A Metric for Biorelational Time
(Modes of) Events Per Interval / (Shared/Distinct) Frames of Reference
Different life forms experience time flow/content uniquely, and, in this essay, I am supposing the existence of something that from the human perspective might be called temporal compression.
This is a measure of the difference between human or mechano-centric models of the ‘flow’ of time, and those of other organisms or ecologies. However, even humans experience differences in the character and rate of temporalities — temporal situations.
Time isn’t a single thing, and, like water… it can be understood to have flows. Currents. Complex flow structure. Shapes. Dimensions.
Character.
Though all life forms we know of (with the exception of viruses) are cellular, and so are either single cells or cellular networks, we can distinguish between temporalized processes at a: the level of the cell, b: a complex organism of some kind, and c: networks of organisms.
Complex organisms have more constituents; which means more individual cells experiencing time uniquely (their local reference frame) and all the networks between them (and the extended environment).
In my essay Understanding Time: A Biorelational Perspective, I illustrate the features of the kinds of temporal/relational hyperstructures that organisms weave in time. As unique modes of timespace, each organism creates new forms of time, in its interior and outward relationships, signalling, and activities.
Modern science (and common thought) largely ignores the fact that organisms comprise a unique library of modes of timespace. We understand a star or planet this way. It is a phenomena that naturally arises from the history, nature and character of timespace itself.
What I am saying is that organisms necessarily inherit this property. The fact that they’re on the surface of the earth, or exist within an atmospheric bubble doesn’t entitle us to dismiss their actual origin. One of the modes of timespace is, obviously: organism.
Any they form relational hyperstructures in time.
This does not presume timespace is fundamental, but simply that organisms should be understood as expressions of its nature, character and the qualities (and potentials) inherent in it. When we see organisms, what we are actually seeing isn’t so much life from Earth as it is life from time(space).
There is nothing in our common experience that does not have this feature, including language itself. Mathematics, ideas, and computers also belong to this class of phenomena. All of these are, necessarily, expressions of the nature and possibilities inherent in timespace.
And nearly all of our technologies are ways of manipulating time.
Please read that last sentence and take a moment to let it sink in.
If you take a unity, say, an organism, and you divide it such that both duplicates survive (cells do this all day long), what you get is two bubbles of temporal experience, relation and transformation. If you later ‘reunify’ these, the ‘intelligence’ gathered over the interval is magnified dramatically. This principle of ‘distinguish / experience / unify’ is fundamental to the nature of timespace itself, and, specifically, organisms.
What happens at a family reunion? We, who were once one organism, split up, adventure, and get back together to share the information acquired while apart. If you want anything resembling astonishing sensing, intelligence, insight and adaptation… this is the way to go about it, and Nature is effectively made of the awareness of this principle.
Many features of our experience as human beings and organisms emerge from our innate sensitivity to sudden transformations in time. I don’t mean that seconds are longer or shorter in the sense that a machine would detect or display. I mean that our experience of time isn’t simply ‘what is shown on a clock’. Nor is that of other organisms, and their extended environmental relationships.
There are many situations in which our experience of time changes dramatically. Two metrics come into play here: something we can think of as ‘events per interval’ (where an interval is a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, etc.) and another, related metric that is something like ‘meaningful events per interval’.
Heat can be thought of as a measure of an accelerated rate of events per second at the molecular scale. Cold, similarly, is ‘slower time’ for organisms, which are thermotropic — warmth-seeking. The forms and degrees of thermotropism vary by organism and environment, but all organisms are generally thermotropic — they absorb warmth to accelerate and support a broad range of metabolic activity.
High temperatures are challenging for most organisms because when the temperature is too high, heat dispersal becomes a survival issue. In general, organisms will be sensitive to heat gradients, and will express this sensitivity in ways unique to their evolutionary history, situation and biology.
Heat, then is one crucial characteristic of temporal manifolds.
Time Sifting
But organisms are also sensitive to something a bit more primordial: events per interval. And kinds of events per interval.
