Understanding Time: A Biorelational Perspective
The nature of organismal time shatters our prosaic ideas about the nature of time, duration… and age.
The difference between objects and organisms is temporally profound. While objects may be thought to experience mechanical time (clock time) since this is how we measure their transformations, organisms have endless domains of bio-sensing and relation, and these are rich with character. We have neither the concepts, language or methods to ‘measure’ organismal temporalities, but they are more real than our mechanical metrics.
The interior ‘gestalts’ of organismal experience are not ‘dead inside’ the way we generally presume the ‘experience’ of objects, atoms, or quanta to be. Organisms are complex symbiotic manifolds of unique modes of time. They create new modes of time in their cellular and outward relationships. For organisms, there are different kinds of time, and these kinds have character in experience, not merely mechanically abstracted duration.
Our modern languages are missing the categories and concepts that would otherwise allow us to understand and relate intelligently with this facet of our own human experience that is largely unknown and undiscussed. ‘Time’ is, for us, a feature of physics. And we are inclined to ‘think about it’ only in very irrational ways that predate Einstein (circa 1905).
In a universe with just one object, there’s no time. But each time you add an object or a perceiver, you get new modes of time. They are all the modes of time that the internal and relational features of the organism or situation (i.e a star) introduce. And these tend to synchronize in a broad variety of ways… with other features and organisms that they arise in relationships with. A single cell is infinitely complex and is itself, a sort of living temporal hyperstructure ( a complex structure with a dimension for each form of transformation it can accomplish, internally and externally ). But when you put many cells together… the result is unimaginally temporally complex.
Consider the implications of world-lines in Einstein’s relativity. One way of understanding this is the concept of non-simultaneity; each observer or object comprises a locally privileged reference frame in timespace. No two observers can ‘experience (precisely) the same thing at (precisely) the same time’ because they inhabit distinct reference frames (or comprise such frames). World-lines are oriented within light cones, which can be understood to show the range of phenomena that can reach a given observer’s world line and thus affect or influence them.
One of the most dramatic consequences of Einstein’s theory of special relativity is the “relativity of simultaneity”, the fact that events perceived as simultaneous by one observer appear separated in time in a different frame of reference.
This creates a hyperstructure within relationships between organisms; an incredibly rich ‘soup’ of signals, particles such as atoms or molecules, and relational signals between life forms, timespace, and artificial objects. The key feature to pay attention to here is that each world line comprises a locally privileged time-space system that has its own unique ‘experience’ of events within the light cone, and (nearly) all events are non-simultaneous, even if two observers share a simple reference frame (such as a moving train car).
Transfer this concept to organisms, such that each observer is a unique instance of timespace, and has unique experience of relation-in-time (and light). This means that the idea of a ‘shared temporal reference frame’ is at the same time, useful… and mostly wrong.
We are trained to think about time only in ‘flat’ mechanical terms that universalize time over ‘some’ reference frame. Those ideas should have largely disappeared as we came to understand relativity. But we didn’t, really. We ran the tests, built the bombs, but failed to update our understandings of time relative to relativity. Part of the problem was that the theories related, primarily, to objects in spacetime.
But organisms are infinitely more complex than objects… and they are alive.
This has profound implications for the actual nature of biorelational temporality that deserve careful attention. Organisms comprise unique modes of timespace that produce temporo-relational hyperstructures in time.
And these hyperstructures are the actual origins of our bodies and minds.
“The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse.[2]”
But as regards time this theory, which seems exotic to our intuition, is far less exotic than what is obviously at play. We must imagine that the temporal aspects of each being’s ‘decisions’, produce temporal branching. While each organism comprises unique temporal world-line, when you put trillions of them together, the shared context that results — is a temporal hyperstructure from which all actual and possible futures arise and exist…outside of linear time!
The participants in any temporal manifold navigate something that resembles a mutualized worldine (one in which all situations and organisms on Earth participate), within which they are selecting the futures that appear ‘near’ and accessible (this often depends on signals in their light-cones).
