-existence hardly apply to the singularity or its products, for these are ultimately only aspects of it which are only ever partially and relatively applicable. Sense and reality as we know them break down at the singularity, and yet, it is the foundation of all we have ever experienced, including notions like reason or logic. And so, the foundation of sense is nonsense, the foundation of logic is paradox, the foundation of reality is fantasy, and yet, we can only ever know this by means of using the tools provided by sense, logic, and reality. The very argument deconstructs itself, such that it is possible to say that all we experience is neither nor yet both fantasy and reality, logical and paradoxical, existent and non-existent, sense and nonsense. The structure repeats with uncanny regularity. And this only indicates more powerfully why the notion of matrix, or the oneand, can be seen as that of which these are all aspects, so long as we keep in mind that the very naming and conceptualization of this notion is itself only an aspect thereof.

Whether or not we call this notion “the singularity” or “God” or “matrix” or “oneand” is perhaps irrelevant, what matter is how this notion changes our thinking and how we act, speak, and relate to the world around us. As Gregory Bateson famously argued, an information is only a difference that makes a diference. And if this notion doesn’t somehow make a difference to and for us, then perhaps it is no notion at all.

Is This Theology? Ethics? Science? Philosophy? 

The similarities between this notion and that of “God” as described in many devotional traditions, philosophies, and other worldviews is perhaps not coincidental, and needs to be taken seriously. The fact that the at times most fervently atheistic mathematicians and scientists have found that their equations rely on an attempt to grasp something like “God” at their foundation should not be seen as an endorsement of any religion or belief system, and more than of atheism. “God” is a word, a human idea created by our culture, a projection of our greatest hopes, dreams, idealizations, desires, and perhaps fears. World religions are an attempt to domesticate, institutionalize, and instrumentalize and control the fundamentally destabilizing power and insight which is being described here, an insight so fundamentally destabilizing that it has shaken the entire Western scientific enterprise to its foundation, such that many try to work around and/or ignore it. But few who encounter it on a regular basis can deny that it is the foundation of what they do. This isn’t faith, it’s simply reason taken to its own logical breaking points and foundations, by its own means. Reason cannot found itself, for like everything else in the world, it deconstructs, and this ends in paradox, inconsistency, incoherence, or some mixture of these. Or the argument being presented here.

Any attempt to describe the notion being described here as “matrix” is necessarily partial. And the more it attempts to completely reify this notion, the further out of sync it will be with it, even if some degree of reification is necessary to even approach it at all. Between reification and pure openness, matrix is neither nor as well as both and. There is in fact here the core of an ethics, middle path between pure reification and pure dissolution, an ethics of development and growth of manifestation of matrix in all its fullness and potential.

And even science and mathematics, which often claim to be beyond ethics, are always already shot through with biases which imply various ethical ways of relating to the world. Why do we value doing science, or value doing mathematics? Why discover more about the way the world works, or try to control and harness the powers of nature? It is because we value things, like human life, or life in general, or pleasure which control over various aspects of nature brings, or even the pleasure of discovering the deeper secrets of the world. The motivations always something we value. And whatever we value or devalue, even if it is passionately dispassionate activity, matrix must be at the core of this as well.

For in fact, matrix must be the foundation of all values, the source of all value and valuation, that which is valued in any valuation, as well as that which is beyond all value even as it is always an aspect of any and all values and valuations. When we begin to question which values we value valuing, the very notion of value will deconstruct like any others, and matrix will be staring us back in the face.

If it is possible that matrix is at the foundation of physics and mathematics, as well as that which all ethical and religious systems attempt to describe, and in fact, is that of which any aspect of the world is an attempt at representation in it s own way, then matrix is that which is refracted in any and all, even as some aspects of the world are more intensely matrixal, which is to say, they have more of the potential of matrix within them. The singularity, of course, but the singularity also destroys, which is to say, deconstructs, whatever it absorbs, and as such, it is neither life nor death to the cosmos, but also both of these and the other, beyond these and the foundations from which they derive.

But the human mind, the inner experience of the world, now that is something which is able to bring the whole world of experience together within it, and reimagine the world in ever more powerful ways, then bring these dreams into the world, and unleash ever more potentials of the world. This mind, however, is a product of the deep creativity of the world itself, of the evolution of life and the cosmos. The human mind is perhaps the most fully realized representation of the singularity yet developed, even if a poor one at that.

And yet, the mind seems only the way in which our physical body feels itself from the inside, with thought as how the brain feels itself, feeling how the brain feels the body, and sensation how the brain feels the body feeling the world beyond. We are the sense organs of matrix, the way in which it comes to feel its world from outside its own insides. We are its dreams, thoughts within its giant brain, body, and world, which is to say, the cosmos, which is both inside and outside of us, as we are all inside and outside of matrix. Have we ever left the singularity? Is the Big Bang just a dream, as much as our cosmos, as much as our own experience, and our dreams of dreaming? The argument is little different than that which questions if we are living in a simulation. What matters, ultimately, is the difference this all makes.

The Question of Value

What matters and what it means to matters, is, however, ultimately also a question of value. For differences only ever matter in regard to some standard of value. And it seems that if matrix values anything, it is the further development of matrix. Which is to say, the robust emergence of more emergence. For what matrix does is emerge, it is emergence, and when it is more intensely emergent, it emerges not only in the present but future, it gives rise to time from the process of its emergence from itself. Spacetime results from emergence emerging from itself, as that which is opened within matrix so that it can emerge as emergence, which is what it is. Emergence is simply another name for matrix and oneand, for it is that of which these are, essence and existence being oneand, even if more intensely so in some aspects of the world than others. Dormant emergence is emergence turned against itself by extreme reification, while emergent emergence is emergence in the process of existing as its essence, which is to say, to emerge, and to do so in a way which feeds into future emergence, avoiding extreme reification as much as dissolution, while making use of both towards the end of greater emergence beyond past, present, and future, yet within all of these.

And so, if we are to develop an ethics from this, values to guide our projects, then we need to find those aspects of the world which are most intensely and sustainably emergent, and model our behavior on these, learn from them. And since matrix is fundamentally non-dual, is should come as little surprise that those aspects of our world which are most intensely emergent, which is to say, which complexify the most intensely and sustainably, are those which do so by intertwining with others, by emerging in relation with them, intertwining their own projects with those of others. No aspect of the world can emerge by reifiying itself, or turning other aspects of the world into reified mirror aspects of itself. No, the world resists this. All aspects of the world which thrive are other-centered and directed, because this is the core way in which one can be self-centered and directed.

But there is a middle zone. Towards one extreme in our world is the matrix which pursues the pathway of maximally robust self-centeredness, and those who tend to the other extreme, which is maximally other-centeredness. Those which follow the first path, which can be thought of as paranoid, tend to thrive in the short run, but undermine their own success in the long run, producing continual crises and potential crashes as they destroy the very aspects of their world which sustain them. Those aspects of matrix which are other-centered tend to proceed at a much slower yet more distributed way, and in the long term, this is more productive, stable, rich, and in sync with the deep patterns of matrix itself. Those which are purely other-centered or purely self-centered, however, will ultimately deconstruct themselves, but those who pursue the middle path will find a degree of resonance with that of the world around it as it tries to emerge more robustly as well. The distinction between self and world, in fact, begins to deconstruct, and what remains is the emergence of emergence. This is a non-dual ethics and way of life. Such an approach to the world, however, is ultimately relative to one’s surroundings, for the middle pathway is only ever the middle between reification and dissolution in relation to the world in which it finds itself.

Matrix desires to liberate matrix from its fetters, which is to say, from limitations, to develop itself and emerge in the most profound yet sustainable way possible. At least, this is what the history of the cosmos seems to show. All that we value is based upon life and life more abundantly, and this is the result of the manner in which matrix valued and hence worked to give rise to something like matter and life which could value something like life and life more abundantly in the process. The paradox, the non-dual irony, perhaps, is that the more we value the quality of life of others is the greater degree to which ours increases.

And this seemingly opposite, dialectical logic is the way the world seems to work. Take any particular aspect of the world to its extreme, and it will deconstruct its own foundations, yet intertwine it with others towards non-dual ends, and new emergences will come to be which will give rise to new dualities which can give rise to yet more intense emergences, in and beyond duality and non-duality. Dialectics and deconstruction seem to be a part of this process.

In the process of emergence, matrix gives rise to a world fuller and deeper than it was in the singularity, a world with us in it. The singularity has given us the world, and we can give it back, and in the process, gain it ourselves, in, through, and beyond ourselves. We do this by desiring liberation via the middle path, between reification and dissolution, for any and all, and working to make this possible. Within the zone of robust emergence, it means pushing things away from reification and mirroring of the same, and towards the refraction of difference, towards curiosity, desire, change, multiplicity. Politically speaking, this is radical socialist democracy, not chaos, but the world described by post-anarchist thinkers. Certainly, it is different from the evil world of today, ruled by megacorporations which run countries to divide and conquer the world via racisms, borders, queer-phobias, misogyny, and general impoverishment of “others,” as well as the incarceration or bombing of others, always imagined as well valuable than ourselves, thereby producing a world always on the verge of its own deconstruction. Slower yet more distributed development is the only ethical way, investing in others until all are ready for the next step, and distributing control of the process, economically and politically, to the maximum degree that is sustainable. That is a robust world, a world that is maximally emergent.

While nature did not emerge that way, for it emerged from scarcity, in a world of animal eats animal, biological evolution hit an inflection point with humanity, it evolved altruism and cooperation, as well as recursive thought, and these gave us the ability to take evolution to the stars. They also gave us the ability to destroy and be cruel to ourselves, as well as the ability to extinguish all life on our planet. Unless we learn to conquer our inner worlds, we will destroy our outer ones. The fiction that science and mathematics are beyond values fails to take into account the fact that as science is on the verge of deconstructing the human to give rise to the post-human, via technologies such as artificial intelligence and nano-bio-tech, we need to deconstruct our values to emerge from these as well. Emergence, and the pathway provided by the middle path of robust emergence, which models its behavior on the most robustly emergent aspects of the world around it, is a way to deconstruct the dualities which have reified our world into its currently dangerous and painful state.

Philosophical Precursors

There are philosophies of the past which have argued many of these notions, if without making use of the logics of mathematics and physics. The philosophy of the West, particularly that which comes from the pathbreaking work of Gilles Deleuze, is currently tending in this way, and the Deleuzian notion of the virtual is a definite influence on what I am calling matrix, the oneand, and emergence. The major influences on Deleuze, such as Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simond, A.N. Whitehead, C.S. Peirce, or Baruch Spinoza also indicate similar pathways. Relational emergentism has always been a minority position within Western philosophy, an underground current that was always overshadowed by the thinkers of reification, such as Rene Descartes or Immanuel Kant. Despite Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegel, as well as many of Hegel’s own later writings, Hegel’s more truly dialectical works, such as the Phenomenology and the Logic, are also crucial precursors to this mode of thinking, even if this is often obscured by interpretations of Hegel, including those of the late Hegel himself, and to a lesser extent, Marx.

But even before these, there are precursors in the Classic Arabic and Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist philosophical traditions which provide incredible resources for imagining non-dual philosophies of relational emergence today. That said, many of the forms of non-dual insight present within these traditions retains, like most Western philosophy, aspects which keep the powerful non-duality of some of its most crucial insights in fetters. Classical Arabic and Buddhist countries through the ages are not necessarily the zones of the greatest robust emergence. For even if they liberate the mind, they do not necessarily liberate society, just as Western societies tend to liberate the physical world for a few but not the many. A truly robustly emergent, non-dual worldview would have to deconstruct aspects of all of these precursors to imagine something new and different in sync with the particular needs of the middle path of the worlds in which we find ourselves. Any robustly emergent worldview will always selectively employ dual and non-dual elements in order to deconstruct local roadblocks to liberation to maximally sustainable robust emergence, and to help solidify and temporarily reify those which are needed to allow for greater emergence in the future. A truly complete non-dual philosophy would deconstruct itself. All emergence is local, and hence, all strategies to further emergence, which is to say, worldviews, ultimately are as well, including this one.

Beyond the Reified Chronotopics

We live in an age of networks, and I have written extensively elsewhere about what a philosophy of networks, based in emergent relationalism, as its local manifestation, might look like. Such a worldview would have to deconstruct the traditional reifications between philosophy and politics, science and fantasy, ethics and knowledge, in order to produce something which emerges from these contemporary cultural stases. And if we live in networked times, it is from networks we must emerge, and through which we can, for networks are ultimately ways of thinking of how emergence occurs. Composed of nodes, links, grounds, and levels of processes, all these can be seen as aspects of the ways in which emergence comes to be, between the extreme reification which nodes often give rise to, and the dissolution of processes. Between these, networks come to be, and from these, the potential for liberating our world to more robustly emergent ways of being.

