Decimal time and the Rational Calendar
According to my proposition for a Rational Calendar, the first day of spring is today. What a marvellous opportunity to tell you about this calendar, as well as the closely related decimal time system!
I’ve presented this before, but only in Norwegian. Since then, several important changes have been made. The current version I call Rational Time, 2nd Edition. First on the list for the next version is coming up with a less pompous name :)
Decimal time
The general idea is to simplify the measure of time by decimalizing it. Our current time system obscures the passing of time to us (we the users of the base-ten numeral system) by measuring time with several different units which relates to eachother non-decimally, namely seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. This is obviously completely irrational, and as with so many irrational things, this also has its basis in tradition — one that can be traced all the way back to the Sumerian civilization of approximately 2000 BCE.
The decimal time system reduces the seven units of time to two: Day and year. Hours, minutes and seconds are replaced with decimal places of the day. For example, a milliday is 1.44 minutes, and a centiday is 14.4 minutes (the question of what names to use is of course a disputed issue). The details of decimal time I leave to this outstanding guide, to which I almost completely adhere. The exceptions (decimal week and perhaps time zones) brings me to my proposed calendar:
The Rational Calendar
First of all, a reverent nod to the French Republican Calendar (read the Wikipedia article, it’s very curious). What I’ve done is simply to modify the Republican Calendar to satisfy my own preferences. Bypassing the details of what is original and what is not, I’ll cut straight to my own proposal:
The year is divided into the four seasons, each of which has 90 regular days and 1 or 2 extra days at the end. Days are called by their season, like for example: “the 91st winters day” or “the 11th day of spring”.
The beginning of each season is anchored to the exact moment of winter solstice in the following way: Winter starts at the date of winter solstice, spring starts on the date produced by calculating exactly a quarter of a year from the moment of winter solstice. A quarter of a year is approximately 91,3105 days, which means that when the winter solstice falls on an evening, spring will have 92 days instead of 91. The true spring equinox doesn’t actually coincide with the beginning of spring according to my calendar, but close enough: I will refer to this time as the ‘mathematical spring equinox’. Needless to say, the same logic applies for summer solstice and autumn equinox as well.
This way, the placement of leap days is decided by the actual length of the year, which — when constrained to the four seasons — results in an orderly enough pattern.
A week should of course be ten days instead of seven. I have yet to find a better idea for names than oneday, twoday etc. There are nine real weeks in a season. All “tenth weeks” of one or two days are holidays.
Just as days can have the time of day displayed as its decimals, years can have seasons displayed: 2008.25 is approximately this very day; the summer of love can be written as 1967.5; Jesus was born about 1.01.
It is of course silly to use the birth of one particular religion as the starting point of history. I would like to reform this as well, but haven’t found a great candidate yet. Some people would like the year of Hiroshima or the founding of the UN as year zero, but I think we should be cautious of making the world too young. Someone might be inspired to go on some kind of a “purification spree”… I’d much rather like to see year zero be defined as the beginning of civilization, perhaps 10 000 years ago. The event could perhaps be linked to something like the Pyramids or the earliest known fragment of the Gilgamesh? Or perhaps it could just be exactly 10 000 years from the year which we decide to change the starting point of history? That way, we both get an easy number and a long history.
The three circles of time
Imagine the year as a circle with four quarters in clockwise succession: Winter solstice would be the absolute top point of the circle, the winter season the upper right quarter, spring the lower right etc. The same applies to the circle of the day: Midnight is the absolute top point of the circle, night the first quarter, morning the next, followed by day and finally evening. In this way, the relation between the day and the year becomes intuitive. Spring is understood to be the morning of the year, etc. Time immediately becomes more understandable.
The third ‘circle of time’ is that of time zones. On this subject as well, I appreciate most of Lyle Zapato’s reasoning, but would like to add that I think it would be valuable, conceptually if not practically, to introduce four quarters of the Earth. As I will demonstrate, this makes it easier to calculate from one local time to another, by the analogy of the other circles of time. The four quarters could be given the following names: Pacific, atlantic, occidental and oriental. The pacific quarter is the first because the International Date Line serves as the top point of the circle.
Now it’s possible to determine approximately what time it is in the oriental quarter when you know it’s evening in the occidental quarter: The oriental quarter is the one after the occidental, therefore the time there is one quarter of a day later. This is a superbly practical shorthand when thinking about time zones. But to be absolutely clear, I’m not suggesting that these quarters should be used as time zones. For that purpose, they are far too crude.