If we transfer the many worlds model to time, what occurs is astonishing; all branches that might exist, do, at least in potential, our decisions are a behavior that implies something in us is aware of this matter, that all timelines actually exist, and every decision is an attempt to select from those nearest (because we are lazy) to our present-moment-access.
This is, in part, why much of our concerns with knowledge and technology arise from the attempt to predict futures.
The idea of ‘flat time’ (as if the entire planet was the only world-line we count) is useful, but also absurd, because the actual number of distinct organismal experiencers/observers at any given moment is somewhere between 500 billion billion and 1 trillion trillion.
That’s how many unique biological world-lines exist here, in the biorelational hyperstructure we call The Biosphere.
If we want to get a glimpse of this mode of time, we must also account for the relationships between organisms. Although I am going to leave that aside for the moment, because the numbers will be unimaginable, keep this idea in mind as we proceed.
How much organismal time passes on Earth in a single ‘year’?
For humans, there are ~8 billion of us on Earth. This means that, in order to understand the world-line temporality, we would multiply one year by the number of humans. A single ‘year’ on Earth is thus 8 billion human life-years. And all the relationships between them. And all the relationships between them and all other organisms on Earth at the time.
We should think about time in terms not merely of single world lines but in terms of the number of unique world lines per interval…
It is also useful to suppose that organisms can compress time, relative to human temporalities (seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc.) such that we could usefully imagine that the ~20-day lifespan of a housefly is relatively equivalent to a human lifespan at their temporal scale. It is clear from the mathematics of cell-populations that time for a cell is not the same thing as time at the scale of a complex organism. Similarly, smaller organisms probably experience time as accelerated relative to human time.
“Evolutionary time is directly proportional to cohort size. A million years for a cohort of a few thousands of ambient animals is an entirely different quantity and order of time than the same span for a species whose ambient population is in the millions or billions.
Consider then, your own body. How much ‘time’ is ‘one hour’ for a cohort of ~43 trillion cells, for whom which one second may be relatively equivalent to an hour or a day?
More evolutionary time happens in your own body in one year than our modern way of thinking believes to have happened in the entire history of life on Earth for precisely this reason.
Time is related to cohort size — in more ways than seven. And we are wiping out the cohorts in which evolutionary time exists. And replacing them. With poison, machines, and ‘dead time’.”
So how ‘old’ is a single organism… say, a housefly?
[ Note: the statistics that follow are estimates of populations over time, and have a large error potential; they are meant as rough estimates, and I would appreciate corrections to, for example, the estimate of how many houseflies have ever existed on Earth, etc. ]
If we examine the species of houseflies, we can estimate the number of such flies that have ever lived. There are approximately 100 trillion houseflies on Earth at present. They have an average lifespan of 20 days. If their species ~70 million years old, the following results ensue:
Over the history of this species, something like 13,260 sextillion individual houseflies have existed, around half of which reached maturity. That means that Nature has run that many housefly experiments on Earth, and any housefly you encounter is the living result of all those experiments. A single housefly has approximately 1.26 quadrillion ancestors, presumptions about population, lifespan and age of origin notwithstanding.
If we presume that houseflies experience biorelational time at exactly the same rate as humans, they have existed for ~7,182 qunitillion life-years. A given housefly is the result of 7,248.25 billion life-years of fly ancestors in its lineage. ( Note that each backward branch includes more progenitors, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.). Compared to any housefly, the ‘one world-line only’ age of the Universe (13.7 or 27 billion years) is … trivial.
If, instead, we adjust temporal compression so that their lifespan is roughly equivalent to our own (21 d = 70 y), 1 biorelational ‘housefly year’ = ~ 1,217.3 human years.
This would mean that the organisms we call houseflies are 8.75324 quintillion (8,743,257,250,000,000,000) years old in terms of measuring the population/evolution time. The ‘lineage-age’ of a single housefly would be ~560.6125 billion billion ‘fly-years’.
