Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Come back, Matt.

BREAKING NEWS. Things are exploding right now. My wife is figuring out how I can rejoin the newly recreated Boomer Bible Forum, courtesy of our old friend Null…. More importantly, I’m trying to figure out how I can set before you… the maybe dozen books embedded here at InstaPunk. In the meantime a random shot into the void resurrected a totally vanished friend, an incredibly talented young man named Matthew. I asked if anyone remembered my speculation about time, and Matt did: He’s still the smartest kid I know. Scary smart. Like a guy who’d hang onto this:

THREE DIMENSIONS OF TIME

Let’s say we have a box of three-dimensional time. For any event En we can assign a location in the box based on three coordinates: X, Y, Z. Thus event E1 is identified by coordinates X1, Y1, Z1. Now: what attributes of an event require being called out uniquely and necessarily? Remember, there is no before or after here; the location information provided by the coordinates must constitute a replacement for the before and after, because before and after mandates cause and effect, which do not apply here. To explore this question, let’s imagine that event E1 is me striking the letter Q of the keyboard at my computer. To assign E1 a unique location, what do we need to know about it? First, I would suppose is the identification of the event; that is striking the letter Q, which gives it a unique identity on the axis called ‘What event’?, which we can designate as the X-axis. Next, to my view, would come the identifier Who; that is, from whose perspective the Q key was struck, which we can designate as the Y-axis. Is this sufficient information to give us a unique identifier? No. For it should be obvious that I have struck the Q key many many times. Yet, if I am declaring all events simultaneous, I cannot determine a third unique attribute by identifying a ‘when’ in terms of before or after some number of other Q keystrokes by me. I must frame this third category of identifier very carefully. It is clearly a matter of defining context uniquely, but the cause and effect constraint complicates the question enormously. ‘Purpose’ is not acceptable. ‘Physical location’ is presumably identified by the other three dimensions, and does not allow us to distinguish between the numerous events of me striking the letter Q at this very keyboard on the second floor of M__’s house. Perhaps because it seems direct and simple, and perhaps because I am not smart enough, I choose to identify this third coordinate as corresponding to ‘which’; that is ‘which unique key’, was struck. I do so because at every instant, this key is identified uniquely in the same way that I am identified, as an entity in the ‘real world’ which has a ‘right now state of being’ different from every other apparent ‘right now state of being’, even if in the case of the key it is is a minuscule difference in weight, color, edge integrity, etc, associated with what we in chronological time would call ‘wear’.

The graphic [up top] is a primitive representation of the dimensionality we have been imagining. Note that an event does exist in three dimensions; that is, it has a shape featuring height, width, and depth. We can also imbue the shape with other attributes that correspond to the reality of human experience. An event may have color if we assign to each axis an illimitable spectrum of unique hues. Such hues may vary in intensity according to the brightness or lack of it that causes an event to be vividly perceived or hardly perceived at all. The shape may also have a weight/solidity that corresponds to impact; that is, its gravity to the agent and/or others who may perceive it, such that it takes precedence over the natural conformations of other events in nearby time-space.

It will be observed that the the choice of these dimensions is roughly analogous to syntax. The ‘Who’ axis represents the subject, the ‘What’ axis a verb or participial phrase, and the ‘Which’ axis the direct object. I concede that the ‘What’ does, in our example, seem to contain its own direct object; however, the syntax analogy still applies and neatly illustrates an important distinction: the ‘What’ in this model is conceptual, i.e., striking a key, and the striking only becomes real when a unique key becomes the actual direct object of the ‘sentence’ the event signifies. The inclusion of an apparent direct object in the ‘What’ corresponds to the concept of a transitive verb, which, when it is used, brings into the sentence the requirement for a direct object to complete its meaning. Thus the direct object is implicit in the verb itself. The additional refinement here is that the concept may be more specific than a transitive verb; that is, in the time world of events, there are as many different verbs meaning ‘to strike’ as there are things which can be struck.

Why is this distinction important? Because it is obvious from the graphic that not everything we might conceive of as an event requires coordinate information from all three axes. We must therefore consider the variations of events made possible by this observation. For example, it would be possible to have an Event Et that does not have a coordinate on the ‘Which’ axis. On our graphic Et would still exist in time-space, but its shape would be two-dimensional. What would such an event be in reality? It would be the thought of ‘What’ by a specific ‘Who’; in this case, my thought of striking the Q key without doing so. It does not acquire the three-dimensional reality of an actual keystroke, yet it exists as a thoughtform which may also have a color and intensity, and perhaps even a certain solidity.

Note that imagining a thought event allows us to refine our understanding of the role color may play in this time-space. For if every ‘Who’ has its unique hue in the spectrum of all ‘Who hues’, then perhaps it is the case that this is the only color which is transparent to the percipient of an event. The significance of this will be clearer if we realize that an event like E1 or Et can, and almost always is, part of some larger event Ec; that is, an event which consists of multiple/innumerable sentences, such that its size is large, its shape complex, and its connections to other events manifold. The ‘What’ of Ec might be ‘write a letter’, and the ‘which’ might be this letter. This larger event does contain E1 within it, but E1 is not an event wholly observable by anyone but me. Thus, the enclosing form, shape and color of Ec would conceal the overall shape and size of E1 from everyone but me. Even so, attributes of E1 would be observable by other ‘whos’, specifically, the point at which E1 connects with the ‘which axis’ because Ec could not exist without E1. Not so for Et, which would be entirely invisible to everyone but me.

Returning to the matter of incomplete sentences, we can also postulate an event Ex, which has coordinates on the ‘What’ and ‘Which’ axes, but not on the ‘Who’ axis. An example? A thunderstorm. Envisioning this on the graphic provokes an intriguing observation. It has the two-dimensional existence of a thought form, but differs by being oriented at an angle that cannot be created by a thought form; that is, all of its possible angles vary from a center that is perpendicular to the corresponding arc center of a thought form. Thus, we may cautiously assert that a real world event without a human agent is conceptually perpendicular to a thought that is not translated into a real world event.

Initially, this seems an oddity. A thunderstorm is a very vivid and spectacular event, but only if there is a ‘who’ to perceive it. Thus, it is the consciousness of the observer which gives it its three-dimensionality and therefore its real size and weight. These are only latent in the event itself.

A corollary generalization is that this model does seem to confirm the relation posited by quantum physics between the conscious observer and reality. The thunderstorm does not fail to exist because there is no observer, but its existence is quite similar to that of a thought not acted upon.

The third possible variation of an event, coordinates for ‘Who’ and ‘Which’ but not ‘What’ can also be displayed on this model, resulting in an arc center that is perpendicular to both the thought form and the agentless event. What is not clear, however, is the real experience such a two-dimensional form might represent. A verbless sentence? Or is this the realm of the verb to be, of identity itself? And is the ‘Which plane’ also the home of Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious?

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I wrote that years ago. I was smarter then. And dumber. Back then I thought it was possible to share ideas. Now I know different. But I still miss Matt.

posted at 8:59 am by InstaPunk Permalink