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Subject: Temporality From: James Flint <flint@bigfoot.com> Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 12:02:03 METDST * * * * * Hi - what follows is an article i have just written for the web version of the Dutch art magazine Metropolis M. I hope you enjoy it. James Flint "Time dilation occurs, not only when we travel through space, but when we think about space." (J.G. Ballard, commentary to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1993) European culture has long been strung out on thoughts about time. Phenomenologically, as Heidegger pointed out, we long ago replaced the heterogeneous world of "natural time" with that of clock time. We've chafed against that change ever since, never quite happy with our solution, never trusting ourselves to step outside of the tick-tock paradigm. Clock time and modernity are consequently intimately entwined, and one of the results is that we are obsessed and distracted by the notion that all processes not only occur "over" time, rather than somehow within it, but also that they must all tend towards a series with a definable end, even if that end is a point as abstract as the concept of infinity. Thus teleology infects all of our concepts: we can't imagine time without an end, economics without rationality, evolution without progress, action without intention. Even Heidegger, who perhaps was the philosopher most successful in isolating the problem, couldn't conceive of a non-teleological time. But, as we near the end of the twentieth century, new philosophies that operate without recourse to ontology and metaphysics and new mathematical paradigms that embrace noise and non-linearity are beginning to offer us new understandings of all processes that bracket and bridge the old scientific disciplines together and hint at paths out of our logical conundra and perhaps suggest a way to reach a new understanding of time itself. By the end of World War Two it had become perfectly clear that the classical scientific hope of reducing a complex world to a handful of relatively simple laws was insolubly problematic on nearly all fronts. Two examples will serve to demonstrate the kinds of difficulty at stake: Bruns and Poincaré had already proved by the end of the nineteenth century that it was not possible to formulate the 3-body problem into an integrable system given the parameters of Newtonian physics;[i] and the development of quantum mechanics, with the discovery of Planck's constant and Heisenburg's uncertainty relations, had ended the classical assumption that coordinates and momenta of particles were independent variables and with it the classical hegemony of strict linear causality.[ii] One of the first people to realise the practical and cultural impact of these ideas was the father of "Cybernetics", Norbert Wiener. Combining quantum notions of probability, ideas of information feedback in system control that the invention of the vaccuum tube had allowed to flourish and the second law of thermodynamics he had arrived at a vision of the cosmos as a slowly dissipating energy cloud pockmarked with patches of organised activity: As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organisation and differentiation in which distinctness and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs' universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organisation to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.[iii] That was nearly half a century ago. Since then the ramifications of these ideas have begun to have an impact on nearly every field of Western thought, Post-Modernism itself being a major beneficiary. But today Wiener's ideas seem very dated, very of their time. His picture of the cosmos now seems like a major over-simplification, for the reason that it assumes a point of view from which the notions of "order" and "disorder" still make unambiguous sense. But today such a point of view is unacceptable. "Order" and "disorder" are ambiguous concepts, depending for their meaning upon precisely one's point of view. For example, take one of the common illustrations of the second law of thermodynamics, the swimming pool. This swimming pool is divided by a curtain into two halves: one half is filled with blue ink, the other with clear water. This, says Wiener, is absolute order - all of one element neatly on one side, all of the other on the other. No contamination. Remove the curtain and the second law states that the two liquids - or the "system" - will begin to mix and continue to do so until an equlibrium was reached. The potential energy of the system will be totally disippated when a perfect mixture - perfect disorder - is achieved. But the question is, why should any of the later equilibriums be described as any more or less ordered that the first one? Surely they are not less ordered, but merely of a different order of order. Any information "lost" by collisions between particles is retained by correlations being established between those particles. Information is conserved, and this means that classical dynamics cannot describe the process of increasing entropy - or information decay - demanded by the second law. One physicist who has attempted to think