By comparison, a (single/perceived as separate for this math) human being has around 250000 ancestral generations, and so is a physicalization of ~250 billion human life-years of bio-temporal human evolution. We are a much more complex organism, however, and are representationally intelligent. So we have secondary and tertiary domains of developmental time in which we ‘progress’.
The ‘rate of acceleration’ in these domains can be understood as an exponent of ‘one human life year’ per year. In representational cognition, we might imagine this rate to be squared or cubed. In technological ‘time’, it is proceeding… exponentially. Humans have established at least two additional ‘layers’ of developmental momentum. The plants and animals also have other layers of development, but since they have only relation and biology (in this model), they cannot ‘keep up’ with human technological or cultural development. Tigers can compete against spears, but not against guns.
But a single human has organs; and these organs are unique modes of spacetime as well. They create a relational symphony in time, where each activity they engage in, from oxygenating blood to digesting food, is a specific mode of time. Our bodies are composed of ~45 trillion cells. So, for us, one human second is (at least) 45 trillion cell-seconds. And all the relationships between them…and between them and the entirety of spacetime.
Time for a thought experiment: take a world with a single organism on it. Call it a blonk and suppose it can somehow survive alone there. On this world, along with the planet’s own world line, you now have the modes of timespace that are native to the interiority and exteriority of that organism. We will call this blonk-time. One ‘year’ on this world is one blonk-year (and all of the forms and speeds of cell-time of the cells that comprise it). Its existence results in the addition to timespace of all the kinds of signals it can emit, receive and transform. In effect, the blonk’s existence results in something like the addition of a specific bio-temporal ‘star’ local to its world. This creates new forms of signals, receptions and transformations of timespace. These situations transform what time is, can be, and ‘means’.
An organism is, then, a way of timespace relating with itself through a locally novel manifold. Each organism is a unique form of this.
If we add a second blonk, we get two-blonk years per year (and the cell time), as well as the relational time between both of them and all the features of their environment that reach their light-cones. We can then imagine each organism as productive of an array of unique time-light-like cones. Where these overlap, there is another unique feature which can be understood as the ‘between-space’ or relational space in which they interact with each other, the environment, and timespace itself.
Humans have ‘additional cones’ of development and relation; formally representational language, and technology. These cones profoundly affect the entire biosphere, and all of the world-lines there embodied. Over the past 2000 years, and particularly in the past 300 or so, the catastrophic effects of our rapid technological development resemble the active invasion of all terrestrial world-lines by an alien intelligence bent on obliterating them.
As we add other organisms, we get new modes of spacetime for each organism, and this dramatically enriches the local temporal manifold, and their unique interior and exterior relationships. This leads to what I call hyperstructures on that world. These are complex, ‘symphony-like’ biological, temporal, and relational structures, most of which are invisible… until you begin to visualize the temporalities produced this way.
Can you see, now, that organisms are to time as stars are to light? Organisms create temporal manifolds of unimaginable complexity, in part, by dividing within a unified context, and then relating with each other synergistically.
Any organism you encounter on Earth is unimaginably ancient. It is monumentally older than the age we associate with the Universe.
This perspective is important for a number of reasons, including its implications for the meaning of identity and our ideas about what organisms are and are doing/being. They are forming incredibly sophisticated relational networks that produce new modes of time.
But what I wish to highlight is a principle. The principle of the physicalization of intelligence in terrestrial organisms, particularly insects. Though organismal intelligences such as insects are not cognitive in the way we are, they are, in fact, highly intelligent.
In insects, the ‘intelligence’ isn’t formally representational like ours, but rather, physically relational. They comprise an astonishingly sophisticated library of intelligences that produce unique physicalized derivations over time.
Consider the nearly unimaginable sophistications of environmental fitness and sensing ability that have been invested in the housefly over the 235 quadrillion life-year span of direct environmental testing and evolutionary development in any common example of the species.
Try to imagine the living library of histories there embodied.
