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Picture: R.C. de Winter, The Carousel Of Time, 2009
The last few posts have been pretty specific - time to get more speculative again. The Silmarillion posts got us thinking about time - in particular its relationships to representation and ontology. One thing that book did so well was capture the move across time, level of reality, and narrative mode at the same time [click for the post]. And thinking about time makes us aware just how much the fallen world interfere with our understanding it. Breezy tales about uncomplicated time travel, memory holing facts for fake Histories!, and fostering infantile state of perpetual year zero all distort our relationship with time. So time is obviously important to the servants of the lie, and that means it would be wise to pay attention to it. Because that also means it will have been inverted in the authorized narratives for a lot longer than we've been around around to consider them.
Jim Warren Studios, From Hell to Eternity
It won't be surprising to observe that the globalist beast system has distorted our relationship to time in the same way that it has other fundamental aspects of the reality we live in.
Two big reasons to look at what we can know about time and how we can know it jumped out right away. Also not surprisingly both related to the larger pattern of satanic inversion. The first involves the split between the modern auto-idolatry of secular transcendence and the realities of what we can know and how we can know it.
Ian Barber, Timeless, photograph
The luciferian philosophy of be your own god do what thou wilt is based on denying Logos or existential truth, which has to pretend that the logical necessities of ontology aren't necessary. Fortune-cookie level fake "profundities" like 'time is a flat circle' keep you trapped in base materiality, unaware and unable to figuratively look up and consider Logos. It's a mind trap - horizontal hamster wheel would be wordier, but more accurate.
The second is that a big part of Postmodern Thought! depends on misunderstanding misrepresentations of time. The interpretation of "Relativity" is a good example. The mathematical model tells us that time moves relative to things like speed. Observing that time appears interconnected with other material conditions of reality is the opposite of "meaninglessness". It is based on mathematical order - just not the one we perceive directly. If anything, it tells us that our sensory impressions fall short of abstract precision. Readers understand that there is no conflict - both are "true" in their appropriate ontological frame of reference.
violscraper, Time and Tide
But idiot Postmodernists take this as "proof" that ontology is subjective. Seriously. The chain of thought is literally that retarded.
So there is value in thinking through why the physical relativity of time has abstract-level mathematically absolute zero ontological relevance at all. But framing the question "What is time?" raised an even more fundamental issue for the reality-secular transcendence split. What do we mean when we ask what something is? Call it the Clinton question. Are we asking for a description - what it looks like or how it acts - or are we seeking more fundamental meaning on an ontological level?
Victo Ngai, Pocket Watch
This isn't dorm room philosophizing. The answer will determine how we allow ourselves to see reality.
Often when we ask what something is, we are looking for an identifying description or definition and/or an explanation of purpose or construction. This is generally the case when talking about
human creations.
What is a warehouse? can be answered different ways depending on context, but will be some blend of appearance, construction, and function.
But is gets more complicated with fundamental questions about the reality around us. When we ask questions like what is time - or being, reality, the universe, the meaning of any of it - we are looking for some kind of first or prior principle.
And that moves us into ontology.
Start with an observation: looking for the true or essential nature of something involves reducibility. Because it is taking complex individuated manifestations - things in the world - and reducing the complexity to more universal explanatory principles. This also makes sense from the perspective of the vertical ontology that the Band has been tracing out.
Defining what something is ontologically reduces complex material expressions to simpler abstract ones. But it is also a step "higher" towards truth. Quotes because height is a metaphor. Spatial relations don't apply above the material.
As we move towards truth things simplify by necessity - they have to to get to the absolute unity of ultimate reality. This is the technical term for the inconceivable- in-itself bedrock foundation of all that can be. God in Western thought.
Abstractions are multiple, but but simpler and clearer than the temporal reality that they express.
Like mathematics.
Or angels.
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| Gustave Doré, engraving for Dante's Paradiso |
Essential meaning - what something is in an ontological sense - involves reducibility because it moves up the ontological ladder towards the transcendent unity of God. Seems self-evident. But it's something of a problem for Flatland
That's our term for the demoralized incoherence of modern secular transcendence. That collective post-Enlightenment delusion that metaphysical things have material causes.