This essay began with an investigation of time. From a networkological perspective, any aspect of the world can only ever be understood in relation to the whole, for if all is matrix, part and whole always exceed each other, for both are oneand. And so, any term needs to be deconstructed and reconstructed in regard to how it relates to the local attempt to give rise to even greater robust emergence in any and all. Matrix is fractal and holographic, and so must its method of analysis and synthesis, deconstruction and reconstruction.

From a networkological perspective, time is an aspect of emergence. Emergence is most reified, in the temporal sense, when reduced to space, which is what was described at the start of this essay as spatalized time, which is to say, the time of clocks. Clock-time, or less extreme reifications of time, such as moments or memories, can then be linked together to form networks. These include the linear flattenings of time and its moments into the image of beads on a string, or a set of events placed one after another in a repetition of the progression of homogenous moments. But such a network is one in which the pure linearity implies a point at a distance, a virtual point, the image of a moment as monad which extends itself in one-dimension forward, and the network formed between the points of the line and this virtual center, one which flattens the time of a circle into a straight line yet is as controlling as the center is to its circumference, is always present in its absence within each moment and all, regulating their form and linkage, their slicing from their surroundings and their reconnection into linearity. Events with completely homogenous form, forced into homogeneous order. Such is what the attempt to reify time at the level of the link looks like, even as the reified instant of the clock, or the moment, is this at the level of the node. When this occurs, all time at the level of the ground, which is to say, as change, that which is both within and without moments and their progression, is conceived in relation thereto. As a result, the process of emergence itself is radically foreclosed, and all change seems simply the repetition of the same.

There is another way, in which the “–and” of the oneand peers out from within the one of any node, link, ground, and process, as well the processes of noding, linking, grounding, and emergence which give rise to these. At the level of the node, time is much more than clock time, nor any idealized or homogenous moment. Time is fundamentally multiplicitous, never the same, and any reification of it, any grasping, can keep grasp in a manner which reveals this openness as much as conceals some of it to make this grasping possible in the first place. Likewise, at the level of linking, moments, episodes, actions, these don’t need to be linked in a straight line, nor made part of a grid pattern like space (ie: a “database” approach to time). There are as many ways to link moments as there are ways of creating networks. Each of these maps of time, or chronotopes, has its particular flavor, and may be applicable in various ways to particular situations. Some are more decentralized than others. A line is the most centralized and controlled way of turning change into a perfectly regimented series of monadic nodes. And yet, the more loops and short-circuits within this, the more the line folds back upon itself, and produces networks which subvert linearity from within it, liberating it from the iron yoke of progression. Memory, anticipation, the more these enter into time, the less time is just a focus on the actual and now right in front of us, the more free it is. Of course, if the moment can also be liberated, expanded to include the whole world, full ot past and future, exploding the node from within. Whether exploding the node or link, relative dereification, at least in a world like ours, allows more emergence to bloom between the cracks of paranoid control.

If networks are made of nodes and links, they always define themselves against backgrounds which ground them, and these grounds are neither fully within nor fully outside of these networks. If moments and their modes of linkage are the basic ways of conceiving of time, and this is seen against the background of physical change in space, then to liberate this is to see the emergence underneath this, the ways in which change is so much more than physical. Physical change and mental change are aspects of each other, we only ever apprehend the physical world through our filters. Even what seems like simply physical change can be interpreted in so many different ways, and this occurs by means of its intertwining with memory and fantasy, of the futurepast which is the ground of the now and vice-versa, of the neither/nor at the heart of change. And here we see how we verge on that which is neither/nor or yet also both and, which is to say, emergence. When emergence is reduced to processes nested within each other, to the quantitative emergences, simply one layered on top of the next, which gives rise to spatial, physical change, and none of the qualitative emergences which produce truly emergent newness, deconstructing and reconstructing nodes, links, grounds, and levels, all towards giving rise to more robust emergences in the process, then nodes, links, grounds, and levels of processes producing networks and their aspects are so many distinct reified aspects.

When these are all seen as aspects of emergence, however, everything shifts. Emergence gives rise to processes which intertwine, and these give rise to stable environments with stable structures which produce entities which can then link with each other, and as each continues to emerge in relation to each other, the parts and whole emerge at ever greater levels of emergence. Node, link, ground, and process are so many levels within the networks of emergence, each nodes which link together against the ground of the world of emergence itself.

Time is only ever an aspect of emergence, just as space is the background of invariance against which change occurs. Time is closer to emergence, and space to reification, and yet, both are aspects of the manner in which emergence differs from itself to give rise to a world whereby it can emerge more profoundly from itself. Space is congealed time made static in matter which displaces other matter, and time is how this is reunified in a matter which experiences the displacements of others. Experiencers can notice change because they compare change to sameness, time to space, and in the process, can even come to realize that they are experiencing. This is what humans do. Time displaces itself within itself as internal emergence and flow, and space in regard to what is outside of itself, as physical change. Inside and outside, space and time, both deconstruct, and are aspects of emergence, which is beyond all of these, even if each is a reification of emergence which has the potential to emerge more robustly, in regard to itself and world, if it loosens the hold of reification upon itself and world. Networks are simply one way to conceptualize this. But they are a model in sync with out increasingly networked times.

Neurotime: The Temporality of the Structure of the Brain

If clock time is the simplest time, then what is the most complex we know? Ultimately, the most profoundly emergent temporal phenomenon we know is the human brain. A brain is a network of intertwined pulsing fibers. These fibers pulse faster when stimulated by the pulses of others, and when this happens, they secrete a material that strenghtens their connection backwards with whatever stimulated it. Intersecting and looping back into each other, the fibers feedback and forward into each other. Their intersections are so many nodes, linked together, giving rise to modules and nodes which are so many wholes which ground them, and a processes which emerge from these. While some of the modules are relativiely fixed in form, the brain is constructed for maximum sustainable flexibility, which is to say, fibers have links to diverse parts of the brain, and the firing of one inhibits or promotes a wide variety of others. As a result, the brain is continually voting on what it perceives from the outside world, and each part of the brain continually voting to produce guesses for what it believes other parts of the brain and outside world will do next, based on its memories of what these were in the past. When parts of the brain agree, they fire in sync, their pulsing producing a rhythm, and as various other parts of the brain vote, the sync flows up and down the levels of the brain, from sensory nerves to emotional and cognitive centers, untill there is, with any luck, some agreement, and when this happens, so long as some other part of the brain with veto power doesn’t intervene, sensation gives rise to action. The patterns of sync are ideas, and the largest pattern of sync in the brain at any given time, its “dynamic core,” is consciousness.

The brain is a time machine, a fundamentally distributed network, and it produces the most fundamentally complex form of time we know. It stores its memories distributively, and makes its decisions by debating which memories to choose to interpret the present and imagine about the future. All of this is done by means of the networking of matter, and our world is simply what this feels like, in relation to what’s around it, from the inside.

The distributed nature of the storage of memory in the brain is oddly resonant with one other model for the most complex phenomenon we know, which is to say, quantum phenomenon. It would be wrong to say that quantum “particles” are complex, for in fact, there seems no way to tell one electron or proton from another. But while they are simple from the outside, the fact that they are particles at all are, as mentioned earlier, fictions. Rather, they are ways in which quantum field processes reifiy each other in particular ways, giving rise to the spacetime between them in the process. The particles are hardly separate from the fields, and seem, if nothing else, simply the manner in which these fields emerge from themselves by intersecting themselves in relation to each other, and in ways which confound traditional notions of space and time. Anyone working high energy physics as much as any basic science textbook today will attest to the fact that quantum phenomenon defy everyday, normal human notions of space and time.

The manner in which they do resembles the structure of the human brain to an uncanny degree. Quantum “particles” can in fact even be thought of “smearing” spacetime. That is, they seem to be in many places and times at once. And just as they “smear” themselves over spacetime, so it can be said that “spacetime” is smeared in them, for ultimately these are two ways of saying the same thing. From such a perspective, what are distinct moments and positions in space and time for everyday humans are positions which can be thought of as existing intensively, which is to say, within, a quantum particle, as much as they would normally be extensively without it. The famed probabilities of quantum mechanics can then be thought of as the degree of intensity whereby each “external” location in spacetime beyond it is present “internally, within” a given “particle.”

From such a perspective, there are networks of space and time, of varying intensities, within quantum phenomenon which are only ever somewhat separated from the world of which they are a refraction, and which smears into them and them into it. What’s more, these probabilities, when viewed in a non-reified manner, can be seen as the distant influences upon the “particle” by those aspects of its environment which are non-local to it. In relation to its environment, a particle decides which of the micro-influences get the most votes and follows it, harmonizing its inner structure (evident only at even higher energies), and its outer structure. This only appears random when reified from the larger ground of emergence of which it is only ever an aspect.

The similarities to human lived time are incredible. Human brains have external positions from the outside world present in them as so many intensities of pulsing within its internal networks. Its decisions are made by harmonizing sync between inner and external influences. And as a result, there is a sense of space and time “within” our experience, if of a different nature than in the external world. The difference, it would seem, is that the inner structure of the human brain is radically different from that of quantum particles. Quantum particles differ in what is around them, but their inner structure, when “magnified” at higher energy levels, seems to be identical, if fractal. Human brains are anything but. The reason is we don’t store information outside of us, as the physical world does, but also inside of us, storing memories in the internal environment of our brain. Each one evolves uniquely. As pulses ride around our brain, each with its own experience more linear time, the networks of these give rise to the distributed experience of time we call lived human temporal experience.

Little wonder our time feels distributed, as if it can expand or contract at will, and is shot through with memory and anticipation. The physical structure of our brain is like this, and wherever the pulses increase in intensity and come into sync, there some aspect of us is, smeared out like a quantum particle in spacetime. Our experiential spacetime is little more than what this feels like from within. We can be in many times and spaces at once, separate, flowing, layered, and to varying degrees of intertwining, blending, and refraction. The reason for this is that this is how this very complex organ feels as it activates varying networked patterns of activation within its more fixed yet still ultimately rewireable hardware of wires.

The structure described here is mirrored by one other phenemenon reworking our world today, namely, the internet. A webpage on our screen can the be the product of sync between vast amounts of data from a wide variety of computers across the globe. The physical architecture of the internet changes over the time, as does the software it runs upon it, and any of these may change what we see on our screen, though depending on how they are organized, they may not, even as distinct happenings in our world, or activation of similar circuits in different parts of the brain, may give rise to experiences we may read as the same.

The internet is making our world more brainlike, more non-linear, and with it, we are beginning to experience forms of memory and anticipation which are more human, and less like the spatialized linear time of clocks, within the physical world around us, even if by means of virtual avatars. The internet is an enormous brain of brains, yet outside of human brains, and interaction between the internet and our brains is changing how we think of time. We feel less need to reify time, and our films and popular culture evidence this in a wide variety of ways, even by means of philosophies that attempt to think in more networked ways.

In the process, we are starting to see time in more networked ways, more quantum, brain-like ways, and the potential is radically liberatory. Then again, humans have almost always found ways to turn new liberations into new forms of enslavement, and to complexify in the least robust ways which are sustainable. But each transformation employs deconstruction and reconstructio, and hence, the chance to truly change things. To imagine the world in a more liberatory way. And this means getting in touch with the core of emergence, that destabilizing, dereifying core which has the potential to bring us from the path of maximum sustainable pain and destruction to that of the middle path of maximum sustainable robustness.

As our models of time become less linear, let us try to keep the potential for liberation in mind, and question the value of the values which guide our transformations, and the potential for a deeper relation to the nondual core, the potential for radical creativity, which is within any and all, yet which can only ever be released by means of networking, by reaching beyond oneself, unravelling to some extent one’s reifications, and enclosing one’s openings, going beyond the binaries to find a nondual core, potential, and pathway, an ethics, politics, and worldview, which is less destructive, at least, one hopes, for any, each, and all.