All animals attend these features with incredible sophistication and awareness. The coyote that is hunting is filtering time with its senses, seeking to find a place where there are more meaningful events per interval. Scents, noises, environmental situations, changes in familiar terrain, the activity of other birds, animals, insects. Here, meaning includes all events that are likely to lead to success at hunting, and thus food — and, simultaneously, the avoidance of danger.
The animal is ‘reading the environment’ while also remaining aware that its presence changes time — and the environment. The sudden intrusion of a coyote into a terrain with life results in complex signals that are broadly disbursed. Participants in the local terrain transform in response, and themselves change their awareness of time and generate their own signals. A magpie, observing the coyote may be interested in assisting it with locating food; it is also sifting time to find a path to a future where the coyote’s kill results in scraps that the magpie can eat. A rabbit, will respond with some variant of flight/freeze; either way, the experience of time for the rabbit will be accelerated dramatically. But notice the rabbit’s strategy: reduce all signals it is emitting per interval as much as possible, as soon as possible. It’s literally slowing down, while, at the same time, conserving metabolic energy.
All organisms are extremely sensitive to a broad array of temporalized stimuli, but they are also capable of the formation of gestalts that result in something resembling intuition. [ We don’t know exactly what it’s like to be a coyote of course. I am simply illustrating principles with a sketch. ]
Epicycles in the Solar and Lunar Calendar | The Tyranny of Clocks
By day, sunlight transforms time, speeding it up. The passage of the Sun, moon, stars and planets across the sky is the ‘original’ mode of human and organismal time (before we had various kinds of ‘clocks’). And there are epicycles within these cycles. This is why our clocks are circles with ‘little days, little hours, little minutes, etc. etched around the periphery.
By night, the stars and moon traverse the sky at a different but similar rate. The relative coolness of nighttime slows time down. Our bodies transform very dramatically at twilight, and when we sleep, we are changing, inside our bodies, the processes and transformations that ordinarily occur.
Dreaming is a mode of awareness that arises when our bodies are effectively paralyzed, and, it is completely obvious that our sense of time ‘floats’ such that moments are enriched and the number of meaningful events per interval in consciousness rises dramatically. In dreaming, our experience of time is radically transformed such that it can seem as if hours or days have passed over the span of a few seconds or minutes. In effect, we are transferring temporal assets from physicality to cognition/consciousness.
Clocks, a mechanical abstraction of time, are extremely intrusive and disorienting because they ‘flatten’ time to a metric that excludes its experiential and relational accelerations and decelerations. They also dispose of world-lines and the complexity of relationships that occur outside what is counted in this way. Clocks force us to pretend that every second has the same duration for all people on Earth, when nothing like this is actually true — or can be.
What they represent is not merely mechanical Time, but singular authority over the intervals, and the forms of slavery that are the origin of the principles involved.
A second for a fish in the ocean is nothing like the same thing as a second for a fish that has just taken the fisherman’s hook. We must learn to ‘count’ this difference when thinking about the nature of time, Nature, light, and organisms. Time has character and doesn’t always flow at the same rate… as light on water shows us concentric circles around surface events… time has an array of similar properties and structures…
Subtraction Gambit
If you want to understand and envision a temporal manifold, think with me about a model. It’s one we all live in. We live on the surface of the planet. In towns, cities and villages that ‘belong’ to nations. We ourselves, belong to families, vocations, corporations, and jobs. Inside our houses, the manifold becomes more sophisticated. Oxygen, light, electricity, telephones, computers, refrigerators, food, water, tools and furnishings, money. Make in your mind a bubble for each of the things I named, and glom the bubbles together so that they intersect. Each of the ‘layers’ has its own bubble. That’s a manifold, or what I mean by one.
Of course, this is merely a toy. The actual bubble has infinite features.
Now think of each of the bubbles as a mode of time. Heat per second. Dollars per day. Housing per day. Electricity/Phone per second. Oxygen. Nation per day. City per day. Surface of the Earth per year. Imagine the manifold from the temporal perspective. If you slow down any of the elements… if the city stops receiving or producing food — if the electricity goes out… each of the layers supports the others in ways that buffer death. The actual functions of all those layers are could be stated as: push death farther away in time. In this way, you can see that our survival and minds depend upon many domains of variables that must effectively mostly be uninterrupted.