Flatlanders want to understand the reality around them as well, only they can't look up. They have no Logos - vertical in this case, or any other kind - so they have no path to first principles.
Flatlanders can't do this. Everything has to be constrained within the de-moralized material level of reality.
This is what leads them to the real whoppers of secular transcendence -
like teleological materialist history and the presence of eternity within the temporal.
The idiocy of secular transcendence should have been instantly obvious - a subset can't create it's set nor a child its parent. But vanity and greed are powerful, and the modern commitment to Flatland so strong that reason doesn't matter to many.
They're broken and they can't look up.
Insisting that transcendent meanings are found in secular material reality stops Flatlanders from answering ontological questions. If they want to be intellectually coherent, they can't even acknowledge an ontological prior exists. So when you look at "meaning" in a modern secular context, all you really get is endless description. This is important because it is a fundamental fake principle of secular transcendent Thought! that description pass for ontological meaning.
Consider this really basic question for the sake of discussion - what is reality? Or a little more practically, where does reality come from or what is matter made of? Then think how unable a materialist, de-moralized modern perspective is to even address this. It can't get past description because it is material-level knowledge, and the material world is known empirically. That is, observationally. That is, description. Other forms of knowledge necessarily rise to the forbidden heights of ontology.
Start at the beginning - with the act of asking the question. Just putting "what is matter" into words is transforming what you are personally curious about into a standardized symbolic form. That is, description.
The Panel of Hands, El Castillo Cave, Spain, about 40,600 years old
As far as we know, written language evolved from visual symbols and pictograms. It's obvious - if you had to cooperate with someone who didn't speak your language, you'd start by figuring out ways to communicate. Common terms for things and so forth.
We only have to emphasize this because a huge part of Postmodernism was the collective delusion that words don't refer to things.
Postmodern linguistics were founded on the premise that language signifies or communicated negatively, not positively. The Structuralist "epiphany" that a word isn't meaningful because it designates something, it is meaningful because it is different from every other element in the linguistic system, Because it isn't every other word.
It's really that retarded and we don't want to get into it again. Click for an older post breaking this down in a characteristically harsh way. If you want a Philosopher's Name, it is most associated with a fraud from those early posts - Saussure.
Retarded enough that we don't even have to appeal to history for it to vaporize. Just consider how new words are added to a system based on relational differences... Poof.
This is why language is always imprecise. On the personal level - everyone who read "language" conceptualized it slightly differently. And on the cultural level, in that different languages express different attitudes and mindsets. They developed down in different material contexts with different relationships to reality.
Why the notion of subjective linguistic filtering somehow became radical is one of the great mysteries of the 20th century. Right up there with "literary criticism" deciding language doesn't denote things. Think how you try and overcome the limitations of language in real life - more nuance, analogies, rhetoric. Better description. It is so self-evident that language is denotative that the acceptance of the inverse in authorized culture is just more evidence that the institutions are unfit for purpose.
Language isn't limited because it is founded on some faux-mystical abyss of "difference". It is limited because it isn't what it represents.
This is where the imprecision comes from. It's inherent is symbolism of any kind. No matter how much description you pile up, a sign system ever becomes the same thing as the thing described. You can get endlessly closer without ever attaining a perfect replica of the experience. Because it is a material phenomenon and the material world is finite and fallen - a darkling glass. There is no perfection down here. Flatland is material only - a horizontal hamster wheel instead of a ladder to anywhere.
If you're trapped in the material all you have are material accounts of material things. And that's just dealing with the language.
This isn't "Postmodern", "radical", or "discourse". It's communication. It works because there is enough common ground and flexibility that the differences don't preclude sufficient information transfer. But it isn't "perfect" either.
You can see the limits inherent is sign systems.
Simply posing the question has brought at least two layers of descriptive subjectivity your thought into language and language itself - into the equation before we've even started to form an answer.