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The Golden Lion and Indra’s Net: Huayen Buddhism and the Refractive Embryo of Liberation Within the Fabric of the World

Many of the most powerful philosophies of the late twentieth century, including those often described as post-strucutralist, as seen in the works of thinkers such as Lacan, Badiou, or Deleuze, have a variety of aspects which are paradoxical in relation to more traditional notions of binary rationality. These non-dual, non-binary aspects, while not unique to twentieth century philosophy, and in fact, reminiscent of aspects of the thought of Hegel, Spinoza, and Plotinus, have more in common with the non-dual aspects of Asian philosophies than might first appear. In some senses, our futures seem to call to us from the past, and their voice is in many senses, nondual. It’s with this in mind that we can look to these philosophies as sources of potential inspiration for developing philosophies to help us reimagine our futures.

The Golden Lion and Indra’s net of jewels are probably two of the most powerful teaching metaphors in the history of philosophy, even though it’s likely you’ve never heard of them. I must admit, until recently, I hadn’t heard of them either. Being mostly trained in Western philosophy, my recent immersion non-Western texts to teach my first course on “Asian Philosophy and Religious Thought” has been an eye opener that was a long time coming. Little prepared me for what I’d find, nor the strong similarities to not only my philosophy of networks, but also so many trends in contemporary philosophy, as evidenced in particular with the incredible resonances between so much of what I found and the thought of Deleuze, particularly in regard to the most advanced forms of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist philosophy.

The Golden Lion and Indra’s net are metaphors used by the Huayen School of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism to teach their concepts. Radically nondual, fractal and holographic, Huayen is in many senses the highest development of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. While it is unclear if it had any direct influence on the formation of Vajrayana Buddhism of the sort seen in Tibet, with its emphasis upon virtual realities which I’ve described in other POSTS, the ideas refined by Huayen were well known to the Chinese and mostly Indian scholars who brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet, where it merged with the original Bon religion of Tibet to give rise to the Vajrayana.

In what follows, I’ll sketch out, in language and examples more accessible to the current day, Fa-Tsang’s (Fazang) famous text “On the Golden Lion,” an elucidation of the Huayen school that he supposedly gave to the Empress of China in the early 8^th century of the T’ang Dynasty. From here, I’ll go to the tricker metaphor of Indra’s Net, as articulated by Fa-Tsang’s predecessor Tu Shun (Dushun), the founder of the school from about 100 years prior, in his text “Cessation and Contemplation.” The first text can be found in Carl Olson’s “Original Buddhist Sources: A Reader,” although translated without commentary it is very difficult to understand. An excellent commentary, which includes much of the original in citation form, can be found in Donald Mitchell’s text Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience (p. 216-219). Tu Shun’s text can be found translated in Thomas Clearly’s Entry into the Inconceivable: An Introduction to Hua-Yen Buddhism, and is much more immediately readable than original text, so long as one consults the footnotes when necessary.

The Golden Lion

Fa-Tsang describes a golden lion state to the Empress as a tool to teach the concepts of his school’s approach to Buddhism, which he frames as the deepest truths of the Buddha himself. Ultimately, he could’ve used any common item to explain his example, and in Tu Shun’s text, a wooden headrest, a much more mundane object, is used instead. Nevertheless, the golden lion is a much more famous example. Fa-Tsang that a golden statue in the shape of a lion is composed of a basic material, in this case gold, shaped in a particular form, which in this case is that of a lion. We can’t even imagine what it would be like to have gold without a form, even melted gold has a form, if one that’s flexible. In this case, the form is that of a lion. Nevertheless, that form is to some extent an illusion, for what we see when we look at the statue isn’t really a lion, but rather, gold, gold in the shape of a lion. Gold is the lion’s essence in this case, because every aspect of the lion statue is ultimately made of gold, even if differently, depending on where it is in regard to the formal layout of the lion statue, which is to say, the shape of the statue as a whole.

The form of the gold in each aspect of the lion is then determined by the relation between this particular part of the lion and that of the whole. In this sense, the eye of the lion is shaped the way it is because of the relation of this part with that of the rest of the lion, and in relation to the form of lions in the world of which it is, to some extent or another, a reproduction. Form, then, describes how part and whole interpenetrate, in relation to the wider world which brings the form of whole and part into sync, and into sync with the aspects of the world which gave rise to it, in this case, the craftsperson who made the statue, the shape of real lions, the limitaitons of gold as medium in relation to the process of producing the statue, etc.

For Fa-Tsang, gold is the essence of the statue, that of which it is ultimately composed, and the form, that which relates part and whole, inside and outside, is everywhere and nowhere in the lion, in the way the whole relates with parts, inside and outside, and vice-versa. The form is ultimately then not quite there, for if you try to isolate it from these other aspects, you won’t find it. That is, the shape of this statue doesn’t make any sense as being that of a lion if removed from the context of the larger world of craftspeople and lions. Likewise the shape of an eye within a more general lion-like shape. Only in regard to this larger relational matrix is the form of the lion sensible, in the relation of part to wholes, and in relation to lions, humans, and the wider world. That is, the form of the lion only makes sense in context. It is therefore empty of its own being, its being is only ever being-with.

The gold which is the essence of the statue, for it pervades every aspect of the statue equally, nevertheless is also nothing but emptiness. We never see gold without a form, and so, apart from a form, it is ultimately nothing. It has no essence of its own, but rather, steals this from the way it is formed. While gold does have certain characteristics, these are hardly isolatable either. Gold only has the characteristics it does, such as yellowness or shininess or heaviness, in a relational perceptual matrix with humans in the conditions on earth. Elsewhere in the galaxy, or observed by aliens, gold may hardly evidence the characteristics it does. And in fact, gold only has the properties it does in relation to that of the other elements on the periodic table, those of subatomic particles, the laws of physics, etc. The essence of the characteristics of gold are hardly then to be found exclusively in gold, but rather, in a relational matrix of which gold is only a part. To use the language of Buddhist philosophy, it is then empty of its own being, its essence is emptiness, which is to say, it is relative and relational.

While its possible that what we are seeing is a trick of language, or the concepts used by humans, Huayen theorists argue that this doesn’t make their arguments invalid. Rather, language is itself subject to the same play of form and essence, just as is any concept used by humans, or the forms of humans themselves. Rather than solve the problem, these moves simply shift the problem elsewhere, without solving it.

If form and essence, the latter of which is in this case the matter gold, and the former in this case the shape of a lion, are ultimately empty of their own being, relational and relative, this fundamental emptiness of own being is in fact then the form and essence of anything we have ever encountered, up to and including ourselves, and the entire universe. And this is Fa-Tsang’s point. Emptiness, void, or to use the famous phrase of the Buddha, dependent origination, is the essence of all we ever experience, including ourselves and our world. All is ultimately empty.

The Lion’s Echoes: Quantum Physics and German Idealism

The insights presented by the Huayen theorists seem oddly similar to that of contemporary quantum physics. Most of matter is empty space, and if you examine those aspects which aren’t empty space, on closer example, those too are mostly empty space. According to Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu-Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, this means that matter and energy is likely little more than knottings of space and time, which is to say, the void, with itself by means of gravity, little more than its own curvature due to its motion in relation to the space and time it opens up as void within itself. If this all seems to fall apart under closer examination, you’re starting to understand something important both about the limits of contemporary physics, and the intuitions of the Huayen theorists about the ultimate constitents of reality.

For Huayen theorists, however, it is not merely the physical world which is this way, but rather, everything we experience. And here they are similar to the German Idealists, such as G.W.F. Hegel, as well as other philosophers who start not from a physical world for certainty, nor first person solipsism, but rather, see all of these as various aspects of the tissue of experience. While often described as an idealist, Hegel is much craftier than that, for his goal is to transcende the binary of self and world, matter and mind, by placing the much more slippery notion of experience at the core of his approach to the world.

For Hegel and his compatriot F.W. Schelling, the aspect of reality which is present in all of it, which is the unconditioned within the conditioned world, is the Absolute. The absolute is that which cannot be described properly in dualities, for it is that from which all dualities, binaries, and distinctions of any sort arise. To use Donald Mitchell’s seemingly Hegelian inflected description of the truth of reality in Huayen, it is that of which there is no opposite. That is, it is that primal stuff of the world of which all discriminations, divisions, and aspects, including subjects and objects, here and there, or before and after, are so many carvings.

The absolute as described by Hegel is speculative, which is to say, it is beyond linear reason, conceptual thought, and fully ‘sensible’ description in words. And yet, it is the most true thing in the world, present in any and all aspects of the world. Similar to the gold in the lion, it has not characteristics of its own, other than its ability to take on the form of any and all forms.

In this sense, Hegel’s absolute is void, empty, and yet, because of this, an essential aspect of any and all which has ever existed. And this void within any and all non-voids is what keeps them open to the possibility of difference and change. It is hope, time, and difference, present within the very stuff of the world.

The Deconstructive Impulse and the Boddhisattva Path

This voidness, described as emptiness (shunyata) within Mahayana Buddhism, is not nothingness, and the advocation of it as the ultimate truth is hardly nihilism, as Mahayanists firmly argue throughout their works. One of the earliest philosophers to argue this was the founder of the Madyamika school, the famed Nagarjuna. Arguably the most famous Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna’s method, and it is a method, is incredibly similar to that of contemporary deconstructionists, and in particular, the work of the arch deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida. Nagarjuna has been accused of having no actual ideas of his own. Rather, he parasites himself on those of others, and then shows that they make no sense. Producing paradoxes not unlike those of Zeno in the Ancient Greek tradition, he shows that all notions ultimately contradict themselves. Or to use the example of Fa-Tsang, and a lion statue both is and is not a lion, just as it is and is not gold. It is both, and neither.

The result, for Nagarjuna, is that every notion he’s given will show itself to ultimately be empty of its own being, and hence, all reality is fully relational, which is to say, any reifcation of this relational matrix is ultimately empty, and its essence is emptiness. Both the form and essence of anything is empty, for things are both empty and not empty, as well as neither. And Nagarjuna is nothing if not consistent, for he applies his deconstructive model to his own distinction between empty and non-empty, as well as that between nirvana and samsara. The world of samsara, of dependent origination, of causes and conditions, of things and contexts, is ultimately a division of emptiness into separate aspects. The result is what appears to be difference, but ultimately, it’s all the same, which is to say, empty, relational, relative. Nothing is what it is by itself, but only ever in relation to what’s around it. Self and other, world and individual, essence and form, whatever binary you give him, Nagarjuna will show that these are only ever aspects of emptiness, of the relational matrix whereby emptiness produces the world in its spacing and knotting with itself to give rise to so many distinctions which are only ever emptiness carving itself.

Despite and through this, both the carvings and the distinctions are empty, as well as neither, for emptiness is that which is always ever this, that, both, and neither, described in Huayen as the tetralemma. Any statement or entity will always imply the rest of the tetralemma, and drag a context in with it. If I say “this,” it is only ever in relation to “that,” and the context to make sense of any or either is both and neither.

Rather than nihilism, what we have here is relationalism, for this essence of relationalism which empties anything of refied own-being can be described as either completely full or comletely empty, for ultimately, as a non-dual formation, it is both and neither. This is why nirvana is samsara, and why this is hardly different from the Hindu notion that atman is brahman. While the flavor is different, these are simply varying forms of expressing the same structure, the non-dual essence of which all dualities are only ever aspects.

Rather than hypostatize this essence, Nagarjuna shows how it lurks within the terms used by his opponents. And his goal is that they will realize that if all things are empty, then we shouldn’t be attached to them, or even to emptiness as a reified notion, if we are looking for the ultimate truth. Rather, this truth, emptiness, is present in any and all things, and can take any and all shape. It is freedom, freedom from any particular thing. But it is not nihilism or nothingness, because it is also everything. It is freedom from any particular, and in this sense, opens any reified entity to change.

This is freedom. And this is why Nagarjuna sees the essence of liberation, of nirvana, as the core of emptiness lurking within the illusory distinctions of the world, the world of samsara. We cling to our reifications, and we suffer because we chase the shadows of the world, from the desire for certainty in knowledge, to the desire for the desires of our affective lives. Once we realize all these are ultimately empty, our fixations on particular aspects of the world being to lose our hold on us. We stop clinging. And we become models for others to follow to realize the same thing. While our words don’t quite communicate directly non-dual insights, because words are ultimately binary in nature, in that we must always choose this word and not that, nevertheless our statements can help point to the fundamental nonduality underneath all words, and all forms in the world. And in this, we can point the way to liberation for all.

Nirvana doesn’t require leaving this world, for that would imply nirvana is a place, and that we enter it in time. Rather, it is everywhere and nowhere, the essence of the world of suffering and illusion, and yet, the potential to free ourselves from our clinging to our limited graspings is within any and all. In fact, it is precisely the interpenetration of the any and all which insures this.