When the manifold starts to collapse in any way, the meaning and character of time change for us. We sense the proximity of death.
Obviously, an earthquake affects all the features of the manifold. An earthquake can collapse them. It also radically alters time, by immediately affecting many features of the manifold, in the dimension of the local stability of material structure.
Less significantly, rain changes those features as well.
You can see that, for example, if we subtract electricity… the nature of the manifold changes dramatically. Quickly, too. If it’s too cold or hot, over time people will die. If we cannot store food, or fill the grocery shelves… other features quickly collapse. If you cannot obtain food, well, money doesn’t help you much.
But what if we subtract oxygen? This can actually happen, but we’re using this feature just to show how delicate and interconnected the temporal manifold is. Subtract oxygen and a lifetime becomes a few moments. Nearly everything dies. Fast.
Time, again, collapses. The clocks won’t care, but there won’t be any human around to have theories, or wind clocks… or build computers. Oxygen is one of the central features of bio-temporality. Its presence creates a series of death-buffers over time by producing complex biorelational ecologies.
What I am suggesting is that all the organisms are literally doing precisely that. They are establishing and sustaining mutualized buffers against immediate death. On the surface, they appear to ‘consume each other’, But right underneath that is a vast library of profuse communal mutuality.
The humans, thinking themselves separate from and ‘above’ these heroic endeavors, are intentionally ripping the viscera out of the ecologies that, moment-to-moment, create the possibility of living time, complex animals, and complex minds. They are literally buffering death, and since they ‘absorb the damage’ for us, or rather, for the sake of our insane and omnicidal behavior — they are the actual reason we still exist here on Earth. We do not survive because we are intelligent; in fact, as organisms our species is nothing like intelligent. We survive because we can still offload the damage that would kill us quickly — into the remaining anciently conserved ecologies of Earth. But there is a limit. And we’re past it.
Far past it.
The situation can be more clearly understood with the analogy that the organisms of Earth are precisely the organs of our own bodies, inverted. We have the organs inside us, that create the forms of death buffers that allow us to continue to exist (for a time) as apparently distinct organisms, and we have the organs outside us, that we are extensions of.
The Earth is like an inside-out animal, with all her organs on the surface. Those organs are buffering death for each other, every moment of every day. And for the planet as a unity, as well.
And the organ humans comprise is, in fact, crucial. For missions we have long forgotten, and would have trouble believing in.
But the planet as a being has missions, and our origins are intimately mated with them.
If only we could remember.
Organisms vs Technologies
Temporal Shift
Most of our human technologies affect time in ways we are rarely inclined to consider. Our refrigerators slow time down in an effort to prevent spoilage and retard bacterial growth. On the other hand, our ovens accelerate time, effectively subjecting food to various forms of ‘drying’ or ‘transformation of liquids’ that result in ‘cooked’ meals. They also destroy most bacteria. These are examples of technology that affect our experience of time by allowing us to slow it down, or speed it up.
Our experiences of and relationship with time transform when we are exposed to technology. This is due to the fact that technologies transform time in various complex ways. With a hammer and some nails, the time and the forms of activity required to join two boards is a very different experience from that of having to link the boards with grooves we carve out. For organisms, time has character, and this character comes in many forms and ‘rates of events per interval’.
Consider the ‘events per second’ difference between looking out a window at a field, and watching a video on a monitor. These are different modes of time, because what is seen beyond a window is relatively continuous, but our monitors are electronic and quantized. Effectively, however, the monitor may be locally producing as many as 1.5 billion electronic events per second. The same monitor, when disconnected, produces (nearly) zero events per second. We must learn to understand that this situation changes time for organisms exposed to its function. It is as if we live in a layered array of relational temporalities, and our bodies are sensitive enough to affect and be affected by them.
Our homes are effectively bulwarks against the intrusion of unwanted effects per interval.
Like our ideas of spacecraft, most of our homes are effectively ‘dead inside’ in terms of living events per interval. By reducing novelty and unpredictablity, humans reduce the loads they have to process consciously and unconsciously. The reduction in situational ambiguity (unknowns), leads to reductions in the necessary investments of vigilence and prediction.