Now we have to address the question. Set aside the limits of signs systems and subjectivity for now. How does a Flatlander address the question what is material reality? By continually describing matter and energy.We can dramatize it - call it the dialog of secular transcendence.
Endlessly reframing, parsing, and describing and getting no closer to what it is. Just ever more precise detail until slamming into limits of discernment with no logically-necessary endpoint. Like Zeno's paradox.
It's a lot less paradoxical when you realize division doesn't stack subtractions the way multiplication does additions.
Modelling something - qualitatively or quantitatively - requires a better understanding of it's workings - a better description - than a surface scan. It is an interative process of finding quantifiable patterns and relationships within datasets that are themselves symbolic translations of material phenomena. When done well, it can predict outcomes and identify solutions and efficiencies. But it isn't is the same as grasping it ontologically. But when you don't have ontology, describing is all you can do.
This is not a rejection of modeling as a concept. Modeling is important as a material process for material outcomes. We just can't get to essences or ontological priors - let alone origins - by trying to build models of fallen, entropic empirical things.
This can be a confusing distinction because modeling also involves reducibility. The reduction is that the model is less complex than the reality that it represents. It's semantic, not ontological. Descriptive, not determinative.
Flat and secular transcendent rather than vertical and logos-facing.
But this is Flatland, and in Flatland, semantic, descriptive secular transcendence is all there is.
Hence the bizarre modern idea that being able to describe pre-existing material phenomena in a symbolic language somehow connotes ontological Truth. It's incoherent when you think it through - that people don't is a sign of how distorting Flatland has become. It's more comfortable to simply accept things that literally make no sense rather that roil the placid waters of delusion. Because it's the delusion that brings the stuff, and, if you're really lucky, the prestige...
François Le Moyne, Narcissus Falling in Love with his Reflection, 1720. oil on canvas, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
We know that the material world is finite and fallen, and we are temporal and subjective. It's why there is no ontological certainty here. But the Flatlanders need to limit everything to the material and pretend to deal with properly metaphysical subjects. It is no surprise to us that their fake material absolutes fail over and over - we know that positing material absolutes is terminally inane. But is it existentially traumatic for them.
Consider a less simple question than what reality is. Like relativity - one of the central planks of the modern, de-moralized world view. Both in physics and as the more broad attitude towards culture and morality of Postmodern globalism where everything is relative.
According to the recursive echo chamber of the NPCs, this was cause for a "crisis of confidence" that "upended man's place in the universe" and similar b.s.
It didn't really. Like deconstruction - it blew up auto-idolaters' simplistic fake schema by showing that they fail as descriptions.
We are not interested in disputes over authorship or Einstein's perverse personal life, nor the specific strengths and weaknesses of the theory. The information is so intrumentally mediated, so far removed from experiential reality, so unverifiable, that it resembles a game of abstract pattern-matching more than anything else.
It even features an observatory named "Keck". So there's that.
What matters here is that the theory describes and predicts certain things better than the models that it replaced. But it "explains" nothing essential. Nothing about the prior existents of which material reality is necessarily a subset. It is a descriptive translation of observed reality into a quantitative metaphor that describes the material world more or less well. It simplifies in that reduces the complexity of the subject to imperfectly-fitting equations with no bearing on what the subject is or where it came from. It may be accurate, but it is ontologically irrelevant.
Translating and describing is all you can do in the material world. And that is never coherent.
Euclidean geometry, Cartesian space, and Newtonian physics do a fine job of describing material reality on the personal level. Relativity and quantum mechanics do better jobs near the limits of discernment - accounting for things that we don't experience directly, but know through instruments and mathematical logic.
As we leave the world of direct experience and move towards the limits of discernment, the models of reality become more complex, counter-intuitive, and bizarre, before disappearing from view. None of them are compatible. And this is only surprising because of the power of the glamour - the mental indoctrination into the fake thought-prison of secular transcendence - to teach nonsense is truth.
