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Thanks, Arlo, for a swell presentation.  

When I used the phrase "parlor trick" to describe one aspect of perceiving deep time, I meant to follow up. What I am thinking about (and am not sure what I think about my thinking) is that when we ask ourselves to "imagine a time before imagining, a time before time" we are anthropomorphizing time. We are projecting our own experience of time onto a canvas that neither knows nor cares for our oohing and ahhing over it.

I do see the value of using deep time as a trope. Imagine if the way that we experience time (in seconds and minutes, as clocking in and clocking out and waiting for people to shut up already so we can have *our* say), imagine that experience stretched out across the broad expanse of the earth's history. It's helpful, to give us a better sense of stewardship, to give us some perspective--but only to the extent that it helps us see that this old earth was here long before us (and *something* was here long before it). This scale cannot be understood, of course, by its object. And a truer (less wrong?) perception of that big expanse--and the scales we use to measure it--need to include their own fictive natures. We can create an unreal scale to give us a sense of the sublime nature of time, but I wonder if what prevents Arlo (and me) from being comfortable with holding "deep time" close to our selves, is an intuitive sense of the unreality of the scale. And a sneaking suspicion that the minutes and second that we experience (in our middle-age) so anxiously are fundamentally different units of measure from the moment that life on earth moved from one-cell to two.

Paul tells us that the sound of a tree falling in a forest only exists when a brain is present to create sound out of the various and sundry phenomena of timber descending to a forest floor. I want to suggest that time functions the same way. If there is no consciousness to measure it then perhaps it is not measurable because it has no phenomenal properties. I don't know if I want to suggest that in a deep time context all units of time are subjective, or if it makes more sense to suggest that we invent some different units for time-in-the-universe.

Part of my Big Project, I think, which motivates this train of thought, is wanting to hold fast to an idea that the universe exists outside of and apart from our experience of it. Our language and our understanding of the universe as an extension of our experience sometimes help us to see the universe more clearly, but it just as often, I suspect, gets in our way. Part of the appeal, for me, of trying to think in the context of emerging systems is to get myself to be present in that emergent process: to be completely connected to the moment of the emergence of a way of thinking/seeing/being that benefits from a gathering insight but is not yet hampered by the limits of specific understanding.