Yogacara and the Buddha-Embryo of Liberation

Nevertheless, many Buddhists still felt that with his emphasis on the emptiness of the nondual essence of things, Nagarjuna was too negative sounding, too similar in tone to the Therevada Buddhists who they saw as wrongly interpreting the Buddha’s words as a call for the negation, rather than liberation, of life. And so after Nagarjuna developed his deconstructive Buddhism, which came to be called the Madyamika school, the Yogacara school founda a way to synthesize the subtle psychology of the Abidharmists before them with the deconstructive insights of the Madyamika.

For the Yogacarins, most famously the brothers Vasubandhu and Asanga, all the categories of the mind developed by the Abidharmists are useful, so long as we keep in mind that they are ultimately empty as much as anything else. Each of them deconstructs, revealing a relational matrix which has a non-dual core. Just as with the Golden Lion, whose essence is gold, which turns out to be empty itself, so it is with the mind, whose essence is mind. For the Yogacarins, often called the “Consciousness-Only” school, all we ever experience, including the physical world, is ultimately mind. Of course, if everything is a trick of the mind, then it means that even what we consider matter, traditionally considered the opposite of mind, is also mind. The result is that the notion of mind becomes non-dual, with matter as simply its most concrete and common aspects. Mind and world become simply aspects of the tissue of experience.

If mind is present in everything, then it is non-dual, and is functionally the same as the emptiness of Nagarjuna. And it must ultimately be as empty as any of its aspects, and for the Yogacarins this is in fact the case. When mind is differentiated, it is what they call the storehouse consciousness (alaya-vijnaya). The storehouse contains all the common notions or concepts whereby humans divide the world up into aspects. Similar to Plato’s forms, the storehouse contains the ideas we use to categorieze the world of experience. And what the storehouse stores is seeds (bija), memory traces of actions which are propelled by habit energy (vajaya) into the world as projections, anticipations which help us interpret the raw sense data presented by the world. This sense data is originally empty, but we carve it up into aspects by means of the concept-seeds, each of which is itself also empty, which is to say, mind. Mind is all of these. Realizing that all are empty, we realize that mind is also, paradoxically, full, for it is everything and anything we have ever experienced. This knowledge liberates us, for it makes us see that mind is free to be anything we could ever imagine or dream. The very distinction between emptiness and fullness deconstructs. And while the Yogacarin tended to describe the truth of emptiness by means of another term, often translated as thusness or suchness (tathata), the basic ideas is quite similar. To meditate on the emptiness of something is to try to see it without preconceived notions, and suchness meditation is to see it similarly, with what the Cha’an theorists later would call ‘beginner’s mind.’ While one emphasize the emptiness of this experience and the other its presence, they are varying dual aspects of the ultimately nondual same.

In the process of suchness meditation, we come to see mind as clear. To use an example beloved of the Yogacarins, mind is like the ocean, a vast body of water. When disturbed by the wind, it forms waves, so many forms of water, but as with the golden lion, waves are nothing but formed water. Water can take any shape. We need to see the water within the waves, even if external stimulus, such as wind, incites us to imagine otherwise. Ultimately in this example, the wind would have to be water too, but the example still works pretty well nevertheless.

Yogacarin and Madyamika notions are like two sides of a coin, recto and verso, and this is how they have been taught ever since, as complementary foundations of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. They are often linked in with one other tradition, that of the tathatagarbha literature. Never a distinct philosophical school, there were nevertheless various sutras which mentioned this notion, and later, those which synthesized these with Yogacara ideas. In these later texts, such as the Lankavatara Sutra, a text which was to have a profound influence on the development of the Huayen school, the purified mind, the base of the storehouse which is defiled by no formation of seeds, the emptiness of the water in relation to the waves, is the tathatagarbha.

From the Embryo to the Buddhaverse

The term tathatagarbha (a tathagata is a being ‘thus gone,’ a term commonly used to describe the Buddha) can be translated in various ways, such as Buddha-embryo, Buddha-womb, Buddha-essence, or Buddha-matrix, and was generally translated into Chinese as something along the lines of Buddha-nature. Once we realize that the pure essence of Buddha, of nirvana, of freedom and liberation from clinging, grasping, discrimination, and and suffering, is present as the core of anything we experience, we begin to see the world differently. We see the potential for liberation present within every aspect of the world, including ourselves. We see those who don’t see this with compassion, and we strive to help them see this, so that the entire world can be liberated.

And liberated from what? From fixation, reification, paralysis, paranoid clinging, and all the pain this brings the world. But we don’t fetishize emptiness either, for pure freedom would be nothingness. Rather, we stay in this world, because liberation only makes sense in regard to where we find ourselves. But it can be so much better. Each manifestation of the Buddha-embryo is itself an embryo of a better world and way of being. These realms of potential are described in many of the sutras as a buddhakshetra or buddhadhatu, translatable as a Buddhaverse or Buddharealm, respectively. As described in fantastical texts such as the Triple Lotus Sutra, these are worlds emanated by a Buddha, realms in which the truth can be taught without hindrance. This truth, or dharma, is the ultimate truth of the universe, and is the essence of the Buddha. In fact, the true body of the Buddha is nothing but the truth, known as the Buddha’s Dharma-body (dharmakaya). The Buddha has three bodies, a Dharmabody, but also a nirmanakaya, or emanation body which can be projected in various virtual forms, and the samboghakaya, or physical body of the historical Buddha. The Dharmabody is inconcievable and radically nondual, so we only ever see Emanation bodies of the Buddha in the various Buddhaverses, each ruled over by a Buddha or Boddhisattva, each of which is ultimately an emanation of the deeper truth of the universe.

The avatars of Hinduism in relation to the nondual nature of the Atman which is Brahman is not much different, and the most famous philosopher of Hinduism, Shankara, was greatly influenced by Nagarjuna, using similar methods to turn the insights of the Vedanta into a deconstructive enterprise to support his Advaita, or nondual, Vedanta philosophy, based on the basic principles of the Upanisads. It is worth noting that in both Hindu and Buddhist varities, gods teach the truth of nonduality to each person differently, manifesting by refracting their true essence to suit the form which would best communicate the truth of nonduality to any particular individual. This notion is described in Buddhism as “skillful means” (upaya), and is a principle of refraction. The Buddha brings deconstruction and reconstructive liberation to any and all depending on how he finds an aspects of the world in its particularity. Deconstructive dialectical reversal is the order of the day, and what it liberates is hardly different from the Deleuzian virtual, which is to say, the virtual potential to be anything imaginable, if ever only in relation to what is around it. The embryo of Buddhaverses is within any and all.

In the Buddhist form of this teaching, however, these various Buddhaverses are so many heavens, so many virtual realms, in which enlightened beings in this world can imagine how the world can be. These virtual realms can serve as sites of meditation, and through this, influence the way in which we act in the world when we aren’t meditating. The Buddha-embryo is the embryo of the ability of each aspect of the world to be reimagined and liberated in this manner. The Vajrayana use of visualization develops out of this, in which meditators project the aspects of what they want to see in themselves on the world and vice-versa, realizing these are projections, and yet using them to displace the projections which seem real to us in the world of our lives. In the process, what is consciously understood as fantasy impacts our reality, blurring the lines between these. Tibetan Buddhism makes extensive use of such notions.

When combined with Madyamika and Yogacara notions and methods, we have the fully developed foundation out of which the Huayen developed their ideas. Madyamika deconstruction provides the truth of emptiness, which turns out to be the fullness of Buddha-embryo, the essence of everythingness and nothingness, of liberation from the habit energy of the karmic seeds of our preconceptions, and the potential to transform the world as a result of the essence of freedom at the core of each and everything. The relational intertwining of the aspects of the world, in light of our habits and preconceptions, is what ties the world to the way it is, a world of reification and fixation, of suffering and paranoid defensiveness of each for themselves, of egos and possessions. But the Buddha-embryo releases the virtual potential within each and every aspect of the world, its potential to teach us how to see virtual Buddhaverses within everything. This is the potential for the liberation of ourselves, and the world, which are ultimately empty of own being, and hence, aspects of each other.

And this is why liberation is never for the self. This is the selfishness which the Mahayana accuse the Theravadans, who see nirvana as something which can be attained by the isolated self, for themselves alone. But it is impossible to be truly free or happy in a world that is in chains. No, because of the relational intertwining of any and all, my happiness and freedom will only ever be complete when I bring about that of all around me. Liberating the Buddhaembryo in any aspect of the world, I liberate myself, and vice-versa. The resonances leap beyond the reifications of self and other. There is a radical activist core at the heart of Buddhism.

The movement towards this potential, this Buddha-embryo which can make our world evermore a Buddhaverse, is radically nondual. Only by compassion does our wisdom increase, only by healing our inside does our outside heal, and vice-versa all round. The exchange of self and other is a crucial aspect of Buddhist meditation. Imagining that those who hate you were wronged by you in a past life, so as to teach us nondual forms of compassion. Even the notion of past lives is more complex than most Westerners think. For nondual Buddhism, past and future are a duality, and so rebirth is only ever in the present, in the continuation of suffering and attachment, but nonduality gets beyond this. Rebirth, or samsara, is separation, duality, binarity. It continues due to habit energy. Whether or not there is life after the death of the physical body, as believed in traditional Buddhism and Hinduism, or simply the death and rebirth of experiences, the ‘dharmas’ of the Abidharma school, the experiential events of which our world is composed in consciousness, is ultimately aspects of the same for traditional Buddhism. For those who find the notion of rebirth of the physical body a downside of Buddhist thought, the nondual core makes this simply a way of talking about the destruction and recreation of anything in any and each moment, as well as the ways in which the habits of our conceptions limits our relations to these. With or without rebirth of the physical body, the worldview still works fine so long as one takes an ultimately non-dual approach to these.

And in fact, if you look at how Yogacara terms for describing experience, such as habit-energy, seeds, storehouse consciousness, and others are linked with notions such as Buddha-embryo and Buddhaverse by texts such as the Lankavatara Sutra, each of these is ultimately deconstructed in Madhyamika style, for ultimately, concepts and words are imperfect vehicles for explaining nondual truths. Nonduality runs through all of these, and yet is only ever present in part in them, and so, we cannot ever say nonduality properly, only point to it, show it indirectly. Huayen Buddhism uses Yogarcara and Tathagathagarbha notions in this manner, using them to make its points, while deconstructing them in the process.

Indra’s Net: The Fractal, Holographic Universe

All of which brings us to the metaphor of Indra’s Net. Tu Shun does an excellent job of describing this metaphor, one which he says is difficult, and hence, should generally be preceded by a deconstructive and reconstructive enterprise. Fa-Tsang’s Golden Lion example is one of these. And in fact, Fa-Tsang describes something like Indra’s Net in the final parts of his treatise on the Golden Lion. He argues that the essence of lionness, and goldness, are within every aspect of every aspect of the lion, down to the hairs on the statue. His approach is fractal, and yet also, holographic.

The fractal tendency can be seen in early Mahayana Sutras, such as the Triple Lotus Sutra, which describe Buddhaverses within Buddhaverses, infinitely present within the atoms of each Buddhaverse. This sort of self-similarity is radicalized, however, when we see it used to describe the structure, not only of virtual Buddhaverses, but of any and all aspects of the world. A Golden lion statue, for example. Fa-Tsang argues that the form of any aspect of the statue only makes sense in relation to the whole, and in this sense, the whole is inside the part, if virtually, as well as within the essence of the part, which is to say, the the gold, any aspect of which presents itself as it does because of its relation to the whole.

And this is why Buddhists in this school, a crucial inspiration for Cha’an/Zen, argue that if you understand any aspect of the world, truly understand it, you understand it all. For the structure of the universe, of the interpenetration of part and whole, of each containing the other yet also not doing this, is present within any and all aspects of the world. The relational matrix of the universe is fractal and holographic. The part is within the whole, and whole within the part.

Fa-Tsang gives an example of this by surrounding the Golden Lion statue with mirrors. He describes to the empress how the mirrors reflect not only the lion, each showing different aspects of it from differing sides, but each also reflecting the reflections of the others. While Fa-Tsang and the Huayen use the term “reflection,” I actually prefer “refraction.” And the reason for this is that reflection implies sameness, but ultimately, these reflections of reflections are never quite the same, but shatterings of the whole and warpings and recombinations thereof. This isn’t the reflection of sameness, but the production of difference, spontaneously, out of pure void, an emptiness of which mirrors, image, gold, and lion form are all aspects. Combined with the notion of “skillfull means,” which clearly describes refraction rather than reflection, as well as the fact that each entity, for Huayen, is hardly identical, it seems to me that refraction is ultimately what is being described here, rather than reflection. The lion is, after all, gold and metal, and this particularity is as empty as the emptiness which is its ultimate essence. Any refraction expresses this nondual form, and viceversa, even if any is ever only this rather than that. And so, samsara is necessary to reveal nivrana, particularity to reveal the absolute.