I read somewhere (which i forgot where and probably wasn’t good scientific data anyway) that the 7 day cycle is imprinted into humans somewhat heavily, that is, hard to change. By myself i couldn’t bother less about 7 or 10, but i am just guessing you would have to find some major spectacle to force people to forget about the 7-day thing.
Anyway, i am all for decimal units for time, do you have anything agains the “beats” thing? My blog does give minutes in beats units, though i really doubt anyone did figure that out…
The problem with a pre-historic start time for the calendar is exactly it, we do not have any way to cite a precise day. The best candidate for this would have to be 1- an event precisely dated enough to pinpoint a specific day (i am guessing carbon dating isn’t enough) 2- coincident with witner solstice 3-politically and culturally neutral. Maybe the hunt would be good…
I’ll check out your links another time. You probably already know of it, but i like the “long now project” (or something like it), i guess this is where your “not too young” idea for humanity comes from…
Marcio Rocha Pereira
3 Apr 08 at 05:34
What do you think of the reconstructed Mayan calendars?
Marcio Rocha Pereira
3 Apr 08 at 05:35
Yeah, the reform will be tough. But I hope it can be driven forward by the economic interests in rationalizing time keeping. And the result will be hugely enlightening, so we’ll have no problem keeping it. I mean, everyone processes numbers nowadays, but most people with only a vague understanding of proportions. With decimal time, decimal mathematics will be lived, and thus better understood.
I don’t have any strong opinions about the beats system you’re using, but Lyle Zapato does. Check out his page (the link in the post above where it says “this outstanding guide”).
Never heard of the “long now project”, but I will certainly check it out! As for the beginning of history, I’ve become very satisfied with my 10 000 years solution. What do you think about this?
And lastly, about the Mayan calendars, is the question about the yearly calendar, the registering of “ages” or the 2012 myth? All three are interesting from an anthropological perspective, but as far as I can tell not from any other. If you can convince me otherwise, please do.
Gorm
4 Apr 08 at 09:14
I am actually very interested in the idea that there are actually many “counts” instead of one calendar. This is not only anthropological, but also philosophical, in the sense that it might change our own idea of our position in the world. They had the account of “year” like to account for the seasons, they had the moon calendar, and actually many others, including the “long count” that stands for the 2012 myth. Though to be fair, i do agree with the idea that we are on the verge of a very, very big transformation in the human story, one that is actually happening NOW, so i would say they were reasonably lucky in their idea of 2012, but that is a long, long discussion, right? I’ll not maintain any apocalypse-is-night stance, don’t worry. But, as a side note, i believe the beginning of the “long count” thing would be very close to your 10′000 estimative. And they do have a precise and concrete begin for it, which is for me the only problem of your idea, the lack of a specific point. We gotta stick to one date, not a vague notion of age. Anyway, i do not have any concrete attitude towards all of it yet…
Marcio Rocha Pereira
4 Apr 08 at 17:58
I guess yes, you can count me on the “superstitious” list ;-) I’ve answered your commentary on the same post, by the way…
Marcio Rocha Pereira
4 Apr 08 at 18:00
The 2012 myth coincides with a huge changes in history. But so does the old mesopotamian concept of “ages”, which is also grounded in astronomy. According to this “greater calendar”, the end of this age is somewhere around 2100. The current age is the age of the fishes, and after 2100 it will be the age of the waterbearer. To my mind, is another example of a coincidence with the singularity. I’m sure there are more that can be found if you search through enough religions.
If you insist on the 2012 myth, can you point me to a good source, so I can read up on it?
Gorm
6 Apr 08 at 16:07
The way I see it, the most interesting thing about the end of the Mayan calendar, is that it coincides so perfectly with Terence McKenna’s “timewave zero” (the theory of novelty).
However, I don’t believe the world will come to an ‘end’ or transcend into some “higher plane of being” or whatever, but I’m sure a lot of religious cults will commit mass suicide and -murder on that day, possibly accompanied by massive acts of terror and war.
Technologically speaking, we’re obviously headed for an inevitable Singularity, and I don’t find it impossible or altogether improbable that Kurzweil is way too conservative when he predicts the Singularity to occur in approximately 2045, although 2012 might be a bit too radical a prediction for such an event.
CERN’s LHC will hopefully give us some important new insights into the nature of matter, physics and reality the coming years, and December 21st 2012 might very well be the day when we first start time-travelling in a newly developed time machine courtesy of CERN. (Just kidding. (Or am I?))