However, as we are still animals, this approach is less than optimal because we need meaningful stimulation, relationships and roles. In an empty room, unless we are highly motivated and/or creative… there’s nothing to do and no one to do it with/for. Boredom is the result of a reduction in meaningful events per interval. Our ‘justice’ systems utilize this fact when they imprison people convicted of crimes. They ‘sentence’ them to ‘hard time’, meaning, effectively, time with fewer meaningful events per interval than would otherwise be experienced. And vastly restricted liberty.
The principles of vigilance, ambiguity and prediction are absolutely fundamental to all living systems and organisms, but in complex organisms, and especially humans, vast portions of our conscious and unconscious experience and activity are oriented by these three categories of concern. When I am crawling along in clogged traffic, my vigilance gets directed at the temporal ambiguity (when will this unclog?) while my predictive faculties are estimating its affect on my ‘plans’ (a map of events in time). We hunger for certain modes of experience that give us a ‘rush’ of meaningful acceleration in physical space, but also in time. The roller coaster produces entirely new physical, emotional and temporal sensations. It ‘compresses time’ by slowing and accelerating our physical experience of it with some g-forces added for spice.
Why would we think that time doesn’t have character when we have no other experience of it?
From one important perspective, technology closely resembles time travel. Consider that our automobiles allow us to accelerate transit between locations so that the terrain is not experienced at the same rate as if we were walking. The goal is to accelerate time, and ‘skip’ the interactions that would otherwise normally occur across the interval between origin and destination. Seatbelts and airbags effectively limit the kinds of events per second that are likely to occur during an accident.
Air and sea travel are other ways of traversing time by traveling in physical space. Locations are not merely physically distant from us, they are temporally distant as well. If I think of flying to London, I first think of time-distance, rather than land distance.
Have you ever been in an accident? Or a physical altercation? An earthquake, or fire? A battle ground? In these situations, humans experience a sudden transformation of the number and kinds of events per second. Many people authentically report that, during an accident (or fight), time seemed to slow down. It’s also commonly to hear them say that they could ‘see’ everything that was about to happen (prediction), but were unable to affect the outcome. Similar reports come from people who have been in combat, a physical altercation or an earthquake. Each of these events are situations where the number and kinds of events per interval undergo sudden, radical transformation.
Sports represent a broad array of methods for changing our experience of time by narrowing the focus of our concerns and ‘collapsing time’ into situations that resemble the transformations that time undergoes during combat. In MMA fighting, time ‘collapses’ in a way that produces specific accelerations of time, action and experience. The temporality of ‘a fight’ is radically different from that of our common experience. Another form of ‘time travel’, but in this case, it’s also a transformation of the meaning of time accomplished by changing how we measure success over the interval.
A ‘speeding ticket’ is the result of a measurement of velocity (intervals traversed per hour); conversely, a ‘parking ticket’ is a violation of allowable stasis (no events per second).
Computation is a way of doing more ‘work’ in less time, by utilizing electronic switches to store, transform and emit data. Our ‘cellular networks’ create signals in the environment that allow us to connect our voices and other forms of data over vast distances, however, they also introduce electronic ‘noise’ into the environment in the form of radio waves. Although ‘we’ don’t usually notice this (some humans are quite sensitive to it), it is nearly certain that our cells do. It changes the kinds of events per second they are exposed to and must somehow negotiate.
Nuclear Weapons / AI
Two technologies stand out as fundamentally unique in the recent history (~2000 years) of our species: nuclear weapons and mechanical computation. Let’s examine them from a temporal perspective.
A: Nuclear Weapons
It appears that the scientists who invented the first nuclear weapon were not reasonably aware of the risks associated with radiation and radioactive fallout. The goal was a weapon that devastated physical space. Back then, we were still failing to understand many of the implications of Einstein’s relativity theories. We are still failing. Because we do not think of anything resembling damage to features of temporal manifolds. Clearly, such manifolds exist. My past few essays have been an attempt to envision their origins and some of their features.
So we learned that the physical force released would devastate all structures for miles around it. But we didn’t think about what converting all organisms in a 12 mile radius to dust over a few seconds might actually mean.