John Martin, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1829, wash on paper. private collection
Readers know material reality is knowable empirically up close and gets murky as you move further out. As should Christians - if they haven't followed Churchian frauds away from God to worldly things. In the finite/fallen world, the limits of discernment are just the darkling glass and valley of shadow in a different allegorical language.
The larger issue is that Christians need to take their own metaphysics more seriously and stop dancing for globalism. It's satanic. Relativity and quantum mechanics are only "destabilizing", and nihilism producing if you are a Flatland moron that can't look up.
Of course mathematical models become incoherent and unreconcilable - they have an abstract perfection that ontologically exceeds the conditions of material reality. They represent too high a standard, figuratively thinking, for fallen material reality and human intellects.
This means that the incoherences and discrepancies in the models are not limitations in the math, but artifacts of the fundamental nature of material reality and our place in it.
There is no reworking of the calculations that is going to bring us to the essence of the calculation - just endless refinement of the necessary gap between the models and material reality.
Think about that for a moment - we can't Flatland our way to the essence, origins, or meaning of the material reality around us. All we can do is calculate ways that that material reality fails to conform to abstract quantification. How the fallen, finite world we exist in falls short of the literally metaphysical perfection of mathematical relationships. In other words:
Read that again, because it sort of short-circuited us for a bit.
Of course there is no path to origins or ontological priors of any kind in the secular transcendence of Flatland. Think about it - using mathematical nomenclature to imperfectly model this valley of shadow in the hope of stumbling onto first principles is no more plausible than trying to determine someone's parentage by digitizing a cartoon avatar.
None of this is a swipe at the complexity of the math. The question is, does the intricacy of the the numerology matter when the operating assumptions are this conceptually askew?
If you want to know what something is, you have to be able to look up.
It's metaphysics.
This is relevant to the issue of time because time is one of those fundamental issues like the nature of matter or the origin of the universe. So speculation about what time is are either ontological or descriptive - either they look up for essential meaning or spin round and round empirically in Flatland. There are no other options.
Micha Arkhipoff, On the Shores of Time Lost, oil
Most definitions are descriptive - time as a sort of sequential movement, causality, events, or perceptions. We're struck within it, so we map and describe the condition of being subject to time - temporality or time-boundedness.
mariana-a, She saw the time passing by (new), drawing
Because we can't look outside of time, there is noting concrete to relate or contrast it to.
We can't really conceive of the eternal or the timeless - we can use words to describe the opposite of what we perceive time to be, but have no path beyond that.
The Band has no idea what time is in an ontological sense. Looking at it from the outside, it is obvious that we have to account for it on at least two levels. Time as a physical condition of the material world and time as a subjective experience.
This is an old distinction in Western thought. We can see the basic distinction in the writings of St. Augustine - click for the argument we're summarizing here.
Steve K, Let There Be Light, 2013.
Time exists objectively because it came into existence when God created the universe ex nihilo and precedes humanity temporally.
Titian, Allegory of Prudence, 1565–1570, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
But time is understood by human consciousness subjectively. Augustine describes three states - the present, the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future. Think of them as past, present, and future as they appear in the present moment.
This complicated painting combines the traditional three ages of man with this notion of time as past, present, and future. This theme may be symbolized by the animal heads and is clear in the inscription, "from the experience of the past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future actions". Memory, present, anticipation. Just as Augustine wrote.
Both appear to be sequential, but are not the same. We are not that interested in the subjectivities of individual time consciousness. You can read Proust for that - and become very aware of your own dwindling time on this earth while doing so. It is enough to observe that we don't perceive time consistently. Not as individuals and not compared to each other. Like all our perceptions, it's a reminder of the subjective filter that covers everything we do.
Physical time is more pertinent here because that is the aspect of material reality that we are trying to make sense of. The it in the sentence 'we all perceive it differently'. And as is the case with material reality in general, what it is isn't precisely clear.
Brigit Byron Coons, Timeless, 2009
There is a difference between how how time appears to act in our direct experience and under more unattainable or theoretical conditions. Relativity and quantum theory tell us that time is not independent of the other aspects of material reality, but part of it. Extreme speeds and gravitational forces appear to influence the rate at which time passes. Time-translation symmetry appears to break under specific conditions.