FraterPan
14 Apr 08 at 08:02
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_theory
FraterPan
14 Apr 08 at 08:10
Man, i just keep coming back to that same post, don’t i, but anyway i just remembered something. Actually, it is not completely an idea of mine, but i notice it isn’t in your linked guide nor in your proposal but it definitely should.
Day start is sunrise! 0.1 day is 8h24, that is, 2.4 hours after 6 o’clock.
Come on, i guess there was something like it in medieval europe, but it is not too bad an idea at all.
For example, it would cut that crap of “is it today or tomorrow now?” you always get late at night when you are drunk. It would make it convenient to use normal time to record astronomical observations. It cuts a day from another where there is actually a cut, now that no one in the whole world ;-) actually goes to bed before 3am, when the sun rises (actually, not exactly, what would be the half between the sun apex and nadir, both of which we can’t measure with the naked eye either).
But i over-explain myself. Day start is not our current midnight, it is our 6am, roughly sunrise.
Actually it could be sundown too, but less preferably…
Ah, just one note, no, i do not insist in the mayan 2012. I actually do not know much about it myself. Just like it.
Marcio Rocha Pereira
23 Apr 08 at 05:38
Mario: The French revolutionaries celebrated new year on the autumn equinox. And I think the old, Julian calender starts with the spring equinox. But I have never seem a clock that starts anywhere other than with midnight — and these two cirles have to be adjusted to eachother.
I have to think more about this, but for now I agree with you, morning feels like the start of the day, and spring equinox would work well as the start of the year, at least in terms of what feels right. It is not, however, as elegant as anchoring both day and year at the darkest point.
FraterPan: The Mayan calendar isn’t exponential like McKenna’s, is it? I do believe in a lot of the singularity thinking, but this has absolutely no connection to the Mayan calendar, which is about some really slow astronomical cycles. As I said above, you might as well believe that the singularity has a connection with the waterbearer of the old astrological calendar of mesopotamia, incorporated by the jews and inherited by the christians.
Gorm
1 May 08 at 17:25
Hi Gorm
Long time no see! I have been checking out your blog every once in a while and I must say that it is getting very interesting! So much so that I think I have to throw myself into the discussions at this point. I’m very interested in the Mayan calendar and did a lot of research on it last summer. Now, the way I see it, the mayan calendar is not really about astronomical cycles at all, though there might be a correlation. This was actually a projection of western astrology onto the mayan time science. All that was basically known about the mayan calendar at the time it was popularized fifteen years ago was that it was mysteriously comming to an end around 2012, and all the rest was “filled in” using western astrology. Now, it wasn’t until the late nineties that the intricasies of the calendar, or time-matrix, was actually understood (mainly by the sweedish researcher Carl Johan Calleman), by studying the calendar glyphs that exist all over Meso-America. The calendar is indeed exponential! Rather than a straight line, time is depicted more like a spiral, building upon itself in tighter and tighter curves that eventionally reach a point of singularity, just like Terrence’s time wave zero. But the end date is actually slightly different: 28. October 2011. I think this is the reason that this infirmation hasn’t reached out to the general public, because the 2012 date was already so ingrained that people felt unconfortable about having it challenged. but who knows, maybe both dates holds some kind of significance.
When I discovered this information last summer, I got totally obsessed with it, and the reason for this is that there is an almost scary coherrence between the time frames depicted in the calendar and the dating of events in the natural evolution and human history that modern science has provided for us. Let me just briefly describe what I mean (I could actually write for days about this).
The calendar is divided into 9 underworlds, or 9 turns of the spiral if you will. Each turn proceeds within a time frame that is twenty times shorter than the one preceeding it. (The increase of complexity increase the number of novel events with twenty fold for each cycle).