The physicalized intelligence of the common housefly has been perfected over an almost inconceivable amount of biorelational time. The depth of that intelligence is staggering. It is also unimaginably well-adapted to the Earth’s environment.
One could reasonably say ‘it is the Earth’s entire library of organismal intelligences and relationships localized in the form of the housefly’.
To properly understand the difference between the temporal complexity of organisms and computer circuits, let’s ask if any computer can accurately simulate the activities of a single cell — over an interval of one second:
Me: How much computing power would be required to accurately simulate all the activities of a single 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 (at 300 petaFlops of sustained activity) about 390 million years to accurately 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 a cell would require a very large amount of computing power.
- 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.
Accurately simulating a single cell at merely the molecular level, over one second, requires more computing power than we will ever produce. In one second, a cell is conducting more intelligent operations than all the computers on Earth will ever do.
Imagine that the organisms of Earth comprise a ‘living membrane’ which is actually just one organism. Consider the number of ‘individual’ cells/viruses on Earth: ~10³⁰ (10 octillion) and ~10³¹ (10 nonillion) respectively.
[How many unique modes of biorelational time and how many unique biorelational transactions occur…as the entire biosphere… over the interval of any ordinary second?]
The organisms of Earth form astonishing networks of unique intelligences, world-lines, and temporalities. These networks are the ‘sum over the populations’ of discrete organisms and forms as they embody their relationships in the biosphere.
The nature of biorelational manifolds on Earth is a story of the incredible libraries of temporal and relational synergistics among the entire biosphere over the whole history of Life on Earth.
Ordinary humans are completely unaware of this fact. We were never taught models of this, or how to hold such things in perspective. But it is possible for us to learn to understand… to remember this.
Our own intelligence (the aspect that is actually intelligent) is not really ‘ours’. Rather, it is the result of our capacity to inhabit something that resembles a relational superposition over and within the organismal membranes of Earth.
Damage to those networks lands in us in real time. And when they are healed, or re-diversified… the benefits of that land in us in the same way. It is clear that many indigenous peoples were aware of this, and strove to remain in relatively harmonious relationships with the environment — while at the same time taking their survival needs seriously.
It’s not the health of a given local intelligence that actually really matters, rather, it is the networks from which that intelligence is derived that produces the possibility space of any given intelligence, organism, living place, etc.
The present environmental situation on Earth represents the intentional devastation of the anciently conserved bio-relational hyperstructures that represent ‘the womb’ in which our own species arose and exists. Not only is that womb not disposable; any damage to it lands in us instantaneously (due to our relationship with the entire organismal network) and in repercussive waves that increase in frequency as time proceeds. Effectively, damage to the environment results in the sacrifice of degrees of liberty now and in the future. Additionally, the biorelational networks of Earth act as buffers against catastrophic terrestrial or environmental destablization. Any damage to them, reduces the environmental resilience of Earth.
Our species has become the primary threat to the anciently conserved ecologies. We are ripping the buffers down to their roots, in a totally ironic attempt to convert them to luxuries and ‘conveniences’.
Why?
Our species is vulnerable to capture by vast arrays of structured fictions of concept, language, and commodification. Our present societies are essentially running malware as their ‘operating system’; this isn’t entirely our fault — it’s a situation we inherit at birth. Nonetheless, it should also be obvious that an embryo that attacks the womb will, eventually, be aborted by the body in which it is developing.
The burning of the Amazon rainforest, the devastation of the oceans, represent, environmentally, something that makes cancer look like spilt milk. We are ripping time apart at its origins. Those organisms are doing something crucial and heroic… and so, too, the Earth herself.
Our species is inextricably linked to the biorelational hyperstructures of Earth. We must find a way to understand and value this fact.
It is my hope that this essay will help to make obvious to those who read and consider it a new way of understanding organisms and time that might lead us beyond our estranged ideas about … and behavior toward them.
Further reading: A Metric for Biorelational Time
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
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