Time: Is It Bullshit?

mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
Burroughs is emphatic, obsessive: 'In Time any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like an old joke' (WL 111); he notes also that '[a] basic impasse of all control machines is this: Control needs time in which to exercise control' (AM 117). OGU control codings far exceed ideological manipulation, amounting to cosmic reality programming, because-at the limit--'the One God is Tune' (WL 111). The presumption of chronological time is written into the organism at the most basic level, scripted into its unconsciously performed habituated behaviors . . . Power operates most effectively not by persuading the conscious mind, but by delimiting in advance what it is possible to experience. By formatting the most basic biological processes of the organism in terms of temporality, Control ensures that all human experience is of-and in-time . That is why time is a 'prison' for humans . . . Space has to be understood not as empirical extension, still less as a transcendental given, but in the most abstract sense, as the zone of unbound potentialities lying beyond the purview of the OGU's already-written.
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&
Time is a delusion: the impartiality and inseparability of one moment of time's apparent yesterday and another of time's apparent today are enough to make it disintegrate. It is evident that the number of these human moments is not infinite. The basic elemental moments are even more impersonal physical suffering and physical pleasure, the approach of sleep, listening to a single piece of music, moments of great intensity or great dejection. I have reached, in advance, the following conclusion: life is too impoverished not to be also immortal. But we do not even possess the certainty of our poverty, inasmuch as time, easily denied by the senses, is not so easily denied by the intellect, from whose essence the concept of succession seems inseparable. So then, let my glimpse of an idea remain as an emotional anecdote; let the real moment of ecstasy and the possible insinuation of eternity which that night lavished on me, remain confined to this sheet of paper, openly unresolved.
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wild greens

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
Also coincidentally I recently read "Momo" by Michael Ende which is all about the folly of 'saving time' (see http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-MISC/101783.htm)
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Is it any good? I stopped reading that as it was giving away the plot but seemed like it could either be pretentious shite or half-decent

Used to be a really good Nepalese curry house near me that did fucking amazing momos when I still lived in London. Had forgotten about them until i just read that.

*

Working with a "big" client in the current job I've noticed this thing where a meeting will finish early and they'll drop this phrase "I'll give you your fifteen minutes back," and they all say it, it's a little corporate catchphrase. We'll commodify your seconds and minutes and I'm doing you a favour by finishing early. It's a bit odd that one.

In an older job I knew a big boss in the office who went to Dubai on holiday but still checked his emails every day for an hour and said it was fine as he'd "claim his time back". But he was so deep in the job that even a holiday meant that the corporation had his time

It's like these people who install work emails and work "teams"/zoom on their personal phones. What the fuck are you doing

I may be going off track here but some industry has certainly developed a way to take grips of these people that I'm not sure would have happened historically
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I really liked it on the whole.

Some of it was pretty on the nose but it is a kids book so I didn't mind it.

Very imaginative, it reminded me strongly of Miyizaki films. I could imagine him adapting it quite easily.
 
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wild greens

Well-known member
I like the idea of reading a book to the lad that tells him to slow down and not be a drone tbh, indoctrinate him young

Will have a look
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
wild greens said:
Is it any good? I stopped reading that as it was giving away the plot but seemed like it could either be pretentious shite or half-decent

Used to be a really good Nepalese curry house near me that did fucking amazing momos when I still lived in London. Had forgotten about them until i just read that.

*

Working with a "big" client in the current job I've noticed this thing where a meeting will finish early and they'll drop this phrase "I'll give you your fifteen minutes back," and they all say it, it's a little corporate catchphrase. We'll commodify your seconds and minutes and I'm doing you a favour by finishing early. It's a bit odd that one.

In an older job I knew a big boss in the office who went to Dubai on holiday but still checked his emails every day for an hour and said it was fine as he'd "claim his time back". But he was so deep in the job that even a holiday meant that the corporation had his time

It's like these people who install work emails and work "teams"/zoom on their personal phones. What the fuck are you doing

I may be going off track here but some industry has certainly developed a way to take grips of these people that I'm not sure would have happened historically
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My wife often works when she's on "holiday", or late in the evening or at weekends. Does my fucking nut in.
 
V

version

Well-known member
I think it is to some extent, yeah. It's invented, like Craner says. That being said, it's a difficult one to get away from. There's clearly some combination of processes taking place we needed a name for.

If you were to run with it being some sort of natural phenomena, one way of thinking about it would be to picture it as a body of water, any discrepancies between "times", e.g. "deep time" vs. human time, being down to the movement of things within it, i.e. dependent on depth, mass, and how quickly each form's able to pass through it, or be pulled along by its currents. Time travel would be the ability to swim in any direction, independent of current, and the really interesting question there would be whether you could also swim to any depth; could a human travel into and through geologic time, or would their form just not allow for it?
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
mission to Skeggy today on a small dose of mushrooms and time dilation opened right up, malleable and plastic but crystalline and set too, walking in sand adds a warped enough sense of motion on a psychedelic fwiw

one of the crew is a physics boff and went down a wormhole on ‘time crystals’, bit too deep too soon because, although it was chilly, the deckchairs were proper comfy and I couldn’t take my eyes off the myriad of colours within the sea

something about Amplituhedrons as well, “yeah wicked but check out the sssseeeeaaa”

couldnt get my noggin round what he was saying, precisely, yet his enthusiasm for quantum computing and clear pleasure in detailing how energy isnt consumed, that it’s been achieved through experiment, was revelatory, until I stared at the quietly rolling green-grey sea and eventually he chilled

time is emergent, consciousness is emergent, therefore time is consciousness and the only time is now?