The first underworld begins 16.4 billion years ago. Not too far from what science currently hold as the date of the big bang at 15 bill. This is what they called the seeding of the cycle. The fruition of it was the development of eucaryotic cells. The next underworld begins 820 million years ago with the development of multicellular life (primitive clusters). The midpoint of this cycle sees the development of land animals, the flowering is the dinosaurs and the fruit placental mammals.The third underworld is the age of the primates, beginning 41 million years ago with monkeys, seeing the development of apes (no tail) at the mid point, bipedalism as the flower while the fruit was Lucy; a human looking creature with an apesized brain. The fourth underworld is the age of the hominids, beginning 2 million years ago, the time frame science calles “the cranial explosion”. It is seeded with the Homo habiles and Homo erectus. At the midpoint a more advanced homo erectus spreads all over Africa, Europe and Asia. The flower is big brained hominids like the neanderthals, and the fruit is the first hominids with modern looking features, discovered in Israel. The fifth underworld is all about Homo Sapiens, beginning 102 000 years ago. Since this time there has been no structural change in the human body, so i guess a final form was decided upon. At the midpoint of this cycle, which is also the midpoint of the entire calendar, modern humans spreads to all over the old world at the exspence of the old hominid forms. The first solid evidence of religious activity and art is also from this period. The most famous cave paintings however, is from ther flower phase, while the fruition sees the development of agriculture and urbanism. The sixth underworld is what we call history, beginning 3115 bc, which was the time of the formation of the first Egyptian dynasty. The exact midpoint of this cycle, 552 bc, was the time of Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Loa tzu and Mahavira, followed by the rise of Rome and the completion of the I Ching and the Mayan calender. This cycle is too divers for easy summation, but the fruition phase, beginning in 1617, was the age of enlightenment. The 7th underworld began in 1755 with the seven year war, settling colonial issues and setting the stage for globalization. The steem engine and Immanuel Kant can also be considered as “seeds” in this cycle. The midpoint sees the development of telephone, lightbulb, power station, monoplane, subways and radiowaves. The flowering phase from 1952-1972 is the time of television, pop culture, transistor computer and flower children. The fruition, beginning in 1991, well, the internet. The 8th underwotrld began in january, 1999 and is the age of revelation, where humanity is getting ready for the next level, with increased intuitive abilities and so forth. We are currently resonating with WW2, the fall of the roman empire, the extinction of the neanderthals and the mass extinction of the triasic (90%). Its a pretty dark period, but the flower phase of this cycle will begin in november of this year! All of the ninth underworld will unfold during 2011, lasting only 260 days, so bucle up!
This was a brief summary of the calendar. It is actually much more detailed, with a mathematical presison that is amazing. And all of the dates is to be found, carved in stone, in Mexico. (If those of you who are wondering why it came out so late: The mayan glyphs wasn’t desiphered until the 50’s, but why forty years? Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be revield until the age of revelation, which is now?) Check out Carl johan Calleman for more info, or write me an e-mail and i’ll send you some stuff I’ve written on this.
And Gorm: I really liked your last post about becomming a platonist. It’s exactly those things we are discovering during this underworld: How we are creating our own (and our collective) reality. Those insights are extremely hard to put into words, so I really appreciate your formulations. I also liked that distinction about mathematical and mythological reality-modeling. no suprise that I’m focused on the latter. I guess precision is my weakness :)
Snakkes.
Hilsen Henrik
PS: The formula for the time frames is 13×( 360 days ×〖20〗^((8-x) ) ) where x is the number of the underworld. Each underworld is divided into 13 phases that are alternating between light and dark (7 days and 6 nights is the same as in the biblical creation myth) remember that all 9 underworlds end at the same time! And the last one differs a bir from the formula as it lasts in 260 days (to complicated to explain why) Enjoy!
Henrik
19 May 08 at 12:32
Hello Again.
I just have a little comment on my own comment. I hope it wasn’t a total informational overload. I guess I’ve just been daming it up, so when I release the plug, it just bursts.
Anyway, I just wan’t to correct the term i used for the underworld we are currently in: Number 8. I called it “the age of revelation”, which I instently regretted after submitting. First of all, it can’t be called an “age” when it only lasts for 13 years, and second, the world “revelation” is loaded with religious conotations, and the religious era is OVER, as we all know. The term almost made me feel sick. Calleman calles it the Galactic underworld, but that doesn’t really say too much either. I guess it will be easyer to give this period a name in retrospect, when we have a better understanding of what is happening. I think our old belief systems are braking down and being replaced by new ones in preparation for the singularity.
This post for instance, is an impulse for revisioning our concepts of timekeeping, which I think is healthy. I don’t think we should impose a too strict of a scheeme on time-reality, though, but rather view it as a landscape to be explored, and give it names, rather than just coordinates. What if we said, instead of “I’m going to New york”, “I’m going to 40*45′37N - 73*59′10 W? It would be a rape to our imaginitive powers. Yet, a system of coordinates is handy. In that case i think we should base the decimal time keeping on the rotations of the Earth, rather than the orbits of the Sun. The Maya had two separat calendars: A seasonal one called the haab based on years, and a holy one based on days in units of 360 and 260. These units were not just made up, but were found to be significant by the shamans who explored the gridwork of reality using psychotropic substances.
