luka

Well-known member
The two things which are overwhelmingly difficult to see .

Almost impossible. We need to strain every sinew to need to understand both what is in the rear view mirror, which we habitually patronise, and what is before us, which we sell short by seeing in terms of the past. The new is unprecedented. The old is not an inferior version of the new,

 
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luka

Well-known member
The past doesn't exist. Time doesn't exist. We renounce the new and the future.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Last year i started reading this short book about Time by a physicist (but one of those where it's physics blurring into philosophy blurring into mysticism - at least that's how it seems from a 'common sense' perspective, mystical/hallucinatory - and the guy has a very elegant literary style.) and this chap basically endorses the 'there's no such as linear time' stuff, he says it's proven (as much anything is ever proven in this realm - by the time ideas of i dunno superstrings or dark matter or whatever reach the colour supplements and the WH Smiths paperback shelf, the cutting edge of those fields has moved into something else completely, plus it's not like they all agree with other right now, there's as many factions as in music criticism / fandom). but anyway, yes, this guy - Italian chap, forgot the name - is very much "linear time - it don't exist, case closed" . there's no such thing as past/present /future. it's all an illusion. which people have been saying, like J.W. Dunne or whoever, in different fields for quite some time.

i had to stop reading this book after about half way through, it all made no sense to me, couldn't get my head around it - it had no correlation with anything i could relate to experience (e.g. he says that at the smallest level of space-time, the tiniest sub-division units, you can't get any smaller - space-time shouldn't be conceived of as fluid then, but as granular. Nutty stuff!

the thing is - it's all very well saying there's no such thing as Time, but on the plane on which we perforce must live, each day takes us a step closer to non-existence. (glum thought- apologies!) biological and personal time certainly seems to be linear and one-way and there's not a lot one can do about it. things grow, mature, die. cause leads to effect - if i bang my knee getting up from this desk, there'll be a bruise, and then it'll heal.

culture-time though, yes that is something else, and different perceptions of how it works reign in different cultures, in different periods. the forward-movement idea of time is quite a local one in the history of humanity. yes that's true, but isn't that fact itself an example of historical time at work? one set of ideas, an episteme, being succeeded by another... not necessarily as a progress, but as a linear succession of phases.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
Alan Moore explains this 'time is a sausage' thing in a very good and simple way I think, it's in an interview with someone. It's like matrix bullet time, time as a physical thing. Obvs you can't step outside, but there are millions of simultaneous very slightly different realities. Will try find Alan Moore thing
 

luka

Well-known member
This thread is explained by the fact that I had been drinking for 11 hours by the time I made it,
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
how loyal to values from the past should you be? to what extent is it ok to sit things out and wait for the pendulum to swing back in a direction that makes sense to you?
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
On the present - I remember reading some liner notes by Alec empire years ago where he was saying that a true underground is invisible and impossible to define. Because it's always reflecting the present and always feeding back and shifting. It's never a particular sound, style or genre but something much more ephemeral and also more vital than that.

I always liked that, although it kind of does mean that we'll never know what the true underground is at any moment.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
underground is a myth. it never existed. as in, it existed as self-projection. hence why so many people lost the plot esp in dnb, techno and grime when they went big. the underground just become as tribalistic as regular life. it's easy to blame money and students and blah blah blah but if undderground was a coherent ideology it would be able to weather the storm somewhat. except it never has really.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
how loyal to values from the past should you be? to what extent is it ok to sit things out and wait for the pendulum to swing back in a direction that makes sense to you?

accelerationism doesn't care about you fetishising the abstract process.
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
underground is a myth. it never existed. as in, it existed as self-projection. hence why so many people lost the plot esp in dnb, techno and grime when they went big. the underground just become as tribalistic as regular life. it's easy to blame money and students and blah blah blah but if undderground was a coherent ideology it would be able to weather the storm somewhat. except it never has really.

I think grime in the early days was a true underground. In the sense that there wasnt really any common aesthetic features to it. There's no much that links, say, ice rink to "you were always" on a purely sonic level. But they were linked by function and community- they're both beats made in a particular scene for a particular group of people to MC over, and so they're both grime.

But now it has all crystallised and become codified. Now people who don't live anywhere near East London can set out to make a "grime tune" and we know just what that involves and what it means. The definition of grime has moved towards being a purely sonic or aesthetic one, rather than one linked to a particular group of people at a particular moment in time.

I'm sure there are other undergrounds functioning right now, but by definition they are very hard to spot and I can't see them!
 

catalog

Well-known member
Just to get back to Alan Moore for a second, here's what he's got to say. Turns out it's an American football not a sausage:

"...if Stephen Hawking is correct when he suggests that Space-Time itself is a fourth-dimensional solid probably shaped a bit like an egg or an American football, with the Big Bang at one end, the Big Crunch at the other, and all other moments suspended forever somewhere between, then I don't see how Free Will can possibly exist. Time, while it is not actually the fourth-dimension in the sense that H.G. Wells popularised it as being (after the theories of C. Howard Hinton, funnily enough), is, as I understand it, more properly conceived as the shadow of a fourth spatial dimension perceived by human consciousness.

What this means is that our view of our own three-dimensional body is limited: if you had fourth-dimensional vision and were standing at a point outside our continuum, you would perceive your human semblance as a form of horrifically long millipede that would wind back and forth over every landscape you have ever or ever will cross during the course of your life. The millipede tapers slightly at both ends. At one end is genetic slime and at the other extreme is dust or ash. Now imagine that each section of the millipede is one instant of your life from birth to death, all fused together. The way our perception of time works in this analogy is like a peristaltic ripple of awareness that starts at one end and passes through every segment in the chain of the millipede's body in sequence. As each individual segment is lit up by awareness, it only has awareness of what it is, i.e., a segment located at certain co-ordinates. When the awareness moves on to the next segment in the body, it is aware of itself as a nearly identical segment at a new co-ordinate, and it makes the reasonable assumption that it is the same segment and that the segment has moved. In fact, the segment is unwittingly part of a larger organism, and the only movement is the movement of its awareness through that organism's convoluted form.

To quote C. Howard Hinton's own somewhat different way of expressing the notion, "Were such a thought adopted, we should have to imagine some stupendous whole, wherein all that has ever come into being or will come coexists, which, passing slowly on, will leave in this flickering consciousness of ours, limited to a narrow space and a single moment, a tumultuous record of changes and vicissitudes that are but to us." "
 
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