time consciousness Archives

April 30, 2019

Kenny in sonnet form; Absent Reality

When I defended my PhD dissertation, one of the readers suggested it read like haiku, a very long haiku at nearly 300 pages. So when asked this weekend to do a poetry reading I thought I’d take up the challenge, but rather aim for the sonnet form. Try this:

Absent Reality

Click your wine glass, ring a bell – any sound at all

will resound.

First you anticipate the sound.

You are going to make a sound; it is not sounding yet.

Then there is the sound you’ve made, present,

Seemingly present, but even as you hear the sound

Synapses firing, it takes a nanosecond

And the reverberations – past tense

when your brain registers the vibrations.

Gone.

II.

Everything we call ‘now’ is history —

our personal and communal idea, a measured sequence:

we do indeed measure it.

It rules our days, how we schedule our work flow,

plan vacations, anticipate an encounter with our beloved

or remember last night with said beloved,

or our childhood.

We vaguely, reluctantly acknowledge it’s a story we’ve made up.

It might not have even happened.

We could make something else up.

III.

We could organize our lives according to the speed that our hair grows,

or by the sun, to shift with the seasons

as it generally, in fact, does

and we generally, in fact, do.

We hold these contradictory facts as true at the same time:

every day is twenty-four hours yet days are longer

in summer than in winter in the northern hemisphere,

the opposite in the south.

You might protest, “but this is just a confusion of the term ‘day’, semantics”

To which I reply, “exactly.”

IV.

So what about Kenny?

This two-D animated character created in 3-D – digitally –

Always was just flickering pixels, code,

Never drawn as we think of drawing, never pen to paper

That’s an after-effect,

a look that we call Kenny

who dies in one episode just to live again

next week, no explanation

this quirky little guy discloses contradictory facts we hold

with little difficulty in our four dimensions, fifth dimension:

Life goes on, death is not so final.

Indeed, death might not much matter.

So much for time’s arrow;

it can be dismissed as a cartoon figure.

A black hole, a photograph.

You breathe, I breathe. You go on and on

I go on and on and on.

Kenny, just flickering pixels, goes on and on.

You might protest, “Parker and Stone just made that shit up”

To which I might reply: Exactly.

Try this: Mind the gap in the code

Rene Descartes’ argument known as the cogito (“I think, therefore I am”, 1637) was updated as “the brain in a vat” argument. The gist of Descarte’s argument is that the subject’s knowledge of their existence is certain (phrased famously as “I think therefore I am”) because the “I” couldn’t think unless the “I” exists.

The argument was that personal reflection can lead to certainty, yet the updated argument calls the quality of existence into question. If the subject was merely a brain sustained in a vat and receiving stimulation/information electronically directly as brain stimulation, yes, it exists and knows of its existence. However, subject wouldn’t know that this information was direct knowledge of experience or mere data it’s being fed. The brain suspended in the vat could receive data of, say, a hot stove being touched by the subject’s hand. That data would be interpreted as a direct experience, even if there was no such stove and no such hand. Still, logically there must be a brain.

These experiences are time-based, both the imagined brain and Descartes’ original subject. It would take a very short time, a fraction of a second, for the data to be received. That would be in time; it would take time, so data of the present moment would not be available until it was just-past. That is Edmond Husserl’s brilliant insight. There would be no data of the present moment processed in the present moment.

We do, though, logically and necessarily exist in that present moment, if we are indeed able to anticipate an experience and process an experience: future and past, though just-past.

There’s a hole in our knowledge of our experience, that hole being our direct experience of the moment in which we actually experience it. I refer to it as a hole, which has measurable dimensions, when in fact there are no dimensions to the present moment because they are not empirically known, i.e. observable.

The gapped quality of data is precisely what is captured by digital media. There is information, in the form of code, that relates to pixilated images and, gapped, similar to the way an alphabet relates to the sound of a word. It’s also gapped, similar to our actual existence, though different than our perceived experience. The gap is the logically known but impossible to measure present moment, presence. Lacking a narrative structure, the present is, then, infinite.

