Evolving Systems: January 2010 Core Group Meeting

A Haverford colleague just led me yesterday to an exhibit just opened @ the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Called Running the Numbers, it features a series of photographic prints by Chris Jordan that attempt to portray staggering statistics through intricately detailed large-scale panels. I haven't yet been to see the exhibit, but I did spend some time with my friend's book of the photographs. My experience was one of being astonished by the beauty of the image, then led in closer, closer, closer until I realized w/ horror that what I was seeing close-up was, oh, a representation of the 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags used in the US every hour.

This seems to me a great-and-awful representation of what Mark describes below: first, his evocation of some kinds of new (within the past century) storytelling devices in the arts, which give us a glimpsing consciousness of what little we can perceive of the larger context. And, even more explicitly, an attempt to portray his second astonishing idea that "if there is no consciousness to measure [time] then perhaps it is not measurable because it has no phenomenal properties." It seems to me that what Chris Jordan is doing is trying to make both measureable and comprehensible that which we find immeasurable and incomprehensible: numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Just to give you a taste of the experience, here is a 3x zoom of the print called "Paper Bags, 2007." My experience was one of seeing first something beautifully evocative--a forest, perhaps, of birch trees? And then...oof!

I'd be interested to know what you see. And if you'd like to see more, go to Chris Jordan: Photographic Arts.

It was wonderful last week to spend time thinking together about deep time. And to see pictures which made deep time so immediate and palpable! It was very humbling.

I didn’t know many of the scientific facts which Arlo presented, and it was exciting to see how miniscule human life is in the context of the vastness of the universe. But even though I didn’t know the scientific facts, what I was feeling when I was contemplating deep time seemed familiar to me. It was a familiar feeling of seeing myself as not the center of the universe—of seeing that though I affect the universe and the universe affects me, the latter is much greater than the former, and that I am for the most part like a leaf riding the waves in an ocean. In some contexts this sense of being pushed around can seem oppresive and one wants to take control of one’s life and be assertive. But in some other contexts (what maybe we can call deep contexts), seeing oneself against the background of the vastness of the universe is actually uplifting, empowering and even soothing. It is the kind of feeling which makes one laugh at the false presumption of one’s importance and grandeur implicit in being vain or even feeling stressed, and which makes one blissful at the thought of being just the smallest fraction of the infinite.

These thoughts make me think of the relation between Arlo’s presentation and our discussion in the prior meeting about heaven and reason. At some points it seemed to me that Arlo was saying that until the rise of geology in the last couple of centuries, human beings didn’t have the concept of deep time, and that people thought of the world as only being a few thousand years old. I am not sure if this is true. Some very ancient religions have explicitely endorsed the idea of the world being billions of years old; Hinduism is a case in point. Also, even if someone a thousand years ago thought that the earth was only a few thousand years old, that doesn’t mean that she didn’t have the concept of deep time. This is because people in the distant past didn’t identify the earth’s time line or even that of the physical universe with the time line of the universe as a whole. For them there was a distinction between the sacred and the profane, to use Mircea Eliade’s terms. That is, a distinction between time which we can fathom in our everyday life, and a time which is beyond time, which is so vast and so expansive that we cannot possibly comprehend it. This is the time which applies to God or gods.

I would say therefore that the distinction between deep time and the ordinary time of our everyday experiences is not a recent discovery. The distinction is implicit even in a primordial, religious way of thinking of the world. I would say that this distinction between deep time and everyday time is actually implicit in the very structure of human consciousness. This leads to a thought which I wasn’t expecting and which I have enjoyed contemplating since our meeting. Namely, the kind of transcendence one can experience in spirituality of embracing sacred time is not different from the kind of transcendence one can experience through a scientific analysis of the world. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all if one is religious, scientific, philosophical, literary, artistic or anything else, as long as one is embracing deep time in whatever ways one is leading one’s life.

In the context of "deep time"--which Arlo presented as unmeasurable, unimaginable--I was struck most by his nearly off-hand comment that, since "the earth's size is finite," continents that leave "have to come back," so that the movement of landforms "have their own pulse." In his narrative, time may have been infinite, but space was definite: bounded, constricting, determinative. I'm trying now to get my head around a possible correlation, in this story, between the expansiveness of time and the limitations of space. What Alice says below about the spaces opened up by poetry echoes here: bounded, finite, but infinite.

Liz and I are planning to talk, when we meet next in February, about a perspective on the world that seems congruent w/ the human-minimizing view Arlo just shared.  When she and I went to Atlanta together in November, to speak @ the Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, we learned about "object-orientated ontology" (OOO), which tries to think about the world NOT from a human perspective, but rather re-oriented from the point of view of non-human objects. Stay tuned....

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.