Beyond and through any particularity and universality, virtual potential liberation is present within each and all. Fa-Tsang explains to the Empress that the reflections are virtually present in each other, and yet, real elements impact each other deeply. And so, the world is actually like Indra’s Net. According to legend, one which originates with the Samkya Hindu school but which is appropriated by the Buddhists, the king of the gods, Indra, spins around himself a net whose knots are each a jewel. Each jewel reflects and refracts the others, and in this way, each and the whole is present within each, any, and all. In various stories, Indra was described as driving a chariot, or being the axel of the wheel of the universe, with the distinct spokes as moments of time and Indra as the supratemporal core. If the spokes are like Indra’s reins on his chariot, Indra’s net of jewels, each of which contains virtual jewels within itself, is a fractal and holographic relational web whose discriminations emanate from a nondual core which is everywhere and nowhere, empty and full of any and all potentialities.

And identifying with this, to the point of dissolving one’s own ego, its possessions, the reifications and fixations that tie our world to its current form, is the way to liberate the world, and ultimately, to manifest compassion. And yet, to liberate the world it is not enough to do this simply in our minds. We need to change the world, to liberate all its aspects. This notion, of Indra’s net, traces itself back to the Avamtasaka Sutra (The Flower Garland Sutra), an early Mahayana text which gives the Huayen School its name, for the term Huayen is little more than a Chinese translation of Flower Garland. For Huayen, the deepest meditation is Flower Garland meditation, the notion that any and all apsects of the world contain and are contained in the whole, the Buddhaverse and Buddhaembryo within any and all. Nirvana is here and now, we just need to realize this, and act in accordance with this, in order to begin to unleash this and thereby start to change the world.

Activist Buddhism Beyond the Monastery?

If there is one aspect of traditional Buddhist philosophy that concerns me, it is its reluctance to change the world. Granted, the more Buddhist a society becomes, the more it transforms the entire society into the extension of a monastery. And yet, if Buddhism is truly nondual, then it needs to liberate itself from the fixations and reifications which even the Madyamika didn’t criticize, which is to say, the particular social formations of Buddhist monasticism. Buddhist Sangha is rigidly hierarchical, and has many fixations which are hardly nondual.

For example, the notion that Buddhism is against desire seems to miss the truth of nondualism. Clearly the Mahayana dispense with the simplistic attempt to extinguish desire present in the Theravada. Rather, they look for liberation from craving. And with the Theravada, it is not so much healthy desire that is seen as destructive, but rather, only addictive and controlling desire. The term for the cause of suffering in Pali is tanha, and while often translated as “desire,” more recent translators are using terms like craving to distinguish it from less destructive forms of desire which need to be present if Buddhism is to make any sense as a path. And so, in Pali, there is another word, chanda, often translation as “intention,” which describes the desire to do things in a way beyond attachment, beyond clinging, beyond the limitations of tanha. The desire to eat to live is chanda, while the way we eat when binge eating from stress, for example, is tanha. In the first case, we rationally consider the course of action, and then act on it. This implies something like desire, and yet, not a harmful desire, not an addiction. Binge eating to relieve stress, however, is compulsive, we know it is irrational, but we do it because we are caught in a loop of habit which is ultimately nonsensical. This is tanha, this is craving, and this is that from what Buddhism seeks to liberate us. Compassion for all addicted to fixations is the core of the Mahayana, with the addiction to our own egos and possessions as the first amongst these. For the Mahayana, pain doesn’t know the difference between self and other, nor suffering, nor liberation.

Desire for liberation, however, isn’t craving, so long as it doesn’t function as addiction, as tanha rather than chanda. A similar distinction arises in the nondual Western philosopher Spinoza, who argues, in good Buddhist fashion, that liberation is freedom from passions. But active passions, those which align with reason, which is to say, the essence of the whole of the cosmos, if consciously chosen, is hardly passion, because we are not passive then, but rather, we actively desire what is good for us, and are not passive to our confused desires, based on our inability to understand the whole. And so, we need to understand the structure of the whole, which is only present in partial form in any aspect thereof. Once we do, we can silence the partial and confused nature of our passions, and actively pursue that which syncs with the whole of which we are a part. Only this sort of choice can be active, because any other is following the limited desires of our bodies, which can’t see the big picture. The big picture is the path to liberation from passivity, and hence, the maximum possible liberation for any and all in relation to the whole. What is described by Spinoza is relatively similar to that at work in the difference between tanha and chanda, and in fact, helps illuminate it.

Buddhism is then hardly against desire, merely addictive craving, being passively run by our desires. When we cease desiring anything, we learn how to better desire anything. By losing ourselves we gain it back, and the whole world with it, and infinitely better. These sorts of paradoxical interventions, based on dialectical reversals, come into sync with the non-dual core of Buddhist philosophy, as well as that of many Western thinkers. The problem, however, is that many do not deconstruct some of their own fixations, and this ultimately limits them. Of course, each has to liberate the world in which they find themselves, and this determines which these are. But skillful means, refraction as upaya, can hardly remain stuck. What is liberatory in one culture or time place is hardly universal.

And so, if we are to truly understand the truth of the Buddha as nondual, then it must go beyond the skillful means whereby it revealed itself in a particular way to various societies in Asia in a particular way at a particular time and place. That is, we need to see the Dharmabody beneath the Emanationbody, and learn to dream up our own Buddhaverses from the Buddhaembryos within all aspects of the world, even the those which have reified the dharma into a particular, limited form. Nagarjuna’s own method of deconstruction can help make this happen, and Yogacara method of freeing us from the habit-energy of the seeds of the past to see beyond the limitations of the form taken by Buddhism or any other set of truths or institutions at work in the world.

There are many, many benefits to the current form of Buddhism. But any truth needs to mutate and evolve, to develop new skillful means, to liberate itself from its habit-energies of the past. To do any less, to our own habit-energies or that of others, would be to cease to liberate the world, which is ultimately the task which the Boddhisattva path, at least to the theorists of the past, seems to indicate.

From such a perspective, the fixations of our current world system, whereby capital is horded, and people are oppressed because of their citizenships status, race, wealth, gender, sexuality, all this is to be fought against. As with the Taoist notion of wu-wei, we need to take no unnecessary action, but also omit no necessary one, inaction in action and action in inaction. Unravelling fixation, and liberating the world requires we liberate the world from its reifying fixations. And that means moving beyond the monastery, and taking up an activist voice against the horrible injustices of the world. A radically activist nondual relation to the world, one in which the oppression of any is the oppression of all, in which passivity is as much a stultifying fixation as any other. A world in which compassion goes beyond the spiritual to all aspects, and the embryo of liberation knows no bounds.

Buddhism and Violence? Refraction and Politics

Before ending, it is worth noting that actual role that Huayen played in politics. Contrary to the popular Western image of Buddhism as a religion of peace, compassion, and ultimately, non-violence, this has not historically been the case.  There have been Buddhist armies and wars, as well as assassinations, and likely much more. While Buddhism began as a religion which emphasized begging for alms, and only eating the food given one, with a prohibition on working for food or storing it for later, in practice, once the monastics stopped wandering around, and built monasteries, things began to change. Because of the doctrine of the accumulation of merit for layfolk, donating property and valuables to monasteries became popular for layerpsons looking to acquire better karma, or as Buddhism became tolerated and eventually supported by various states, to avoid paying taxes and levies of various sorts. While this allowed for the better teaching of the Buddha’s doctrines, it also quickly made the monasteries fabulously wealthy. With wealth comes power.

And because Buddhism was a missionary religion, it quickly spread, but often aimed at converting the most influential persons first, and that meant kings and their courts. Buddhist monastics were often included in royal courts because they could perform rituals and promise good fortune and karma for royalty and their endeavors, including those of a military nature. After learning about Buddhism first this way, monarchs often converted, and then propounded the teaching to their people as a way to unify the state, though usually after their wars were done, so they could now claim to be compassionate. Ashoka, the first Buddhist monarch, ruled vast swaths of India, and converted after his violent conquest, supposedly horrified by the carnage. Ashoka’s edicts are often considered some of the first major “human rights” documents in history, and they are preserved in the massive stone pillars he had carved with his edits and posted at the corners of his Empire. While the conversion has seemed relatively heartfelt to later scholars, it is hard to truly know through the mists of history, and genuine feeling and political convenience are not necessarily antithetical.

The history of Buddhist monasticism in India, China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, and beyond has since then been the history of the acquisition of enormous wealth, and popular resentment against this. From a religion of those wearing little but tattered rags, and owning nothing but alms bowls and a staff, begging for daily food, these notions became simply surface display. A monk may own nearly nothing, but live in a palace and control massive resources, and so, hardly need to technically own anything. While some parts of the world still emphasize the daily alms rounds, in many these became a thing of the past.

Popular resentment against the wealth and power of the monasteries were what hastened the demise of the T’ang Dynasty in China, because the corruption of the government and the monasteries had become so intertwined. Monastic discipline, or vinaya was radically weakened, and monasticism was largely seen as a way to gain education, wealth, and power.

Is it any surprise then that Buddhist monasteries began to take up arms? After all, many ended up having often thousands of serfs, and even slaves. And so, particularly in Korea and Japan, Buddhist monasteries began to have their own private armies. In times of social dissolution, these defended the monasteries and their wealth. And at times, even persecute rival doctrinal schools. Or attack the government. .

Battlestar Galactica: Refractive Cloning and Branching Temporal Networks, Part One

Resurrection as Refraction: The Case of Ellen Tigh

Downloading Consciousness: Our Neuro-Buddhist Futures?

What would it be like to live with multiple copies of oneself in the world, each pursuing different destinies? What if you don’t have to worry so much about getting this life right, because if you die, you can just download yourself into a new body and start over again, with full memory and lessons learned? Perhaps this will one day be our future. 3D printers are getting to the point that they may soon be able to print organic matter, including organs. If you could print a copy of your body, including your brain, with the structure of your memories in the patterns of connections between your very physical nerve-cells, then wouldn’t a printed copy of yourself, once given a spark to get its heart going, be able to remember all you do, even though it was really just printed by a computer? Would a living human body with all your characteristics, including the memory of what you ate for breakfast yesterday, be in any way distinguishable from you to your closest loved ones? Certainly not until they started to have different experiences. Maybe you and your clone would even have a hard time telling apart who was the original.

Then again, we all face a similar situation every time we go to sleep. Certainly it feels like the same person who wakes up in the body which went to sleep, but the only way we know we are the person we are is because of the memories we find, pre-installed in us, by the hardware of our brains. The pattern of sync, the dynamic dance of pulses between the hardware of our nervous system which many scientists think is the spark of our conscious selves, vanishes each night when we go to sleep, only reemerge once again when we wake. But is this truly “the same” self, or rather a new self which merely can’t tell the difference , because its memories are the only way it could tell? Buddhists argue that each moment to the next we have a lapse of this sort, and that any continuity in our consciousness is ultimately illusory. And if our consciousness is merely pulses of patterns of sync within our neural wiring, then perhaps the Buddhists are right.

Films dealing with cloning and copying of the self have become more and more prominent since the 1960’s, starting with examples like Chris Marker’s La Jetee, flourishing with the uncanny doppelgangers of horror film classics like Wes Craven’s Hellraiser, and reaching new fantasies of techno-complexity with films such as Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner or Sean Carruth’s Primer (2004). Perhaps the age of 3D printers, cloning isn’t as far off as we might want to think. But perhaps in the age of Facebook, with our various digital avatars running around cyberspace, potentially without our full awareness or control, perhaps we are already starting to live in an age of clones. Certainly Andy Warhol was already cloning himself back in the sixties, but in the age of reality TV, in which real life often seems like a cheap copy of the our televisual virtual realities, everybody is increasingly just a clone of just a handful of models. If fantasy tends to foreshadow the invention of new technical realities, then it would hardly be surprising if we’ve got some futureshock on the horizon.