My approach here is phenomenological – try to say that quickly – but here is the difficulty: the phenomenological description of the present moment is that of absence; it is past. There is an ‘experience’ in the classical sense of that word that entails consciousness but by the time it is experienced it is just-past because the experience itself is time-based and it takes some time to register that experience in the brain.

It is rather an experience of absence to the present then, without structure, as we’ve described it above. That is what we might be certain about, but certain about what? Without the internal structure of narrative time there is an edge, being anticipation of a future moment and the just-past moment presented to consciousness as “now”. However, as a presence in time it is not actually now by the time it is registered to consciousness. It’s experienced as now but, in fact, is just past. That’s Husserl’s story and I can’t see how it’s not a clear description of our experience.

Here we are: Our being is in the present that is without structure, outside of a narrative, of experienced time consciousness.

Our experience of digital media is similar. It certainly seems seamless enough but code is just that: coded with gaps between each piece of the code, that produces pixels with empty space between each pixel. It can be wondrously manipulated, and manipulates us to experience this as a seamless experience, when in fact it is gapped. Mind the gap.

Without structure, between each pixel, each piece of code, the gap replicates each moment where we may be conscious but, without the structure of the narrative elements of past and future, always also there in the present infinite space.

The abundance of movies about time travel, gapped reality, make-believe universes where games are played out — what is in the present moment comes into being and disappears — suggests we know at some level that digital media is playing with us, playing with our sense of consciousness, as we play.

And our growing sense that we are spiritual (open, infinite) if not religious (embedded in a tradition, and institutions) mirrors this coded reality.

Try This – an introduction

So now it’s become obvious to me: I’m writing a book about time. “Kenny in Infinity” is a chapter, the cartoon character Kenny my muse.

Here’s the introduction:

This began as a study of new media, not so new now, that discloses aspects of experience we might reflect upon with new insights, given what new media discloses about, well, everything.

Try this.

Theoretical physics was born out of new means of perceiving what’s out there, these new means being new media. Both the new physics and new media reinforce what careful introspection illuminates: time, and our being in time, spreads into infinity. Our physical experience discloses narrative time, ‘one damn thing after another’. But words fail us. And between every syllable is silence. Otherwise, it would be one long screech.

Between every note played in music is silence; between every word or at least every sentence, silence; between every symbol in computer code is no-code. The breaks symbolize something other than the code and, while the overall code has a beginning, middle, and end, it is riddled in no-code. In every sentence there are words and with every word phonemes, and between phonemes… We have breath between syllables, and those familiar with meditation are aware of how noisy we are – our hearts beat, when we inhale, exhale, more noise – and everyone and our world suddenly seems noisy when we attempt to be silent.

There are scientific (measurable, replicable, falsifiable) theories, but here is what distinguishes theoretical physics from plain old physics. On the level of experience, apart from theory, time consciousness might be all we have to work with. In any case, that is what I’m working with here.

Our new time consciousness reflects, amplifies and illustrates ancient understandings. For instance, “In the beginning was the Word…” Fundamentalism is an easy mistake to make when you can hold the Word of God in your hands.

People accept the illusion of a text as timeless, associating the Word with a lot of words. I still hope to hear the word of God in the person of Jesus through the medium of print or, better yet, read aloud, though now the printed page is largely usurped by the pixilated computer monitor. We talked about a paperless office in the beginning of the digital era while creating the cloud of text and images.

Today I even participated in the Daily Office online. These selections of prayers and scripture passages for the morning, noon and evening prayer, a practice going back to Constantine and monastic life in the third century, are recited aloud in communities, and flicker on my laptop as I pray with an online community, though there’s no one else in this room.