Burroughs said death needs time to grow like a junky needs skag, thread on techniques for influencing time is pretty sweet as an aside
 
mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
version said:
I think it is to some extent, yeah. It's invented, like Craner says. That being said, it's a difficult one to get away from. There's clearly some combination of processes taking place we needed a name for.

If you were to run with it being some sort of natural phenomena, one way of thinking about it would be to picture it as a body of water, any discrepancies between "times", e.g. "deep time" vs. human time, being down to the movement of things within it, i.e. dependent on depth, mass, and how quickly each form's able to pass through it, or be pulled along by its currents. Time travel would be the ability to swim in any direction, independent of current, and the really interesting question there would be whether you could also swim to any depth; could a human travel into and through geologic time, or would their form just not allow for it?
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in the borges essay quoted in the OP he makes a similar comparison: "Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river"—so he thinks it's impossible to get away from, but maybe also that these radically different timescales, inhuman as they seem, are already a hidden part of us?

as much as he references berkeley and hume, his impetus seems to have been a far less academic source... an experience he had walking around town:
I am not speaking of the specific surroundings of my childhood, my own neighborhood, but of its still mysterious borders, which I have possessed in words but little in reality, a zone that is familiar and mythological at the same time . . . I stood looking at that simple scene. I thought, no doubt aloud: "This is the same as it was thirty years ago...." I guessed at the date: a recent time in other countries, but already remote in this changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for him a small, bird size affection; but most probably the only noise in this vertiginous silence was the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The easy thought I am somewhere in the 18oos ceased to be a few careless words and became profoundly real
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this sort of temporal vertigo is definitely familiar to me. i remember one time in particular when i was a kid where i was in an unfamiliar part of town and got really worried that i'd stepped through some kind of wormhole into the past—was desperately looking around for something from the current day. and there are other moments where i'll get it. looking up at the sky through tree leaves, in particular. feels like such a timeless sight, something all my ancestors must've experienced.

seems to me that escaping time is very much a sensate thing rather than a philosophical one. obviously it's flatly inconceivable. but if you think of it in terms of parallels in your own experiences, plus those of others in the past and future, chronology (even if reshuffled) starts to seem like a bad frame. "Oh, but tell me/How do I say?/I woke up/And it's yesterday"
 
V

version

Well-known member
mvuent said:
in the borges essay quoted in the OP he makes a similar comparison: "Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river"—so he thinks it's impossible to get away from, but maybe also that these radically different timescales, inhuman as they seem, are already a hidden part of us?

this sort of temporal vertigo is definitely familiar to me. i remember one time in particular when i was a kid where i was in an unfamiliar part of town and got really worried that i'd stepped through some kind of wormhole into the past—was desperately looking around for something from the current day. and there are other moments where i'll get it. looking up at the sky through tree leaves, in particular. feels like such a timeless sight, something all my ancestors must've experienced.

seems to me that escaping time is very much a sensate thing rather than a philosophical one. obviously it's flatly inconceivable. but if you think of it in terms of parallels in your own experiences, plus those of others in the past and future, chronology (even if reshuffled) starts to seem like a bad frame. "Oh, but tell me/How do I say?/I woke up/And it's yesterday"
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If you were to accept Cartesian dualism, you could use the mind/body split to explain their contrasting experiences of time. The body proceeding linearly while the mind drifts in all directions.

There's a Burroughs lecture where he talks about dreams perhaps being a training program for astral projection into space, and that NASA and co. looking to move the human object with rocketry and condition the space environment should instead be working on how to remove the body, the soul, or whatever essence a human might have, being perfectly capable of surviving in space.

Lyotard said something similar about communications technology:

"... one of the essential objectives of research today is to overcome the obstacle that the body places in the way of the development of communicational technologies... "
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
I asked Chat...

Q: Could time be a way to show a 4D reality to 3D lifeforms?

A: Yes, that's one way to conceptualize it. Time is often considered the fourth dimension in the context of space-time, the fabric of reality as described by Einstein's theory of general relativity. While humans and other 3D lifeforms experience the world primarily in three spatial dimensions (length, width, and height), time adds another dimension to this framework.

From this perspective, time can be seen as a way to perceive and navigate through a 4D reality. It's akin to how a 2D creature living on a flat plane would perceive a 3D object passing through its world. The creature would see slices of the object at different points in time, much like we perceive slices of events unfolding over time.

So, in a sense, time serves as a means for 3D lifeforms to interact with and comprehend the higher-dimensional aspects of reality. It allows us to experience and understand the dynamic nature of the universe, including the passage of events and the evolution of systems over time.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
HMGovt’s Glorious Return! said:
If only! Time is a means to punish 5D life and have us suffer, struggling through treacly time as we yearn for the infinite
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"Hey sweetie, guess what time it is!"
Mrs. HMGovt groans inwardly and looks around to see her husband, wearing his dressing gown and a suggestive smirk, brandishing a jar of Tate & Lyle.
'Treacly Time' seemed to come around earlier every month...
 
O

okzharp

Well-known member
mvuent said:
in the borges essay quoted in the OP he makes a similar comparison: "Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river"—so he thinks it's impossible to get away from, but maybe also that these radically different timescales, inhuman as they seem, are already a hidden part of us?
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you missed the best bit >>>

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
 
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