The Complex Time of Life Itself

We left off yesterday with presence, about which Schuon says

The saving manifestation of the Absolute is either Truth or Presence, but it is not one or the other in an exclusive fashion, for as Truth It comprises Presence, and as Presence It comprises Truth. 

Such is the twofold nature of all theophanies; thus Christ is essentially a manifestation of Divine Presence, but he is thereby also Truth: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one enters into the saving proximity of the Absolute except through a manifestation of the Absolute, be it a priori Presence or Truth.

The Presence of Truth is the Truth of Presence? 

Reminds me of taking attendance back in school. I always said "present," even though I wasn't, or "here," even though I was someplace else. Or perhaps I was present, and school was a vast conspiracy to pull me out of it.  

Where did I go? How does existence become diffused, blunted, diluted, etc., and what are we going to do about it?

Time dilation. Problem is, 

"the present" has no duration at all; yet all events must occur in some present (or "now"), and it is only through the present that future events can be related to those of the past. Accordingly, we conclude that all events must be made up of successive "nows," none of which has any duration, and the question arises, how can events which take time be made up of "presents" or "nows" which do not (Harris)?

I suppose it's like Zeno's paradox, only applied to time. But just what is the relationship between one moment -- whatever that is -- and the next? 

There's also the problem of objective and subjective time, for it seems that the moment only exists in our heads. It's as if our heads go around taking photos of what is never static in reality. 

I wonder what Schuon says?  

Concrete time is the changing of phenomena; abstract time is the duration which this change renders measurable.

A ha. So concrete time is a side effect of change, and change is whatnow? For a Thomist it is the passing from potency to act. In the penultimate analysis, time is the time it takes for creation to return to God:

The complete perfection of the universe demands that there should be created natures which return to God.

Elsewhere I have suggested that in the ultimate analysis time is a side effect of a trinitarian metaphysic: the "timeless time" it takes for the Father to engender the Son, which, of course, takes place in eternity, but let's be reasonable. 

Moreover,

a world composed of both permanent and transitory beings is better than one in which there are only incorruptible beings (ibid.).

Really? Thomas doubles down:

a world in which there were only spiritual beings would not be better but less perfect. 

So, it's a full-employment cosmos, consisting of material beings, spiritual beings (angels) and everything in between: a spooktrum. And

All movement [i.e., change] is derived from something unmoved. 

Therefore, it seems that the mystery abides in a complementarity between Big Change -- i.e., Creation -- and Big Changeless -- Creator. The rest is up to us:

The perfection of the whole of corporeal nature depends in a certain sense on the perfection of man.

Big Responsibility! And it seems an impossible one absent the Incarnation that closes the loop -- or mends the breach -- caused by man in his fallen state.

The Divine Wisdom joins the last of the higher kind with the first of the lower kind. 

And

the intellectual soul is said to be like the horizon or boundary line between corporeal and incorporeal substance (Thomas). 

So, God is always just over the subjective horizon, Truth as such being "the last end of the whole universe." I suppose we could say that Being is at one end, nothingness at the other (even though, strictly speaking, nothingness cannot exist in any positive sense, although the left never stops trying).

Recall what Robert Rosen said yesterday:

Any question becomes unanswerable if we do not permit ourselves a universe large enough to deal with the question.

So, in order to deal with the question of time, we need a bigger universe -- one that doesn't exclude Big Eternity, AKA God.

If we're on the right track, then there is no time in the absence of eternity, these two being Metacosmic Complementarities. 

Absolute is to space as Infinitude is to time, which is to say, point and moment, respectively. Thus 

The fundamental contradiction of scientism is to want to explain the real without the help of that first science which is metaphysics, hence not to know that only the science of the Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the science of the relative; and not to know at the same stroke that the science of the relative, when it is deprived of this help, can only lead to suicide, beginning with that of the intelligence, then with that of the human, and in the end, with that of humanity (Schuon).

God-Man being another complementarity. Not an ontological one, but certainly an existential one, for to say man is to say God. Otherwise, to say man is to say animal -- which is to say matter organized in a peculiar and statistically unlikely manner. Which is infracosmic stupidity, i.e.,  

the inability to discern the essential from the accidental: it consists in attaching oneself to mere facts and in considering them simply in themselves, that is, without the least induction. 

Back to Rosen, who I was reading yesterday, both his Life Itself and Essays thereon. In fact, I consulted a third book, Anticipatory Systems, although I'm not about to shell out $130 on a book, especially one that is only 10% comprehensible to the likes of me. But guess what? I looked at the preview, and in the preface written by his daughter, she says

Do not be intimidated by the mathematical notation in this book! The mathematics represent additional illustration of ideas already described in prose. It was his form of "bullet proofing."

 So it's accessible after all. She also says that

Perhaps time is not quite as linear as we have always presumed it to be. My father's view, in fact, was that "Time is complex."

Complex, like how? Not sure, since the preview ended before I could find out. But there's this: 

Living organisms have the equivalent of one "foot" in the past, the other in the future, and the whole system hovers, moment by moment, in the present -- always on the move, through time. The truth is that the future represents as powerful a causal force on current behavior as the past does, for all living things.

Now, teleology is a naughty word in biology, but it seems that one of Rosen's purposes was to resurrect it and render it respectable with pages and pages of bullet-proof equations. Which are also Bob-proof, but apparently this doesn't matter so long as Bob knows how to read.

Among other things, teleology is "future causation," which we experience as anticipation. Lower organisms are always characterized by anticipation, except they aren't self-consciously aware of it. 

For example, earlier this year I remember watching a hummingbird assemble a nest piece by piece. She was anticipating a couple of tiny eggs, but of course, she didn't know that, the birdbrain. But I did. 

And again, all organisms are anticipatory systems, which is what distinguishes them from non-living systems, no matter how complex. Which means that the time dimension -- including the future -- is central to biology. 

But how? I addressed this in the Book, but I think I have a better grasp of it today than I did back then. Rosen, proposes the radical idea that (I'm paraphrasing) physics should not be our paradigmatic science, and that it especially reveals its deficiencies when attempting to deal with organisms, which it cannot do without stripping them of what makes them organisms, precisely: Life Itself is reduced to the nonliving.

Best physics can do is regard organisms as linear machines, but the model is not the thing modeled. Suffice it to say that organisms are too complex to be modeled. He then makes the equally radical claim that complexity is the rule, not the exception. Conversely, physics proceeds as if "every material system is a simple system," but for Rosen, biology is more general than physics. 

Problem solved. But as alluded to yesterday, he doesn't take the argument all the way to the end -- or top, rather -- where we see an internally related Trinity that, in my opinion, is the nonlocal archetype for all living things -- for Life Itself.

I think we're done for today, or at least this is a good place to hit the pause button.