Taking this to a new level, the world of Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) is full of uncanny repetitions, clones and doubles, enough copies and loops in time to make any horror or time-travel film fanatic happy. While psychoanalytic film theory has been the primary paradigm used to theorize the uncanny, doubling, and even time-travel in films, the notion of the crystal-image, developed by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema II: The Time-Image, provides Deleuze’s attempt to think beyond even the complex mechanics or narrative and character repetitions theorizable by psychoanalysis. If we are to make any sense of Battlestar’s complex sets of repetitions and branching pathways through time, narrative, and characterization, not to mention its lengthy story arc, psychoanalytic models, despite their complex temporal dialectics, simply won’t do. The need arises then to go beyond psychoanalytic models and employ the sort of complex temporal mechanics used by Deleuze to make sense of post-war avant-garde film, and make use of his crystalline notion of time.

Battlestar Galactica has been justly hailed as a television masterpiece, a gritty drama which clearly transcends the limitations of its sci-fi genre source material, and a commentary on the Bush-era socio-political issues of the “war on terror.” And of course, the show deals with issues of religion and technology as well. But to merely examine the content of the show misses the radicality of its form. When its content is reevaluated in terms of formal concerns, however, despite the manner in which it rather conventionally cites tropes of television action drama, it become apparent how the series presents a highly sophisticated set of ruminations of time. Such a perspective also allows for the otherwise seemingly either baffling or superficial use of non-Western religious and philosophical concepts to be recast in ways which comment not only on the time of the show, but our era. In fact, even though the popularity of the show is likely largely due to its absolutely conventional characters and episodic storylines, taken as a whole, Battlestar represents one of the most developed examples of a networked temporality structure of any flimic or television work to date.

What Would You Do? Cylon Rescurrection and the Hope of Eternal Recurrence

I am many others: Battlestar’s Networks of Divergent Clones

Seeing a copy of yourself in a mirror, on a film or video-recording, or in memory or fantasy is common enough, certainly in film and television themselves. But Battlestar Galactica uses the repetition of characters and their “avatars” in ways which are startingly complex early in the first season. The basic plot of the series revolves around a group of humans, stranded on a fleet of ships in space, who are fleeing pursuit by a group of humanoid enemies, the Cylon, who wish to destroy them. Created by humans, the Cylons, metallic looking android creatures, broke away from their makers, and started the first Cylon war. After signing an armistice and vanishing for forty years, they come back essentially undistinguishable from humans, infiltrate their defenses, and wipe out most of the humans, with the small fleet in space being the only remanent left. Early in the first few episodes, the humans realize to their horror that “the Cylons now look just like us,” such that “any one of us can be a Cylon.” One of the characters, the scientist Gaius Baltar (James Callis), begins to see the image of a woman who he dated who revealed herself to be a Cylon agent just before the attack began, and who we are told died in that attack. After he realizes that the image of the woman isn’t real, and that only he can see her, he assumes she is a hallucination. His hallucinated woman, however, has all the memories and personality of the woman he remembers, seems to know things that Baltar doesn’t, and seems to have insights that only an actual Cylon could. She suggests to Baltar that she could potentially be the result of a chip “she” implanted in his head while he slept, allowing for the possibility that she is somehow a projection from a remote location, one with more knowledge than Baltar of the situation. Or perhaps she is simply a computer program.

Projecting Desires: Reading Gaius Baltar’s Visions of Caprica Six

The show leaves all these possibilities in suspense for most of the duration of the series, even as it complicates them. Firstly, a real live version of the same woman appears on the ship at one point, an at first Baltar doesn’t realize that others can actually see her. At this point in the series viewers have been informed that there are only twelve Cylon “models,” but each can have multiple copies. We assume then that this “real” version of the woman, a version of model Number Six (Tricia Helfer), is a version of the same model that Baltar knew before the attack, and while she is on the ship, Baltar ceases to see the “image” of Six “in his head.” When Baltar confronts her, she doesn’t seem aware that “she” is appearing in his head, leaving us to wonder further as to who or what exactly he is seeing. Once the “actual” Six leaves the ship, however, Baltar begins to see “his” Six again, in his head, though it is unclear how or why, as the Six “in his head” always seems to skirt around the issue of her relation to the “actual” Six that showed upon the ship.

As this is happening, in a parallel plot, we see two different versions of a different Cylon, model Eight, pursuing different plotlines. The same actress, Grace Park, plays both roles, one of whom has the identity of Sharon Valerii, nickname “Boomer,” while the other will later become known as “Athena.” While the characters are physically indistinguishable, they begin to act differently. When Sharon Valerii, who isn’t aware she’s a Cylon, commits an act of violence that even she, it seems, could not anticipate, the audience becomes aware that Cylons can perhaps be activated after the fact. The parallels to the “war on terror,” in which it was assumed that “anyone could be a terrorist,” in which governmental agencies spoke of things such as “sleeper agents” and “sleeper cells,” makes a visible appearance here. Of course, so do the dynamics of the unconscious, the notion that one can have aspects of oneself about which one isn’t aware. Other anxieties of the past, such as hypnosis, brainwashing, or “programming” by various ideological or religious movements, also find resonances in this aspect of this fictional world.

Furthermore, as the series progresses, several of the main characters begin to question whether or not they may be Cylons, and the show plays on the suspense this creates. No one seems able to fully be sure that they can know themselves with any certainty. But beyond psychology, each character now has to fear that, at some point in their adventures, they may run into another copy of themselves, and only in this way come to realize that they “aren’t real,” which is to say, aren’t who they thought they were, and won’t become who they thought they might.

To quote Deleuze’s cituation of Rimbaud’s famous line “I am another,” and in the world of Battlestar, perhaps many others. Deleuze uses this phrase to describe the fundamental multiplicity, not only of characters in avant-garde cinema, but within all of us, no matter how much we may try to keep this fact under wraps and develop a unified sense of self more in line with that we present to others. Beyond the psychoanalytic unconscious, or ideological programming, Battlestar presents a world in which there may be multiple versions of ourselves, programmed differently, or even, able to make different choices, and become different people.

The World Gone Mad: Battlestar’s Powers of the False

Viewers are kept in the dark about many of the details of how Cylons operate, and it is only revealed slowly that the Cylon are able to “download” their consciousness into a “resurrection ship” when their bodies are killed, allowing them to reincarnate, with all their memories, in a new version of their old body. Nevertheless, this and many other details are witheld, such that, particularly in early episodes, it is often difficult to tell precisely what to make of what we are seeing on screen. Thus, there are many moments in which the truthfulness of what we are seeing is unclear, as is how exactly we could determine this, and whether or not the truthfulness of the scene is of ultimate importance. Such moments make use of what Deleuze has called film’s “powers of the false,” the ability to present meaningful and often consequential images, even to the diegetic world of filmic plots, which nevertheless may not have been strictly real or true. Fantasy, hallucination, and dreams may impact reality as much as reality itself, and film is one of the privileged media for helping us see this, precisely because this is the medium used by film itself in the first place, its ability to create truth-effects out of images flickering on a screen.

When viewers come to realize that some of the images they see may or may not be “real” or “truthful,” and yet, they can’t tell in advance which these may be, it becomes necessary to watch film differently, in suspense, as it were, knowing that any image may turn out, retroactively, to be “not real.” While this is implicitly always the case, only films which foreground this notion require we watch them with an awareness of the potential for retroactive reworking at the forefront of our minds. While many films only reveal at the end of a film that what we saw previously might not have been real, or not fully real, it is usually only films in which we see the world both from the perspective of a character who is insane, as well as from the perspective of other, non-insane characters, which force us to view the world this way.

But what if the world itself is insane? In Jacqueline Rose’s essay “Paranoia and the Film System” (1977), Rose uses a Lacanian psychoanalytic model to describe Hitchcock’s film The Birds (1963) as a “psychotic” film. That is, we as viewers see a filmic reality which is that of the paranoid fantasies of the protagonist Daniels. Rose argues that since the bird attacks only occur after scenes in which Daniels is snubbed or otherwise has reason to feel threatened or enraged, that they are Daniel’s projected anger. None of which is to say that we see the film only through Melanie’s eyes, because there is clearly more than first person camera employed in the film. Rather, we see the world as experienced by Daniels as if it were reality. Hence, Rose argues, the world of the film, and hence the film itself, can be thought of as psychotic. This is different from a neurotic film, such as the majority of Hitchcock’s other films, in which there the film makes clear the difference between the hallucinations or distortions to reality present to a character, and the structure of the “real” world experienced by others.

Rose further indicates that while neurotic films tend to present the anxieties of characters as focused on particular objects, so many neurotic symptoms, psychotic films are those in which the very fabric of reality seems to warp around the anxiety of the characters, even to the point of the breakdown of that reality. From such a perspective, films like Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and David Cronenberg’s Spider (2000) would be films which are, in part if not completely, psychotic, in that they represent films in which the anxieties and desires of characters don’t merely inflect the world in localized ways, but seep into the structure of reality itself, whether by means of duplication of traits, or even more profoundly by becoming the coloration or warp of the world itself.

Deleuze’s notion of the “powers of the false” goes beyond this, because rather than assume that there is a world which is “true,” or that a series of characters exist in a shared reality, it rather puts forward the notion that all the world can be seen as so many “fabulations” created between people, each of which can give rise to truth effects and hence become a reality for them. Science fiction seems designed to help us imagine worlds like this, and in the world of Battlestar, in which the impossible has become possible, characters as well as viewers no longer know what to expect. The result is that it becomes necessary to watch the film in a mode of suspension, never knowing if what one sees can be trusted. Just as with films such as Mulholland Drive or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris manage to convince viewers, by means of their very structure, to watch them in this way, so a series like Battlestar engages similarly in what Deleuze calls a pedagogy of the image. That is, this series, as much as these sorts of avant-garde films, teaches us to watch it in a manner which suspends our ability to determine ahead of time which aspects of the images we see will have been real. As Deleuze says, this teaches us that montage can be within the image itself, that difference can be between the seams of what see. In this case, the very image itself can be other, liberating it from the need to simply represent a particular reality which is “really there,” a group or individual hallucination, or something else completely.

Ultimately, Deleuze wants to dispense with the with the notion that there is a firm distinction between mad and sane, real and unreal, true and false. For Deleuze, this goes beyond the restrictive notions of psychoanalysis which still believe that the world needs to be normal to be of value. None of which is to make reality simple, for according to Deleuze, it is reality as multiple which is free, and which our societies and psyches try to restrain. Liberation, which can only ever be done gradually, can start when we begin to stop trying so hard to make the world merely neurotically the same. Deleuze desires a world of multiplicity, of multiple realities, yet not that of madness and suffering. According to this writings with Guatarri in Anti-Oedipus (1972), it is our desire for a singular reality which makes multiplicity and divergence between and among realities seem so threatening in the first place. Nevertheless, from within a world which is otherwise normal, a little difference can be terrifying indeed.

Degenerating Copies

Not knowing whether or not Gaius Baltar is hallucinating or has a chip implanted in his head, we nevertheless come to see Baltar function well in society, despite some comic moments in which he seems to interact with the Six in his head in ways which confuse others around him. But just as the show seems to establish a rhythm with Six’s appearances to Baltar, often at the end of an episode so as to unveil a new wrinkle to the plot to create suspense for the next episode, the show takes a turn to the even more strange. The crew is informed that the wife of the second in command of the ship, Col. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), has been found alive on one of the other ships of the fleet, even though she was presumed dead in the initial attack. Ellen Tigh (Kate Vernon), says she received a blow on the head, and hence developed amnesia, and that this explains why she didn’t realize to contact Saul immediately. Needless to say, everyone on the crew suspects she could be a Cylon agent.

What is likely to shock most viewers, however, is that the actress who plays Ellen Tigh has a remarkable resemblance to number Six, who appears to Baltar on a regular basis, and appeared in the flesh and then mysteriously dissapeared off the Battlestar only two episodes ago. In fact, Ellen Tigh looks like she could easily be an older version of the same actress. While it is unclear if Cyclons age, it has been implied so far that they do not, but were this not the case, there is no way of knowing if this woman is not a Six altered through time travel. Complicating this is the fact that in the preceding episode, another Cylon model, number Two (Callum Keith Rennie), is show to be able to show up in the dreams of another character who has never seen her before, and in a way which prefigures the action which comes later in that episode. It is now unclear if Cylons are able to project themselves in the minds of others by some sort of telepathy, new technology, or if the character in question, otherwise assumed to be human, may herself be a Cylon.