Walter Ong, Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan all identified the relationship between language technologies and meanings. Overstating it perhaps, McLuhan’s point that “the medium is the message” became a touchstone and then a cliché, but the point is still well taken. There is a trace of the oral in the written text, a trace of the written word on the printed page, and in the pixelated images on my computer screen. Yet, each medium is distinct and is both a vehicle and the road the vehicle travels upon when it comes to a new consciousness of what is real.

That’s life. When sacred or even mundane symbols are pressed onto clay tablets, the clay itself contains remnants of living organisms. Ephemeral words and the eternal Word are only adjacent. To identify the medium with the message might be straight out idolatry because these means of expression are human. What is other than human, absolute silence, is divine.

But I have focused too much on the otherness of text and word associated with the Word. It is incarnate. It is other than other; it is also this.

Try this.

I close my laptop and put my phone out of reach.

Time Consciousness

Time consciousness is gapped. There is no consciousness of the gap, only of the flow. In the case of media and stories, even the story of how we spent the last hour or millennium, and how we’re going to spend the next, there are gaps. We can’t be conscious of the present because as soon as we call it to consciousness, it is past. That’s the gap, the present, in which we of course live but can’t bring to consciousness. We can only be present to it, enjoy it, or not.

Between every note played in music is silence, and between every symbol in computer code is no-code. The breaks symbolize something other than the code, and while the overall code has a beginning, middle, and end, it is riddled in no-code. In every sentence there are words and with every word phonemes, and between phonemes… gaps.

Digitize this…

Yesterday I was trying to explain this to some students. They work with digital media. They create it. So I thought they’d get it if I could just get it out. It didn’t go well.

Here, let me try again here. Let me start by defining time consciousness. It’s different than time. It’s our consciousness of time, how we experience it, that is not as absolute time (whatever that is) but as a human being in time experiences time.

Digital media makes the structure of time consciousness clear.

The structure of time consciousness, as the German philosopher Edmund Husserl pointed out over a century ago, (and taught Heidegger but that’s another story) goes something like this.:

Think about a bell ringing. You might anticipate the bell ringing, then someone rings the bell but you hear its reverberation and process it in your mind at least a nanosecond after it actually rings, and then you enjoy the reverberations.

So the structure of time consciousness is:

the anticipated future which doesn’t exist yet, just as the past and the specious present don’t exist anymore.
the “specious present”, specious because in the moment it takes to register the present sound in consciousness it’s already past, and
the remembered just-past….

We exist, we know (rehash Rene Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am”) because, if I wasn’t in existence I couldn’t be thinking. But there’s no ‘now’ to this conscious existence. Like the sound, there is anticipation,. Then there’s the sensation or thought that occurs, but as we sense it and think it and it is registered in consciousness it’s just-past. Then there’s recollection. It has a narrative structure: a beginning, middle, and end, but this is constructed around a present that we can’t actually bring to consciousness.

There may even be the thought of the ‘now’ but, like sound, we anticipate it, we think about it in time and that is a process, thus taking time and in time, time passes. There’s no now in this that is actually present. It’s already past, a reflection on what we refer to as now, that has already past. It exists as an idea we had, we might still hold, but the experience itself of the thought is past as soon as we think it.

What is actually present doesn’t share this narrative structure. It just is. That’s where we live, or so we assume. That’s where we have the experience, but we can’t think about that without it already being past.

The time that we are conscious of, that’s all just what is remembered or anticipated. There’s no ‘now’ now because in the thinking about it it’s already past.

Yet we live here; we just can’t experience it consciously or think about it in the now of narrative structures because we exist as bodies. Bodies (us) do have a narrative structure. We are born, we do exist now, and we live on until we die. We can make wild imaginative variations on that structure. But it’s gapped. We are conscious of the structure but the ‘now’ that is the epicenter of the structure is like a black hole only more so (really less so – there’s not even dark matter there.) The gap is the present, but as soon as it’s brought to mind it’s not ‘now’ now.