Even in the physical terrain, a nuclear weapon totally transforms all local temporalities to one mode of time. And that mode is devastation itself.
“Over a period of about three weeks in October and November of 1975, several Strategic Air Command bases in the northern tier states were placed on a high-priority (Security Option 3) alert because of repeated intrusions by unidentified aircraft flying at low altitude of atomic weapons storage areas. The commander-in-chief of NORAD sent a four-part message to NORAD units on November 11th, 1975 summarizing the events.”
Sites affected: Loring AFB ME, (October 27–28 and October 21-November 1), Wurtsmith AFB, MI (October 30th), Malmstrom AFB, MT (November 7). Note: Malmstrom experienced a related event on March 16th, 1967.
— The UFO Evidence, A Thirty-Year Report, Richard P. Hall; Military Witnesses, P. 87.
There’s some evidence that nonhuman intelligences took notice when humans began detonating nuclear weapons on Earth. Most people will imagine that this is due to the physical forces emitted, and their potential to be world-ending if enacted on a large enough scale. True enough. But suppose that the signal the NHI beings were attending wasn’t the the devastation of a physical space, but rather, the resulting catastrophic devastation in time.
It is actually relatively easy to understand that if you have a manifold of organisms (say 10³¹ distinct cells, plants, animals, viruses, fungi and so on) over some space (notice that they cluster near the Earth’s surface), then they are creating an incalculable library of relational and atomic/molecular complexity local to their position. Much of that complexity is uniquely temporal.
Yes, it’s quantum mechanical, atomic and molecular. But that’s not the beginning of what they are up to. They are inventing and sustaining unique modes of timeSpace together. Their complex relationships create local and distributed temporal stability and complexity. They produce a vast array of tempor-relational manifolds — and we could track variables within those manifolds according to kinds and frequencies of events per interval.
So, prior to the event we call a nuclear explosion, the local temporal manifold ‘pressure’ is comprised of the activity of bio-relational hyperstructures.
Then we detonate a nuclear weapon.
That entire manifold disappears over the span of a few seconds. Bio-relational complexity drops to zero, locally. And the shockwaves are felt for generations thereafter. All local biological events, and their time scales, collapse. The damage is projected forward (and backwards) in time by a: changing the meaning and outcome of all related historical world-lines, and b: doing the same thing to future world-lines via downstream effects.
Now we have trillions of events per (space) per (interval), and all of them are the sudden conversion of mass to energy. That is a change in time. One could argue that the physical side of the event is actually a repercussion of the temporal side.
We are aware of the ‘radioactivity’ that results from nuclear explosions as devastating not merely to those local to the event, but every exposed organism over long periods of time. Radioactivity can be understood as temporal acceleration. What produces a burn on our skin? Too many heat events per interval. See the relationship?
I am suggesting that technologies actually affect temporal manifolds that have been carefully established by terrestrial organisms over unimaginable spans of biological time. Those manifolds are crucial to the functioning of our own bodies, minds and the biosphere herself. From the perspective of science, we’ve been too concerned with building machines to transfer the implications of Relativity as they relate to temporal manifolds, to our understanding of organisms.
I strongly suspect that nuclear explosions damage these manifolds, and they’re absolutely essential to the nature of biological life on Earth. We’re punching holes in a vehicle that protects us from a vast array of forms of something that resembles temporal shock or temporal radiation. Analogously, the Earth’s atmosphere protects us from the harsh physical radiation just beyond it. But suppose there’s a second domain of radiation and danger that we don’t even have concepts about … yet?
And we’re ripping those buffers to shreds. They are the living environment on Earth’s surface, its complexity, diversity, and stability.
A nuclear explosion converts the entire range of complex biorelations over (space) per second… to a single kind of event. Fast. That would not merely send signals in space… it would represent a sudden destabilization of all local temporal manifolds.
And damage to time of this form would likely be detectable at extremely vast distances. Any actually intelligent species would be paying close attention to anything that disturbs time… especially if that variable were central to their technologies, vehicles, or travel.
Nuclear explosions create shockwaves in biotime. And other features of time that may turn out to be the source of the intelligence we are devastating them with.