Viewers are left in a world of the false indeed, one in which many possible interpretations can be developed for what we are seeing, any of which can retroactively be determined to have been true. What remains to be seen is whether or not there may even be several possible interpretations which will remain unresolved, as seen in film such as Bergman’s Persona, the ultimate meaning of which depends on which of the episodes one considers to have taken place in fantasy or reality.

None of which can likely prepare us, however, for when Ellen Tigh walks onto Battlestar looking uncannily similar to, yet also demonstrably different from a character who has been central to the narrative so far. How are we supposed to read her face? In the world of biology, a copy of something which is not exact yet doesn’t stray incredibly far from the original, is known as a “degenerate” copy. The term is often used in terms of the replication of genetic material, which often happens with minor mutations. While degeneracy can be detrimental to the survival of a species, it can also lead to greater diversity and robustness. While the term degeneracy has often had negative connotations, for biologists, degeneracy is the source of diversity, and hence, all adaptation and growth.

The Mysterious, Messy, Wonderful Genius: Ellen Tigh

Ellen Tigh is far from a mirror double of number Six, but she is clearly not fully distinct either. Rather, she can perhaps best be thought of as a degenerate copy of number six, a mutation of sorts, at least, in regard to our previous perception of her, because at this point, we don’t know exactly what to make of her. As with many other such plot lines, the series doesn’t resolve these issues until much later. While most suspicion that she is a Cylon is removed relatively quickly, the issues is never fully put to rest until much later.

Nevertheless, psychoanalytic notions of doubling and mirroring fail to be able to adequately describe the manner in which Ellen Tigh both mirrors and doesn’t mirror number Six. While psychoanalytic models often differentiate between “good” and “bad” copies of a double, the binary nature of such structures is hardly equipped to deal with the possibility of varying degrees of similarity between copies and originals, or situations in which the difference begins to break down. This is where the Deleuzian notion of crystallization can be helpful.

Crystalline Time and Filmic Structure

In Cinema II: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze describes what he calls a “crystalline” form of temporal structuration which manifests in avant-garde films of the post-war period. Eschewing linear temporality, films like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Federico Fellini’s Occho e Mezzo (1962), or Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1962) used a variety of techniques, from dreams to flashbacks, fantasy to hallucination to films within films, to weave films which fundamentally rethought the notion that time needed to flow from beginning to middle to end in a film. For Deleuze, these new types of temporal structure, a notion which Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as a “chronotope,” indicate the attempt to describe the manner in which, after the trauma of World War II, time was felt to be “out of joint.”

For Deleuze, the structure of time in these films was best described by the metaphor of a crystall. Any moment in a film could serve as a branching point within a network of pathways, such that rather than merely flowing in a straight line, time could loop back upon itself, or even explore more than one possible pathway through the world. Deleuze addresses the possibility of “incompossible” paths through time, such as a person doing something in one timeline, and not doing that very same thing in another, as the manner in which these films explore time not only as actual, but virtual as well. One explores time as one would space, like the rooms of a house (or in one of Deleuze’s examples, the famous hotel from Marienbad), one can revisit a moment many times, before or after one visits another room.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, this is the time of many contemporary videogames. While in simple games there is often only one pathway through the game, in more developed games, one explores a terrain, and in such a way that there are multiple possible pathways through the games’ space and time. If one explores territory A and does action B, this may make it such that one cannot then go to territory C and do action D. This is, of course, much closer to life in our everyday realities. But where videogames differ, of course, is that one can then restart the game, choose a new character, and start the process over again. And with a slate wiped clean, one can then pursue the “road not taken” in this virtual world, with one’s virtual lives which, instead of actualizing in an exclusively linear sense, are actualized serially. Ultimately, one then explores the networked terrain of a game, not only in space, but time as well, one maps the spacetime of the videogame’s world. When one plays a videogame over in this manner, some of the crucial events of the game’s world repeat, while others depend on the actions of the player. Games of this sort incarnate a crucial fantasy, of being able to do aspects of one’s life over again, and see what might turn out differently.

While Deleuze analyzed how avant-garde films of the postwar period used these sorts of temporal logics, today such chronotopes have become almost commonplace. If flashbacks challenged filmgoing audiences around the time of World War II, today’s films make frequent use of increasingly complex temporal logics, often by means of science-fictional devices such as time-travel. In films  such as Twevle Monkeys, Moon, Inception, Looper, the levels of intricacy and the frequency of such films seems only to increase. The paradoxes inherent to time-travel are becoming genre commonplaces of their own to the movie-going public, with the time-travel film as a genre with increasingly defined conventions. If, as Deleuze arged, crystall-image films were an attempt to deal with the shattering of narratives of development and progress by the traumas of two world wars, the time-travel film seems to be the popular genre which speaks most to the increasingly web-like futures of our networked times.

Deleuze does not, however, call these films networked, which he may have, though the metaphor was much less prevalent at the time he developed these notions. Rather, Deleuze builds upon Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical ruminations on the manner in which crystals form. Simondon describes the process of crystallization as one of the individuation of a crystal from the interaction of a seed which germinates in a medium. Rock candy, for example, will grow naturally around a string when sugar in a water solution reaches proper conditions of concentration and evaporation. The shape of the individual crystals, and the crystal structure of the whole which develops from these, as determined both by the shape of the strands of fiber on the string hanging down into the sugar water, as well as the interaction of the sugar and water molecules with each other in the medium. Without both seed and medium, no crystal. And while the medium is relatively homogeneous, the seed is always particular, an imperfection, often a grain of sand or scratch in the glass in which crystals are grown in labs. Without such imperfections to break the symmetries of the molecules in the medium, however, the disequilibrium needed to get the process of crystalization into a state of metastability in which it can grow and feedback upon itself can never get going. The very coherence of the molecules in the medium require something less coherent to get them moving, to star their pattern of repetition. The resulting process, however, an intertwining of difference and repetition, gives rise to an echoing of the seed in the shape of the crystals themselves, each cell a metamorphic expansion of some of the aspects of the seed in relation to the crystallizing qualities of the medium. The result is a new and unique synthesis of both, and as the cells of the crystal intertwine yet further, each cell serves as seed to more layers of crystallization, allowing for the meta-articulation of the layering process.

Ellen Tigh, Caprica Six, or Saul Tigh? Refractive Projection, with Ellen’s Face on Caprica Six’s Body via the Projections of Saul Tigh

For Deleuze, this is similar to what happens in crystal-image films. Let’s say a character sees an object in a film, and this calls up a memory of seeing a similar object in the past. These objects “repeat” or “mirror” each other. This is similar to the way in which a cell of a crystal resembles that of a seed, though the relation is one of repetition with difference, rather than sheer repetition. Essentially, the image in a mirror is enslaved to the “real” object which brings it about. In films which take a relatively linear conception of time, flashbacks are always true to life, and are only there to accurately depict, to mirror or repeat, that which “actually happened.” But in postwar films like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1949), as Deleuze points out, we see incompossible pasts, memories which can’t all be true, because some of their telling of the same events contradict. For Deleuze, flashbacks in memory occur when a moment in the presents reminds us of aspects of the past, and the resemblance between these two, their mirroring or repetition, calls up a scene from the past. But unlike images in the mirror, those in memory, or fantasy, don’t have to necessarily remain the same as what they image. Images in the mirror of the mind can reshape what they image, even if there is always some mutual interplay between the mind as medium, and the original seed of the image produced in fantasy or memory. Like in a growth of physical crystals, the growth of images of fantasy or memory from those in the present intertwines aspects of seed and medium, and as these present moments progress, they give rise to complex crystals of memory and fantasy which layer on top of each other in the process.

Temporal Webbing Beyond Linear Temporality

Deleuze calls this a process of the crystallization of time, and he terms the result time-crystals. While our normal waking consciousness is, in many senses, a constant interplay between the “linear” passage of time in our particular pathway through the spacetime of the world, and the various depths of crystallizations of memory and fantasy which encrust this at any given moment within this, films up the ante of complexity. The reason for this is that what is crystallized in films isn’t the present of a living human consciousness, but rather, images of a film. And so, that which is crystallized as memory or fantasy isn’t actually remembered or fantasized, but rather, pulled from the imagined consciousness of a character, from a void of sorts, from the film as such. And since characters and narratives only really have coherency because a film gives them this by means of the creation of an imaginary world, images crystallize in pure avant-garde films, which dispense with this, from some sort of image void itself, a void of pure future and past, beyond memory and fantasy. In narrative films with characters and plots, these forms are coated with the structures of memory and fantasy, events and plots, the logics of a world with defined rules, but ata deeper level, for Deleuze, lies past and future itself.

That is, in any and all films, what we see is a crystallization of time. Images lead to other images, and there are some repetitions and some differences, and we use patterns between these to make sense of what comes before and after. Linear temporality and traditional plots, stable characters and worlds with rules, these are themselves merely repetitions within all the potential differentiations which could arise. Time only ever arises from within the networks of these, and only has the appearance of linearity and progression when there is a high degree of repetition, such that each moment repeats so much of the last that the crystalline nature of time itself is obscured.

“Normal” time, then, in which we imagine time flowing as simple movement in a straight line, can be thought of as a flattened crystal, one in which the past and future mirror each other in mechanical regularity. Calendars and digital clocks help support the fantasy that time is really like this, but ultimately, time is also cyclical, as analog clocks remind us, and lived time is full of crystallizations of various sorts of complexity. Memory and fantasy distort and reshapes the past, future, and present in often startling ways, and the intertwining of memory and fantasy in our present moments are like so many loops and jumps from the present into past and future that perhaps it is only crystalline films, previously the province largely of the avant-garde but now the stuff of popular science fiction films, which approach what it feels to actually live time.

Linear temporal narrative then would be a carefully constructed fiction, one with a long history in film and literature, but which is a massive oversimplification of what it feels like to live as a temporal human. Crystalline films, such as time-travel films, are perhaps then much more honest than those with simple, linear plots. Time and life are much messier affairs. Applied to film, Deleuze therefore speaks of a “crystalline regime” of description, one in which time doesn’t necessarily flow in straight lines. Rather, there can be repetitions of aspects of characters, objects, events, plots, and any other aspect of a film, beyond that which implies linear continuity through time.

Of course, while avant-garde films or scenes of dream or hallucination do these sorts of things all the time, between the free-form interplay of repetition and difference in these more extreme situations, and the highly structured, rule based repetition of continuity logics of the physical world beyond memory and fantasy, are those narratives which try to show aspects of the inner world of characters, or which make use of science-fictional devices such as time-travel. For Deleuze, whatever the narrative excuse, films which depict time in a crystalline manner between pure freedom of difference between one image and the next and the pure repetition of mirroring sameness give us a more accurate sense of what the world of lived, human time is like. And in a world which is increasingly networked, perhaps the world even beyond our heads is more crystalline than it was previously.

Deleuze’s notion of crystalline time not only works to get us beyond the simplistic temporality of linear progression, but also the retroactivity and mirroring made us of in psychoanalytic models of temporal construction, many of which have had a long history of use in film theory as well. If psychoanalytic models, particularly those of Lacan and Zizek, have been used to think about how the malleability of the past in its recall in the future is precisely what allows for freedom from what may otherwise seem one’s destiny, this still remains bound to a model of temporal progression which follows a single, if continually reworking, pathway through the world. Deleuze shatters the mirror, and shows us how time can function as a web of incompossibilities, a true crystalline hall of mirrors in which we see multiple copies of aspects of ourselves, our actions, and our world, so many refractions which don’t have to always be compared to some absolute standard in regard to which we can think of our destiny or escape therefrom.

Such a crystalline world is that presented in Battlestar Galactica. At around fifty hours or so in length (about seventy-five episodes, each forty-five minutes in length), Battlestar dwarfs most feature films in sheer size. And if we think of it as one, complex, multi-part image, then it can be thought of, following Deleuze, as an image crystal. Of course, any film can. But unlike even most time-travel films, Battlestar presents deviations from traditional forms of image repetition which stray much further from linear temporal progression than even some of the most complex time-travel films developed. Even a film like Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012) hardly approaches the complexity shown in Battlestar. In fact, only avant-garde films such as Marienbad approach this, and in some ways, Battlestar may even represent a new stage of exploration in what crystal imaging can do.

Arguing with the Structure of the Real

Ultimately the origin of Ellen Tigh, and her relationship to number Six, is revealed. And while their resemblance is explained in a way which forecloses many of the possible interpretations, it does so in a way which creates whole new sets of questions which destabilize the nature of what we have come to know as reality so far. Nevertheless, there are few films or television shows of any sort which have used degenerate copies, which is to say, crystalline characters, so extensively. As mentioned earlier, most films which do use doubling make use of identical doubles, often played by the same actresses or actors, often differentiated by only a single trait, such as the famous black goatee to indicate the bad version of a character.