Digital media takes us back to this ancient truth. There’s ‘now’ now that is the imagined narrative that the media presents, but it is riddled with gaps in the code. Between the x and the o in our digital reality nothing exists, except we exist.

Without a beginning and middle and end in itself, this gap in the code has infinite breadth and width and depth, insofar as it doesn’t share the narrative structure.

We might picture it as a gap but the gap has external dimensions. The very idea of a gap is my lame way of bringing what is infinite into the narrative of this expression, this text, that also has a beginning, middle and end. (I’m almost done here.)

So my students create code. They make out of this infinite-lived space an image, a game, a storyline. They give it worldly dimensions. A narrative. But they just make this stuff up, out of nothing. Really. Infinite nothing.

Kenny’s consciousness – like Jesus only not

Try this: Think about your own future: What’s the chances of that actually happening? We might not be responsible for what actually happens in the future, but certainly what we think might happen is all in our imagination, therefore partly in our control. Yes, possibly it’s informed by logic, careful planning, or maybe it’s just a leap of faith but we have to will it (in time) and leap (in time). And by the time we will and leap, that action is past.

Similarly, and more obviously, the past, rooted in actual historical occurrences, is brought back to consciousness through memory, a construction, our own construction of what happened, and we forget a lot. (This proves particularly annoying to Kenny – that his friends don’t seem to remember that he died, again and again and again…) Kenny remembers, and we can check his memory (if a cartoon character can have a memory) by scrolling back through past episodes, but even then…

I’m being ridiculous here – you remember. But you might also forget, like Kyle… Or you misremember. In any case, memory is a process of re-creating the past from traces.

So this crazy animation represents a point I am belaboring. Just to get to the present moment…

Which is already past….

It’s way past by the time I cut and paste this text into the blog, but it was already past by the time I thought of it, even before I wrote anything, even in the present moment by the time I thought of it as present, or as a moment.

And not just because I’m slow. If you were thinking about your own past, present and future… well, think about it. There it goes, you just thought about it in the present moment, and it’s past now. By the time the present is brought to conscious awareness it’s over. That’s my point, and I’m sorry if I’m belaboring the obvious.

I just love Kenny.

When Kyle objects that maybe it’s not so bad that Kenny can’t die, that maybe it’s a good thing, Kenny loses his temper. The point isn’t about being dead; it’s that dying hurts. “It fucking hurts,” Kenny shouts and pulls out a gun. “See? Try to remember this time,” he shouts at his friends and then shoots himself.

Here’s where Kenny really isn’t a Christ figure: “Accepted death on the cross” is a phrase used in creeds, that can be misleading. Jesus didn’t embrace the cross; he was nailed to it. Jesus didn’t kill himself; he was murdered. And once was enough, and it wasn’t suicide; it was murder. It’s a lot different.

But there are some similarities to Kenny’s reality is all I’m saying… that the present moment may not have any structure in consciousness. It certainly doesn’t have a narrative structure: past, present and future. So, like Kenny, we live in infinity even if we die. Even if we’re born again (like Kenny) or rise from the dead (like Jesus.)

We live in infinity, this unstructured timeless present/presence, unlike Kenny. He’s just a comic character, but he makes this much clear which is only one reason why I love him.

[Check out this tribute video:

Kenny as Mysterion – https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-adk-adk_sbnt&hsimp=yhs-adk_sbnt&hspart=adk&p=kenny+as+mysterion#action=view&id=10&vid=d40574aa318156c9a4132847f2d9f1bb

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-adk-adk_sbnt&hsimp=yhs-adk_sbnt&hspart=adk&p=kenny+as+mysterion#action=view&id=10&vid=d40574aa318156c9a4132847f2d9f1bb

Tag: time consciousness

Kenny in sonnet form; Absent Reality

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Try this: Mind the gap in the code

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Try This – an introduction

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Time Consciousness

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Digitize this…

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Kenny’s consciousness – like Jesus only not

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