a way around this problem is Ilya Priogine, whose work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems earnt him a nobel prize in 1977. In his book Order out of Chaos (Flamingo, 1985, co-written with philosopher Isabelle Stengers) Prigogine points out Wiener's entropic universe (and its corresponding vision of time as an all-encompassing but theoretically reversible winding down of the universe) remained intellectually underpinned by a tacit understanding that the deterministic trajectories of classical dynamics were the fundamental level of scientific description. This, for Prigogine, was a mistake. Classical dynamics (and Newtonian mechanics) are rigorously logical and symmetrical. Inject a vacuum with a gas, plot the speed and position of all the particles in that gas, and you can predict the future behaviour of that gas. Reverse the trajectories of the particles, and you effectively go back in time. Although such a picture infected Wiener's view of entropy, Prigogine has argued that such systems are the exception in the universe, not the rule. Although physicists liked them because they were easy to deal with, they are not that common in nature. And as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, they do not inhere at all - Heisenburg's Uncertainty theorem scotches the whole project by pointing out that at the quantum level it is impossible to measure both the position of a particle and its velocity at the same time. To circumvent this problem, Gibbs and Einstein had previously come up with the theory of ensembles. They had argued that by representing a system as a probabilistic ensemble of points it could be formulated independently from its initial conditions. But one of the effects of the theory was that it introduced the notion of probability into dynamics, a discipline which had previously been rigorously deterministic. If dynamical systems are described probabilistically they lose their symmetry, because now the only way to reverse the trajectories of all the particles (and therefore time itself), is by adding extra information to the system, instructions which tell the particles to turn around. The upshot of this is that in dynamics we can control collisions and produce correlations, but that we cannot control correlations in a way that will destroy the effects collisions have brought into a system. "Therefore," argues Prigogine, "irreversibility no longer emerges as if by miracle at some macroscopic level. Macroscopic irreversibility only makes apparent the time-oriented polarised nature of the universe in which we live."[iv] In other words, the microscopic (dynamic) level and the macroscopic (thermodynamic) level have been linked by modifying the distribution function to one which corresponds to an intrinsically time oriented description of the dynamic system. Without extra information, the system can only develop from the past into the future, and not the other way around. But apart from ensuring that time does indeed have an arrow, Prigogine's theory also suggests that intrinsic random systems, rather than closed dynamic systems, are the most common processes to be found in nature. What does this mean for our understanding of time? It means that time is always being constructed, and that since these processes are material it is intimately connected with the construction of space. Time grows; it explores, a by-product of the games of systemic process that the energised elements of matter play amongst themselves. Odd as it may seem, such a changing view of time is reflected in our changing understanding of the meaning of the concept of evolution. In his recent book Life's Grandeur (published in the USA as Full House), Stephen Jay Gould points out that evolution as an idea as become thoroughly intertwined with the notion of progress. "We have been driven to view evolution's thrust as predictable and progressive in order to place a positive spin upon geology's most frightening fact - the restriction of human existence to the last sliver of earthly time." Well maybe that's what drives us and maybe not, but the theory of evolution has certainly been warped in the years since Darwin until it is almost inseparable from the idea that nature is constantly honing and improving its creations, and that human beings are in some way at the top of the tree that has been grown. But the basic constituent of the theory of natural selection was adaptation to changing environments, not progress. Creatures evolve because conditions change, says the theory, and that's pretty much all it says. According to the evolutionist E. Mayr (1963) the key element of The Origin of Species (and the one that Daniel Dennett focusses on in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea) was that Darwin substituted population thinking for Platonic essentialism as a way of thinking about systems in general. It was a conceptual development quite as profound as the Einstein-Gibbs ensemble theory, and in many ways directly comparable with it. Contemporary writers such as Gould and Dennett are keen to recapitulate these ideas and place them once again at the heart of Darwinian thinking. The ramifications of this are huge, for just as the insertion of population thinking into classical dynamics meant that probability replaced classical certainty and led to a new understanding of time and entropy, so to think population thinking with regard to evolution is to change our understanding of evolutionary time and evolutionary purpose. No longer do you have a teleology, in which all living processes conspire to perfect themselves. On the contrary, as Gould writes, "Life shows no general thrust to improvement but just adds an occasional exemplar of complexity in the only region of available anatomical space while maintaining, for more than 3 billion years, an unvarying bacterial mode."