Henrik
20 May 08 at 11:12
Hi Henrik, what a welcome surprise visit!
And what a voluminous comment you’ve left! I’m on vacation, so I don’t have the opportunity to respond properly, but I’ll make some brief comments, and come back to ask some more detailed questions later.
First of all, your much appreciated explanation made me think about the general claim of exponential time, as opposed to linear and circular. It seems in fact to be obviously correct! Yet, I have managed to avoid the subject… It’s about time I start grappling with singularitarian concepts, and the mayan calendar looks to be a great place to start.
I’d like to get a detailed understanding of the scientific basis of the claim that the mayans in fact conceived of time as exponential.
Also, I’d like to study the correlation of the periods (seeding, midpoint, flowering, fruition), to map out the strengths and weaknesses of the mayans’ conceptual framework.
I’ll be back at my workdesk in about a week. Then, I’ll have plenty of time on my hands. Could you please recommend a couple of specific papers for me to read, to get a better understanding of the subject? I’d very much like to read texts of your own as well, if you don’t mind sharing. Link to it here if you’d like, or send me an email.
To your second comment: The term “the age of revelation” seems reasonable to me. And I disagree with you that the religious era is over (but i suspect that’s a superficial disagreement: one of definition).
As I said, I’ll come back with more later.
Great to hear from you again, Henrik.
Gorm
21 May 08 at 14:49
Hi Gorm!
Great to hear that the information was of interest! Sounds like you had some kind of a Eureka experience with exponential time! it IS in a way pretty obvious, but at the same time totally mind boggeling. The way I see it, just to make it real simple, is that time has an aspect of linearity, circularity and exponentiality, and that a good model of time should incorporate all of these. In addition to these, the mayan system also works with two more aspects, which we might call “inwardness” and “outwardness”, represented by dark and light, or night and day.
When it comes to the periods, each cycle has thirteen of them. I think the number 13 is the algebraic expression of the geometric spiral, both depicting transformation. There are seven light periods intersected by six dark. The light ones are called seeding, germination, sprouting, proliferation, budding, flowering, and fruition. This system for modeling growth or development is called trecena.
Then about the inquery of how the Maya came up with all of this. This is just speculation of course, but I think they actually had a really advanced science back then, but that it was so different from ours that we can bearly conceive of it. I’ll write more on my thoughts on this tomorrow. It’s a really interesting question.
I don’t really know of any good links on this material on the net. Callemans book are the best source of information, as mentioned. I have actually thought of making a little site myself though, and a couple of days ago I discovered a way to make webpages real easy, so I actually started working on it yesterday. The world needs this information!
About religion: I didn’t mean that it is over per se, but that the old ones are in serious crisis. Many of the old terms and symbols have picked som much dogmatic waste over the millenia that they have become a hazard to the psyche.
Have a great vacation!
Henrik
22 May 08 at 00:54
I did have a eureka moment. I realized how important the singularity topic is. However, I have another important topic on my hands, namely epistemology, and am busy pursuing it. But throw an article or a video after me, and I’ll read or watch with great interest! The videos I’ve found so far get low credibility rating in my book. There is a great willingness to believe out there. The world need a good prophet, and soon, or all this religious energy will get out of hand.
What I don’t understand about the mayan calendar, is why on earth would the exponential development of the world happen in such an orderly manner, so that we can predict, down to exact dates, what is going to happen when. That doesn’t jibe well with me. This is not to say that I’m any strong believer in free will, but fatalism? Here’s an aversion I won’t let go of easily.
I guess the case rests on the quality of the claims of the calendar. Does it predict with great accuracy, or is its perceived accuracy a projection, like with tarot readings.
Now, even if I conclude that it’s not very scientific, this would not mean that it is declared devoid of value. The reasons why is a long story for another time.
Gorm
3 Jun 08 at 19:58
I don’t think the Mayan calendar is fatalistic at all. I am a firm believer of free will, so if the calendar was fatalistic I would have discarded it instantly for not resonating with my intuition. I think choice is one of the most basic qualities of consciousness on all levels. Yet i also think that certain aspects of consciousness choose to by into different systems of limitation in order to build experiencial realms that could not have worked otherwise. I look at the Mayan calendar as a modeling of the invisible time-structures that has molded itself with the emergence of this planet, just like a geographical map is a modeling of the space-structures. These structures, both in time and space, are not coincidental. The Mayan matrix cannot predict any specific events, because the events are not chosen yet, but it can say something about when certain things are likely to occur in accordance with events in the past. The system is simply resonating with itself and building on itself.