Just like reality in general, we are running into limits of discernment as we try and push deeper into the nature of time.
Consider - in everyday life, time flows along, constant, and unidirectional. Easily measured by inexpensive devices. But the further we stretch our perceptions with more sophisticated instrumentation and even more complex theoretical models, the more it deviates from direct experience. The deeper we probe, the less intuitive and clear time is. This is the same pattern we noticed in the allegory and entropy posts - as we look further, the picture gets more confusing and impossible to resolve.
We recognize this now as a limit of discernment.
Kevin Best, Vanitas, still-life photograph,
None of this is radical from a Western Christian perspective unless you've sold your faith for fancies. Why wouldn't time and material reality be interrelated - they were created at the same time. To say that Creation is temporal is to say temporality is of Creation - it is the condition of the material world.
On this, relativity and Augustine would agree.
But relativity is Postmodern, the fearful squeak. It's immoral. Of course it is. It's a description - imperfect, but accurate enough in some ways - of a fallen, immoral material world in an abstract mathematical language that it can't hope to conform to. This is only cause for fear if you believed abstract certainty can be found down here. Think of relativity as an allegory and it looks like that familiar lack of objective certainty of the darkling glass and the valley of shadow. What we are seeing - once again - is that empirical reality does not conform to the unworldly precision of mathematical modeling. If we want ontological priors, these are the wrong tools in the wrong place.
Even the more radical theories of non-linear time are largely ontologically irrelevant. Suppose there is some Looking Glass technology that let us glimpse the future. So what? Think it through the simulation analogies that are popular with the brights these days. Imagine creation as a video game or virtual life.
Does getting to see three screens ahead somehow undo the temporal sequencing of the game design?
Simulation theory does raise interesting patterns that are worth considering. On one hand it's just the latest in a long string of projections, where people use the most complex technology of the day for as an analogy for metaphysics.
God as Architect/Builder/Geometer/Craftsman, Frontispiece of Bible Moralisee, 1220-1230, illumination on parchment, Austrian National Library
In the Middle Ages, God was presented as an architectural designer, since geometry and architecture were the most advanced example of creation.
Clocks: a watch-maker seated at his workbench with a long-case and a bracket clock behind him, diagrams of movements above his head, 1748, engraving, Wellcome Library
In the Enlightenment, the fine craftsmanship of a timepiece was the pinnicle of design, so God was the divine watchmaker.
Now it's advanced computing and AI - any surprise that brights have suddenly decided that God is now a programmer?
The pattern is simple - humans can perceive the constructed nature of creation, but ultimate reality is by necessity beyond them. So they project the most advanced engineering that they can think of and describe it as a better version of that. It isn't wrong metaphorically, though God is no more likely to resemble a programmer than a medieval stonemason. If thinking in terms of simulation helps break people from the materialist straitjacket, then there is some value there.
But look past the surface pattern of projection to the notion of creation being projected. The medieval builder is an active and willful designer - like the constant presence of God in medieval culture. The watch is an impersonal perpetual motion machine - mechanistic, cold, and woefully conceptually inadequate for the complexities of empirical reality. Like the Enlightenment. A simulation is somewhere in the middle - something that seems to run on its own like a watch, but where the designer can interfere like the builder. It's a narrative. And seeing that helps understand time in an ontological way.
To be coherent, a narrative has to have some sense of internal time - the alternative is cynical Modernist gibberish like the "cyclical" Finnigans Wake.
This is how the book opens. The end continues into this opening to create a closed loop. The book literally goes nowhere.
And it's always worth a grim chuckle to revisit the abject garbage clogging up our culture.
The author is not bound to rigid temporality - so long as there is a coherent structure tying the overall narrative together, it is possible to break the linear sequence situationally. It doesn't even have to be time travel - foreshadowing and flashbacks present information out of strict temporal order that actually furthers and enriches the narrative.
