Temporal Holofractality

Seems like every once in awhile we delve into the subject of Time. I don't know if we make any progress when we do, since I don't exactly remember what was said before. It's hard not to speculate, since it's such a slippery concept, much like its slithery cousin, consciousness. 

In fact, Augustine speculated that it is  

only within our own minds that we perceive the presence of time. Rather than being an external, observable phenomenon, time exists within our own consciousness.... Our consciousness is a powerful tool because it is able to differentiate between what has happened, is happening and will happen.... 

Augustine writes: “If nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time.” Time moves constantly from past to future, and we know this because of the physical changes we constantly observe (Ashcroft).

Well, thanks! I guess. 

But can't we do better than this? We have a word for the "future," but what exactly is it, and how? Likewise the past. And let's not even talk about the present, because how long is that without being the past or future? By time you even say "time," it's already past: "an interval with no duration" (Augustine). So, does this mean life itself is an interval with no duration between two slabs of eternity? 

Aristotle once referred to the present as “a knife edge without thickness" whose only function is to connect past and future. This inability to be able to point at a moment in time and say that this "now" is the present: this is an irresolvable problem for the human mind (Ashcroft).

Oh? Turns out a unit of time is exactly 10⁻⁴³ seconds (AKA Planck time). However long your "moment of time," it is constituted of these temporal bits, much like how a CD or your TV screen only sound and look continuous.

Well, thanks! I guess.

Hold it a darn second -- or 10⁻⁴³ seconds -- because in the case of those technologies, the bits are organized from the top down, not the bottom up. In other words, the point (or meaning) is the song or the movie, both of which are composed of smaller units, and you can't hear the song by examining one of the digital bits. 

That is to say, the meaning is anterior to the organization, and what is the relationship between what we call meaning and the units of which it is composed? A voice in my head is telling me that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax. 

Now I don't pay attention to every voice in my head, but when it's Robert Rosen on the line, I take the call. But he won't mind my putting him on hold for a moment, since he no longer exists in time anyway.

Back to the CD analogy: it is limited, since you can't hear the whole song by listening to one of the digital bits, but you can the hear the whole composition of the human body by listening to a unit of DNA, so to speak. 

In other words, here the part indeed contains information about the whole, and in what kind of universe is this even possible? In other words, it seems that the existence of DNA presumes a cosmos with part-whole relations. 

But again, does this holofractal property extend to time? 

Well, just off the top of my head it seems to, because many developmental processes are encoded into DNA, thus requiring time in order to explicate themselves, and what's up with that? 

This discussion is starting to careen above my paygrade or at least outside my lane, so we better consult an expert. 

Bob, what is your lane anyway? I don't see a lane, rather, a lot of off-road -- let's be polite and call it temporizing. But it still sounds like bullshit to me.   

Maybe. Augustine's road ultimately led to nowhere but paradox -- the bizarre kind: he emphasized

how difficult it is for humans to explain out loud what time really is. And in general Augustine is happy to leave things that way. He never puts forward a definitive definition of time, preferring to highlight the many issues that arise from our consciousness of time.  

In the end, Augustine doesn’t provide us with a good answer as to what time really "is." Instead he highlights the bizarre nature of time, which doesn’t seem to exist at all, and yet is nonetheless still deeply significant to human beings (Ashcroft).

Well, thanks! I guess. Then again, he does allude to the Whole, which is to say, 

God’s eternity, in which “nothing is transient, but the whole is present.” In eternity, there is no such thing as transition from past to present to future. Eternity is simply one whole present moment (ibid.).

Good for God. But I say we can do better. Let's ask another expert:

Time is but a spiroidal movement around a motionless Center (Schuon).

He sounds pretty sure of himself, and he's not wrong, but....

The moving image of eternity. 

Yes, Petey, that's another way of putting it. But what we're asking is whether, or to what extent, everything is somehow present in anything. A voice in my head says YES, but some details would be nice. Let's begin with a passage from an obscure book by an obscure philosopher, Atheism and Theism:

the totality, as a developed outcome of the process, reveals itself equally as the beginning and source of everything that was involved in the process of its own development. That process can occur only if the totality is already in some sense actual, and the whole can be actualized only in and through the process. 

Thus we speak of a whole which is at once eternally realized and continually realizing itself by means of a process throughout which it is immanent (Harris, emphasis mine).

Yes, we are off-road, but I do believe we're getting somewhere -- a bit closer to the damn key to the world enigma.

Semantics is prior to syntax!

I haven't forgotten about you, Professor Rosen, we just ran out of time. Please call back tomorrow morning and we'll talk about it. Wait, now Polanyi is on the line, and I can't take two calls at the same time...