[v] Correspondingly, the tree of life must be redrawn. No longer, in fact, is it a tree, with mammals and humans sitting at the top. It is now a kind of hypertrophic bush consisting of three main clumps - Bacteria, Archaea and Eucarya - each of which is dominated by unicellular life. The three multi-cellular kingdoms (plants, animals and fungi) are tiny offshoots of the eukaryotic clump, and very much bizarre freaks of nature, wild exceptions to the rule. Thus evolutionary time maps neatly onto the understanding of time that Prigogine has given us: the result of a vast array of different processes all working on local levels which together produce a constantly new, constantly shifting environment that has regularities and predictabilities but which is neither completely deterministic nor subsumable beneath some kind of radical teleology. And the processes can again be described as intrinsic random systems. They are what Deleuze and Guattari called Desiring Machines; they are what George Kampis calls Partial Object Systems. Their behaviour is governed by attractors not by rules, attractors which lie virtual in the constraints of the material, not transcendental above it like Platonic essences. Their dimensionality is fractal. They are invoked by the configurations of matter, and their habits and repetitions bind time. What we are approaching then is a conception of time as an almost organic activity that encompasses the activities of repetition and replication. Just as the auto-catalytic chemical loops form the substratum of a biological cell - a bacterium perhaps - and cohere its molecules into processes that allow it to operate as a protein binding machine, so time inheres in the repeating, self-organising processes of matter which alone create the enduring forms which together can thicken into a cosmos. Interestingly, this view of time solves another longstanding dilemma - whether or not life, being such an apparently creative and productive process, actually runs contrary to the entropic flow of the universe. Whether, in other words, it is negentropic. If we take the "tree of life" view, it appears that life somehow cheats, that it produces a series of higher and higher states of complexity, organisation and differentiation. But there are two things to remember here, apart from the fact that we wish to replace this view with the non-hierarchical one taken from Gould. First, the earth is not a closed system - it is constantly bathed in energy from the sun, meaning that a negentropic explanation is not necessary to explain the processes of life. And second,if we extend the intrinsic random system as a model not only for the physical processes of the cosmos but also for the processes of chemistry and biology, seeing them not as determinstic reactions but inherently probablistic ensembles of activity, then there is no need for an explanation of life's relationship with entropy apart from the one Prigogine has already given. Life then becomes a particular instantiation of the general processes of matter, rather than an radically separate phenomenon. Evolutionary time, geological time and cosmic time are self-similar phenomena, created by energised open systems exploring the spaces made available by the churning activities of matter, and it becomes possible to write, as Dorian Sagan does, that: "life is not life, but rock rearranging itself under the sun." The energy may be provided by the sun, by volcanic activity, by gravity: the spaces may be biological, planetary, or interstellar; but the scenario is broadly the same. The processes of life are active in all of these realms. And by feeding this thought back upon itself we can see that time, as an expression of similar processes, becomes conceivable as part of a generative, living system, the hot dewy breath and regulating heart pump of the masticating matter of the cosmos. [i] The three-body problem is the attempt to formulate equations which predict the behaviour of a gravitational system containing three or more interacting bodies (eg. A planet with two moons) [ii] It is possible to determine the coordinate precisely, but the moment we do so the momentum will acquire an arbitrary value, either positive or negative. Thus in an instant the position of an object will become arbitrarily distant. "The very meaning of localisation itself becomes blurred: the concepts that form the basis of classical mechanics are profoundly altered." (Order out of Chaos, p. 224) [iii] Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p. 12 [iv] Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, p. 285 [v] Stephen Jay Gould, Life's Grandeur, p. 33