I’d love to comment on your other thoughts as well, but I have to go now, so I’ll do it later.
Henrik
4 Jun 08 at 11:42
So the when is fixed, but not the what? In other words, what novelty consists of, specifically, is a free choice, but not the rhytm of novelty?
If I got that right, I have a problem for you: Some kinds of novelty, like computer technology, is like fertile soil of entirely new realms of novelty. If we instead of computer tech had chosen some other, less fertile kind of novelty, we would sure be hard pressed to up the tempo of novelty like we have, in accordance with novelty theory!
The only solution I can think of to resolve this, is that not only the quota of novelty is fixed by novelty theory, but also the fertility of novelty. Now, this seems to approach fatalism to some small degree, in my view. What do you think?
Gorm
4 Jun 08 at 12:22
Hi Gorm.
I completely understand your sceptisism towards fatalism. That was my first negative reaction also when when I first came over these time-scemes last summer. I also had a problem with the concept of singularity. What drew me to investigate this information further however, was that having studied evolution, I quickly recognized that the calendrical phases and underworlds were in accordance with modern science’s datings for evolutionary periods. I then checked up the more resent underworlds against world history, and the correlations were obvious. How could this be? I was totally overwhelmed.
When I tried telling people this, I took myself in sounding like a dooms-day prophet, which is the last thing I want to be. However, a part of me knew that this was a distortion, but my intellect could not grasp it in any other way. As winter came I went on to other topics, but still very much kept an eye on the calendar.
The reason I’m telling you this is that I had a major eureka-experience a couple of days ago. All the knots are comming loose, as if my subconscious has been working on the problem since I left it. To put it simply, my realization is this: The nine underworlds are bands of frequency! They are not really past and future, all of them exists right now, but from the viewpoint of one particular band, or dimension of time-space, all the lower frequencies appear as “past” and the higher ones as “future”. Neither is any dimension actually “slow” or “fast”, but from the viewpoint of one frenquentioal present, the future seems fast, and the past slow. Now, the reason for the notion of accelleration is because we are currently moving from one band to the next. Another thing I realized was that we are not actually totally moving into the 8th band in only thirteen years and then the 9th in only 260 days. These are simply just the “turnover periods” of these frequencies. However, we are moving into the 8th band, but this will take as long as it takes, untill we get tired of exploring it, maybe thousands of years, and then we’ll move into the 9th, which is the border of our entire system. At that point I think we’ll be a unified star-mind on the very edge of physicality, and thus time itself, but that’s just speculation.
When that is said, I just wan’t to add that I have just moved, and since i don’t have internet at my new place yet, i won’t be able to comment so often. I also want to say that I know that this is a demanding topic, and if you are deep into your own projects, you don’t need to comment. I need another year to understand this properly anyway :)
Henrik
7 Jun 08 at 14:05
At the highest level, all topics are interconnected. Exponential history seems to be connected to memetics (at least Susan Blackmore’s account), and memetics with epistemology, which is the subject I’m most interested in.
Have you seen Blackmore’s TED video? I think you’ll like it very much. (I’d very much like your comments on it.)
Your frequency theory doesn’t make intuitive sense to me, but I’m not one to let my common sense have the last word! I’ll suspend judgement until I’ve inquired deeper into the subject.
One thing it made me think about though: Do you think it’s possible to view the development of time from the perspective of the frontier frequency? To explain by illustration: From the point of view of nature (which, I guess, is confined to the first couple of time frequencies), history accelerates, while from the point of view of consciousness (which, perhaps, is about the highest frequencies, the frontier frequency), time seems to decelerate? In other words, do you think it is possible that the singularity will be experienced in such a way that cosmic time seems to slow down, almost to a halt? Like it’s a “point of eternity”…
Gorm
7 Jun 08 at 14:54
The management method called Getting Things Done (GTD) is exemplifies promotion of some kind of “frontier consciousness”, in that it suggests externalizing memory to reliable computer systems. The brain is thus freed up to do more interesting things. Mathematical calculation is another thing that we to some degree can throw out of our mental workspace thanks to technology.
Okay, this is too tiny a development to be indicative of anything relevant to our time discussion, but still. It’s interesting. I can at least imagine that we will, in the extension of said development, see the phenomenon of frontier consciousness with greater clarity.
Gorm
7 Jun 08 at 16:27