Now here's where the metaphor becomes ontological - no matter how much narrative time jumps around, you still read the book in sequential order. That deserves a quote graphic for emphasis and clarity:
There's the analogy: material reality appears to behave like an artificial narrative. Put aside the technology and "simulation" is just a hypertext narrative told in a digital medium. Within the narrative construct, temporal sequencing is not rigid. Theoretically speaking, time is relative to other material conditions. But the nature and parameters of the simulation impose a meta-direction that isn't accessible to characters on the inside.
Take a common "reality" simulation game like Skyrim The Elder Scrolls for example:
Time elasticity and manipulation within the narrative level of the simulation...
... are constrained and directed by the built-in parameters of the simulation...
... are constrained and directed by the nature and limits of the medium.
The analogy becomes ontological when we use the levels of "reality" above a narrative simulation to conceptualize the metaphysics of vertical Logos. The parallel isn't exact, but it is close enough at a glance to see the strength of the metaphor:
Game play unfolds within simulation parameters, much like the material and abstract levels in reality. It's weakest at the ultimate reality level, though it tightens up if you include the programmers, engineers, and other makers of the game system.
One benefit of a good analogy is that it lights up something about the subject that was not as clear before. This doesn't explain, but it does help us understand why material temporality or space-time can appear fluid - everything from relativity to mandala effects - but reality itself doesn't collapse or unravel. Time within a narrative simulation can do whatever the simulator narrates or creator permits... within the narrative simulation. But if you can look up, there are parameters to the simulation and conditions beyond those that are indifferent to the vagaries of plot. The meta-direction and it's Creator are utterly indifferent to our perceptions of material temporality.
Victor Bregeda, Inspiring Moments of Narration, oil on canvas
Just as the characters in a story can't change the page order in the real novel.
But that's what Flatland more or less wants to do. It is trapped in material temporality with no path to the ontological - the turning of the pages, or the run sequence of the simulation - to continue our metaphor.
This means that epistemologically, it requires faith to go from the recognition that ontology has to exist to a specific moral code. Grasping that there is a page order or run sequence doesn't elevate your discernment beyond the limits and distortions of a fallen material world. Flatland can't bring material existence into alignment with metaphysics through Logos because its blind faith - secular transcendence - can't even admit metaphysics can exist.
Now this is too speculative to put much weight on, but consider:
Prophecy plays a huge role within the narrative - that is, information about future events before they happen. The unity of the Christian Bible is based on the Old Testament foreshadowing the New. Yet there whole thing is coherent from beginning to end - prophecy and revelation are folded into the meta-narrative.
Gustave Doré, The Prophet Amos, 1865, engraving for Amos 1:1: The words of Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the earthquake (KJV).
Biblical prophecy differs from scientific versions - it uses divine inspiration, not looking glass technology to glimpse the future.
But look at the pattern. The material representation of Christian Truth is a narrative describing a vague fallen Creation with the possibility that information can move out of strict temporal sequence.
A simulation.
Any deeper understanding of time depends on what the authorship of Creation "means". And that boils down to faith, because this is the only access we have to this ontological level. As time-bound beings we can't conceptualize timeless Being. But if we want to stick to patterns we can see, the Bible is a narrative simulation. Where information can come out of sequence and we all freely choose among the options, but temporality has a clear beginning and end. And ts ties into moral direction - Logos, Providence, God's will - the divine plan for Creation as it plays out in the world of human experience.
Both the individual and universal existence have purpose. The soul seeks salvation within a universe that follows divine order. They are teleological - an ultimate endpoint that they are drawn towards.
Giotto, The Last Judgment, 1307, fresco, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
From a Christian perspective, time is the causal chain that this divine meta-narrative - God's plan for us and for Creation - plays out on. Internal temporal inconsistencies and all. Reality is teleological - it is sequential in that it has a beginning and end. It's just that that's not visible to material beings within its span. It's ontological. You have to be able to look up to see it.
Here's a thought:
"Time" is the framework in which the teleology of Creation unfolds. "Temporality" is how we see it.
George Grie, Dreamscape Reality, 2012