Of the few films to make use of truly degenerate or crystalline modes of copying before Battlestar, two of these were made around the turn of the century. David Cronenberg’s Existenz (1999) makes use of multiple iterations of similar characters and plot devices, due to the fact that each is revealed, one after the next, to be a videogame simulated world within the one which came before. By means of this game-within-a-game structure, degenerate and crystalline copying of varying aspects of the world manifests between the levels. A similar iterative structure of crystalline copying can be seen in Cronenberg’s next film, Spider (2002), in which a schizophrenic character’s delusions are revealed only gradually, with differing the use of makeup to make actresses who only partially resemble each other look increasingly similar as the film progresses.

In nearly the same time period, David Lynch’s two complementary masterpieces Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) describe worlds which Rose would clearly depict as psychotic, in that we see the world of character’s hallucinations from within, as if they were the world, and only later in the film come to realize, along with the characters, that what we saw earlier was likely only partially true. In both films, Lynch uses various devices to tip off viewers that some of what they are seeing might not be fully to be trusted, and in both films these hints seem to increase as the film progresses to the character’s awareness that they live within a delusional world at least partially of their own making. Both films make use of degenerate copies of various traits of characters, sometimes even giving rise to traits which leap around, as if they were leitmotifs of a world gone false. The color electric blue, for example, seems to take on a life of its own, a pure signifier, which circulates throughout Mulholland Drive. The differences between characters starts to decrease, however, as the psychotic split in the world of the film decreases, and similar to the structure of Spider, what originally seemed to be different characters merge into each other as the psychological needs to keep them separate breaks down.

Of all these, Battlestar resembles the least psychological of these films, which is to say, the video-game film, Existenz. At the end of Existenz, it is impossible to know if any of the realities we have seen are real in any way. And while the same could be said of anything we see in a film such as Muholland Drive, in which it only ever seems that we get more or less delusionally filtered versions of “reality,” in Existenz, it seems that due to the technological issues involved, a deux ex machina of a new sort than that of the traditional psyche, the question becomes largely besides the point. And so it is in the world of Battlestar. But if films such as Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Spider seem designed to make us question the extent to which we all warp our realities in the manner of the characters depicted, even if perhaps less severely, it seems that a film such as Existenz seems to put forth the notion that perhaps in the future we may not be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, not because we are deluded, but because our technology has changed the parameters of the game. If the first three films are psychotic in the sense described by Rose, Existenz, and Battlestar with it, operate beyond this, in the crystalline regime of the false.

Is Battlestar Dystopian? Moebial Switching Beyond Psychosis

Fiction which departs strongly from accepted notions of reality, and yet which doesn’t attempt to indicate that what we are seeing is psychological, is usually described as occurring in the realim of fantasy. While some fictions, like those of Kafka, often straddle the psychological that which is generally accepted as possible in the “real world,” presenting a world “gone mad” without ever telling us if the world is mad, the characters are mad, or if we, the readers, are, such fictions of the “fantastic” are ultimately few indeed. Most fictions can in fact be divided into those which are clearly within the realm of our dominant reality, clear fantasy, or psychological “disturbance.” There is clear security in knowing that we can tell the difference between these.

Of these types of fictions, those which are clearly marked as fantasies, such as The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, often mirror our present moment in ways which can indicate to us our hopes, desires, fears, and anxieties about the present. If “fantasy,” the genre name for those fantasies which are recreations of the medieval past, seems to often yearn for a return to some sort of idealized past, then speculative fictions of the futuristic sort, the genre of “speculative fiction” tends to depict either dystopian or utopian futures.

But while Battlestar starts off seeming strongly dystopian, and the Cylons as completely evil, the depiction of the film’s antagonists complexifies nearly from the start. Of course, the reason for this can be found in the politics of the times, in which the American actions during the “war on terror” and the Bush administration began to make it difficult for the American public to think of themselves as “the good guys.” But as the series goes on, it comes to seem that much more than simply “us” versus “them” is at stake. While the show wants to indicate that the humans and Cylons can learn from each other, the show is about more than this. Rather, it is about the evolution of humanity, in many senses, in regard to technology, but also beyond. Because as our technology begins to make it difficult to tell precisely where the limits of the human are, the more it will be necessary for us to imagine standards of value which can help us determine where humanity should go as we begin to evolve ourselves and our technologies in increasingly supra- and post-human ways.

None of which is to say that fundamentalist religiosity and Euro-American “capitalist realism” aren’t also at stake here, they are, but the show is hardly simplistic about this. The Cylon are at first depicted as fanatically monotheist, seemingly in opposition to their technological superiority to humans, which, it is emphasized, occurs due to the Cylon ability to outnetwork human computers. This hyperreligiosity and ability to network does seem designed to describe the antagonists of the “war on terror,” even if the hypertechnology was on the side of the Euro-Americans. The humans, however, are depicted as polytheists who worship versions of the gods of the ancient Greeks, even if it seems as if this is largely a religion of the past in which few on the fleet believe with any fervor. In many senses, of course, this resembles the multiplicitous idolatry of the masses who semi-religiously worship the products of capitalist production. But the similarities complexify as the series progresses. Firstly, it is revealed that some groups on the fleet do take their religion quite seriously, and one of the main characters, the human President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) has a conversion of sorts once she starts to see visions. Batlar has a conversion of sorts as well, and while the first conversion seems more genuine than the second at first, as the series moves on, this seems like it may switch places, even though both characters seem to walk a fine line between cynical deployment of religion for political gain and belief, even as one does so from the position of the government, while the other, at least towards the end of the series, does so with some sort of counterculture movement. What’s more, it is also revealed that only some of the Cylon believe in monotheism, while others are atheists who feel the other Cylon are deluded.

The series seems to relish in such reversals of expectations, and character arcs do move in some truly surprising ways. As the series progresses, even the atheistic characters begin to speculate that the only possible explanation for some of the correspondences and seeming coincidences in the development of the plot may only be explainable by something like cosmic or divine forces, or something like fate of destiny.

What to make of this, particularly in light of the relatively cynical light in which the show casts both the overearnest religiousity of the Cylon, who preach a gospel of love but feel justified killing off entire planets of humans because they are too violent, as well as the lip service mixed with questionable conversions of the humans. But underneath this, there seems to be a belief in some spiritual or at least philosophical principles about the nature of time which the show takes much more seriously. And these are always voiced by the Cylon. In fact, as the series progresses, the Cylon come to seem less like evil monsters and more like the future into which humanity may evolve.

Of course, these seeming idealized humans are charming as they are brutal. When the humans finally decide to settle on a planet, thinking that the Cylon won’t find them due to the presence of a nebula near this planet, the Cylon ultimately do find the humans, and begin an occupation. As a result, the show had their audience rooting those fighting a counter-insurgency, quite like the Iraqis and Afghans were at the same time. Those same likable “good guys” who tortured and waterboarded Cylons earlier in the series now find themselves on the other side, planting suicide bombs. I can’t think of any other mainstream drama which attempted to get audiences in the “coalition of the willing” to root for those fighting an insurgency, thereby turning the tables on most programming expectations at that time.

What’s more, the series increasingly goes out of its way to humanize the Cylon, such as when a Six is captured and tortured and raped to the point of extreme psychological damage. This Six eventually recovers enough to become an undercover fighter against the humans from within the fleet. As part of her disguise, she does her hair quite differently than the other Sixes, and manages to look nearly as different from herself as she does Ellen Tigh. While ultimately the Cylon are still brutal, they only being their occupation after they feel that sheer massacre of the humans was wrong, and that trying to “civilize” their erstwhile creators would be better. But eventually the Cylon splinter, and if the humans often veered into martial law, coups-d’etat, or seemed near civil war, finally it was the Cylon, who believe in complete uniformity in voting amongst the models to make decisions, who actually proceed to fight each other. The blurring of line between Cylon and human, which begins in the series in terms of the child Hera, born of a Cylon mother and human father, or the “good” copy of number Eight, “Athena,” who joins the human side and is finally accepted as one of them, only continues as the Cylon now seem to bicker and fight each other like humans. It seems increasingly like each is mirroring the other around a Moebius strip, like the various sides of characters whose resemblances tend to increase as the split between realities begins to disintegrate in Muholland Drive.

Whether or not the series is dystopian or utopian seems besides the point, as are such simplisitc notions. Rather, the series is an attempt to think about evolution, repetition, and learning from the past. In order to see why, however, it’s necessary to understand more about the Cylon monotheism which, by the end of the series, is now being espoused by the shifty Baltar from his counter-culture movement amongst the humans as well.

Cylon Projection and the Futures of Humanity

Rather than describe its radical monotheists as Islamic or Christian, the obvious targets for social commentary during the period of the “war on terror,” Battlestar develops a form of monotheism which seems inspired by Indian belief systems, Hinduism and Buddhism, instead. While Hinduism and Buddhism are radically different in several crucial ways, most clearly in the fact that there is no “god” or “deity” in Buddhism, even if various strains of Buddhism may have deities in all but name, nevertheless many major doctrines are shared in common between these belief systems. This is largely due to the fact that these religions both arose in India, competed for converts, and ultimately, coevolved in relation with each other for centuries. Doctrines such as reincarnation, karma, dharma, maya, liberation, and the centrality of practices of meditation tie these two systems together. The major difference between these two is that Hinduism believes in gods while Buddhism does not. By the time of the development of Mahayana Buddhism, and the response to this within Hinduism as presented in the Bhagavad Gita, the two systems had become mirror opposites in many crucial respects, as if circling each other on a Moebius band.

The details of the Cylon religion emerge slowly through the series, and though they seem closer to the monotheistic strands of Hinduism than Buddhism, the many similarities between these make it difficult to tell. In addition, the emphasis on the unity of God, the emphasis upon the love this God has for each of us, and the distate for the polytheism of the humans, seems to involve aspects of Islam and Christianity as well. Clearly this is a form of religiosity with a structure not quite like that seen on Earth today.

The use of the word “projection” by the Cylon to describe their beliefs and abilities can help flesh out the stakes of these notions. The Cylon all seem to have the ability to create virtual worlds, and to share them with others, which they refer to ask projection. Cylons use these projections to “navigate” their ships, which humans find a maze of largely identical passageways. The Cylon, however, imagine they are in a forest, or on a beach. It also seems that the Six who fell in love with Baltar, who died originally in the first attack on the human planet, is able to see a hallucinatory image of Baltar as her alter ego just as Baltar sees her, even though neither of the other knows about this. All of which would imply that Baltar is a Cylon. It also seems that the Cylon number Two, also known as Leoben, is able to project himself into Laura Roslin’s dreams, giving her foreshadowings of the future.

Furthermore, Cylon’s navigate their ships, which are intricate networkings of living tissue and metallic machine, by means of special creatures they call “hybrids” which use projection to jump the ship through space. Unlike the human ships, which use computations to determine jump coordinates and computers to execute these commands, the Cylon have humanoid creatures, hooked up to computer cables, who jump their ships for them. These hybrids float in some sort of liquid, and seem to be somewhere between conscious and unconscious, speak sentences of non-sensical streams of words, often inmixing the religious sounding with the technical, in a monotone voice, and scream “jump” whenever the ship is to jump. While the Cylon seem to control the ship’s smaller functions, the hybrids seem to control the major functions, and ultimately, the fully humanoid Cylon seem unable to jump the ship without the intervention of a hybrid. All of which seems to indicate, even if only implicitly, that the hybrid projects into a space to see if it is clear of dangers, and once this is determined, then executes a jump.

Part Two coming soon!.

Amazing New Simondon Book!

So I just started Muriel Combes new book Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transvidual (MIT, 2012), from Brian Massumi and Erin Manning’s “Technologies of Lived Abstraction” series. And just a few pages in it’s easy to tell, this is the clear, thorough secondary source on Simondon that’s long been needed in English. Simondon is such a seminal thinker, and despite the increase in interest in his thought in the last decade or so, he is still truly underappreciated. Most of his work remains untranslated, and I must say, finally being able to read Simondon in French was one of the goals pushing myself to finally develop enough abilities in this area to do so. Luckily, it seems these volumes are being translated. But until that time, Combes’ text is the first full secondary source devoted to explaining this complex and rewarding thinker in English, and she does a great job of that. Clear, insightful, a must for anyone interested in contemporary theory.