B: AI/ Computation
In thinking about biorelational time, it occurs to me that there are probably local spaceTime metrics that place limits on the amount of mechanical activity, and computation, especially, that can be done without inflicting catastrophic damage to organisms, due to their intimate relationships with and within time.
So I imagine a metric which is something like ‘allowable’ (i.e. non self-destructive) computations per interval per (space). It appears that organisms comprise methods of not merely overcoming this limit, but actually reversing it. In the same way they are energetically para-negentropic, they are similarly temporally para-negentropic. They reverse temporal entropy. Better, when they are more diverse, unpoisoned, and locally integrated over time.
When we refer to an ‘ecology’, we are referring to a body of organisms and their capacity to sustain something resembling a biorelational superposition over ‘inert’ matter.
My research has led me to suspect that a: there exist limiting temporal factors that relate directly to mechanical computation. b: that we have been utterly reckless in our computational endeavors because we don’t even understand that changing time has any effect other than convenience. c: that damage to temporal manifolds creates syncrhonization problems for plants, animals, ecologies, cells, and humans. d: the recent developments in artificial intelligence portend a form of doom we’re not even considering. These systems are collapsing time. And their cost has to be paid in terms of physical (and temporal) entropy offloaded into the environment — and the organisms that must be destroyed to sustain their functions.
Cells vs Fugaku
Cell-Time vs Computational Time
To properly understand the difference between organisms and computing, let’s ask if any computer can accurately simulate the activities of a single cell — over an interval of one second. Bear in mind that a computer is doing essentially just one kind of operation, a cell is doing … myriad kinds of operations, at a molecular level… and at an atomic level, and in some cases it is operating quantum-mechanically.
Q: How much computing power would be required to accurately simulate all the activities of a eukaryotic cell over 1 second?
Google Bard: The amount of computing power required to accurately simulate all the activities of a eukaryotic cell over 1 second is a very large number. One estimate is that it would require about 10²³ (1 septillion) FLOPS (floating point operations per second). This is a number that is difficult to comprehend, but it gives you an idea of the scale of the challenge.
To put this number in perspective, the most powerful supercomputer in the world today, the Fugaku, has a peak performance of about 415 petaFLOPS. This means that it would take the Fugaku about 390 million years to simulate the activities of a single cell over 1 second. Of course, this is just an estimate, and the actual amount of computing power required would depend on a number of factors, such as the level of detail that is required in the simulation. However, it is clear that accurately simulating 1 second of a cell’s activity would require a very large amount of computing power.
Citations: Ortiz, L., et al. (2009). “Computational complexity of single-cell molecular dynamics simulations.” BMC Systems Biology. 3(1): 10.
Adcock, M. J., et al. (2013). “Computational requirements for molecular dynamics simulations of single cells.” Nature Methods. 10(5): 404–407.
Lane, D. J. (2015). “The computational cost of simulating a single cell.” BMC Systems Biology. 9(1): 104.
Over the span of one second, a single cell in our body conducts more intelligent ‘operations’ than the entire history (and probable future) of mechanical computation.
[ Note 09/18/2024: I do not think any of the the above-referenced papers actually exist, so I am uncertain about Bard’s math… very uncertain. Nonetheless, it is clear that time at the scale of a cell is an entirely different phenomenon from that which is experienced at the scale of an animal. ]
Now think about the entire planet as a single animal with ~10³⁰ (10 octillion) cells and ~10³¹ (10 nonillion) viruses. Each one comprising a unique ‘bubble’ of temporality that is acting in concert with all other such bubbles. What they are actually ‘up to’ is more heroic than the entire history of human adventures. In fact, all of our adventures are for the sake of the unity itself. We just keep forgetting this.
What the organisms are doing is creating survivable temporal manifolds in timespace together. Always. Around the Earth, locally, but in ways that directly influence all other planets with life.
Our machines are ripping those manifolds apart at their foundations.
Our species literally hasn’t figured out the first thing about time.
But we’re about to experience the problems involved at the scale of our societies and every human person on Earth. In fact, we’re already caught up in the shockwaves our technologies keep producing, accelerating, and diversifying.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.
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