Eclipsing Perceptions [Time & Change]
Pursuing the intuitive reconfigurations of time and change as internal functions for our benefit, rather than external variables to our detriment.
While we may understand and appreciate the nature of change, we often fail to consider our polarized relationship with it.
When we need it, change is something to be desired, and when all is perfect, we fear it unreasonably.
But what if we were to reconfigure our perception in a way that affirms our latent need for change, one that views it as a biological (or physical) necessity, and as something emanating from within ourselves more than something influencing us externally?
Consider our inherent pursuit of novelty generation — something that I’ve recently been chewing on since an interview with astrobiologist Michael Wong about his team’s theory regarding the law of increasing functional information.
The notion presented by Wong et al., in a nutshell, is that evolution (whether in biotic or abiotic systems alike) is in part driven by this dynamic of novelty generation — that it’s a characteristic central to the progression of any organism.
And so if we were to think of change not as some external and volatile variable that shuffles our decks now and again, but as a force that we ourselves pursue — via dispositions innately coded into the essence of what we are — we begin to view things a little bit differently.
Especially with respect to the capabilities of our navigational potential through space and time.
That, alone, is pretty noteworthy. But it was when I had realized that I’ve recently undergone a similar perspective shift (with regards to time) that I began to notice something of a powerful idea hidden between the lines of curiosity on these two topics (time + change).
Under what I had called the Zero+ Time theory (that time can generate from within the parameters of our perception as opposed to dwindling from outside of our perceptual frames of reference), this same perceptual shift — regarding the nature of change — fit rather intuitively.
It actually fit perfectly.
Through both time and space, we seek and cultivate novelty. Progression that leads to new states; the acquisition of new resources; the pursuit of unhad experiences.
Time and change both increase in a way whereby we ourselves can either be A) responsible for their generative potential, from the inside looking out or B) victims of their oppressing nature, from the outside looking in.
Though I’m no expert, they also seem to fit within the rigid confines of thermodynamics, specifically with respect to the laws of entropic function, but that’s another story.
More than anything, the theories, amalgamated below, reverberate soundly within the realms of instinct — at least to the potentially crazy mind writing this.
Ultimately, we seek change. We make change and we exist because of change. Next to the idea that we’re growing time — generating it — is also the idea that we’re generating change.
Expanding Time
I’ve presented this theory previously in an attempt to break the traditional 2-dimensional perspective of time — to delinearize it as much as possible.
Whether we want to conceive time as a circle or a sphere or a spiral, something pretty cool happens when we begin to unravel the paradigms that have saddled our perceptions for the sake of pragmatic existence. In other words, our linear progression model, good as it may be for objective stabilization, is stunting to our subjective navigation through opportunity.
When we begin to look at time, not as fleeting but as growing, some kind of fundamental perceptual shift happens.
It seems against nature to move, temporally, move from point A to point Z, as everything in the natural world cycles (or at least seems to cycle) from Point A to Point A, ad infinitum.
So if we uproot our perspective of time, off the fleeting path of unilateral diminishment, we begin to see a polar shift in possibility — one of abundance, not scarcity. We begin to consider time’s movement as one that doesn’t dwindle downwards to zero but, rather, accumulates up from it. Accordingly, we begin interacting with everything (reality, society, ambition) much differently.
Moreover, we can infuse time — even ‘wasted’ time — with value via retrospection. Uneventful mistakes of yesterday can be eventful lessons for tomorrow. We can likewise do this with prospect and with future considerations — anticipations of tomorrow can be motivators for today.
In other words, how we use [our] time isn’t only measurable by the present — a distorted perception we’ve grown accustomed to applying. Value can be attributed via past and future considerations.
This fact expands on our capabilities in navigating through time, affording us much more versatility (as we can proactively move forward and back rather than passively standing still) and makes the whole process of change [from past to future] tremendously more maneuverable.
If we apply this theory of counting up from zero to the world around us, to other theories relating to consciousness or technology or politics, we can see things in a dramatically different light — the light of a rising sun rather than a setting sun (to borrow an axiom of Eastern thought).
And if we apply it to the concept and nature of change, specifically, we begin to see something rather special unfold with respect to the way we navigate our reality.
So we see that time isn’t so much a river as it is the entire water cycle.
Generating Novelty
We’re creatures averse to stagnation. As much as we cling to existing stability, we can’t help but seek out novelty.
Everything in the universe does.
We both avoid and embrace change, with the perpetual balancing act functioning as something that makes or breaks us. Whether we pursue the hollow and invaluable types of change or whether we avoid the necessary and intimidating types of change, our interaction with the fluid nature of reality defines us more than just about anything else.
To embody the right kind of responsivity and viscosity, maneuvering with the right values and alongside the right variables, is to exist in a healthy state of novelty generation.
To employ the wrong kind of friction or move in the wrong directions, amidst bearings we deem meaningful or not, is to exist in an unhealthy state.
Those variables and bearings are entirely subjective and there’s no one template to follow despite intuitively feeling certain inherent values of, say, consistent discipline or altruistic morality.
To generate the kind of novel experiences and opportunities that are the most important to our fundamental nature, pursuing change in ways we deem most meaningful, is something of a key towards attaining the kind of fulfilment that, ostensibly anyway, seems the most worthwhile.
Our senses, our neurochemical dispositions, our psyches, our social movements, our intellectual discourses — they all work as a testament to the fundamental idea that change isn’t only something inevitable, but it’s something that we ourselves seem to need.
Picture a utopian circumstance for a young Shakespearian couple, madly in love; unlike Romeo and Juliet, their families approve of their relationship and they have the most ideal circumstances that one could hope for — they have literal perfection day after day. Invariably, things will change for them through their own will, and likely in a way that would be considered negative relative to their gold-standard status quo existence of romantic prosperity and circumstantial perfection.
Why would they lose it all?
One truth from a psychological perspective would be the thirst for escape from static monotony. Zest is a life goal.
From a perspective of time, it could be that time itself isn’t sensed and really felt without such changes, without a changing horizon; from a perspective of biological evolution, it could be a need for progression or diversity to ensure survival; from a perspective of physics, it could be the fundamental inevitability of increasing disorder.
So what’s the common denominator?
One, apart from the vague aspect of change, is complexity. Biotic and abiotic systems share a characteristic of pursuing, intentionally or not, complexity. It’s how progress is measured. And so this couple will inevitably complicate their existence in some form and in a shared desire to evolve themselves, both as their respective, individual, and existential selves, and also as a particle within a whole organism that is the human animal.
And so change can thus be seen as a function of complexity, in the same way that time is a host for such functions to take place. Together, they work to create; whether they create opportunity, complexity, evolution, meaning, disorder, that’s ultimately up to us.
The kicker is that they can work for us as much as they can work against us.
Intuitive Reconfigurations
Where these words have any semblance of relevance falls within the parameters of possibility, and how we can reconfigure perspective regarding our coexistence with time and change.
Time and change are, in some curious ways, malleable to whatever extent that we (via our subjective navigation) perceive them to be.
So what does any of this mean, and what function (if any) can be served by reconceptualizing the interaction?
Similar to how a revitalized perspective on time can enhance our maneuverability through opportunity (to either help with outcome predictability or the leveraging of past / future tenses or, say, simply being more patient), a realization that we can effectuate and steer change can similarly help us to situate ourselves in a more potent capacity with respect to navigating possibility.
To spin it dramatically: it affords a more supreme kind of agency through space and time.
Reforming our perspectives on time and change can help us to stay ahead of their influence on us, and while I hate to use the word ‘control’, it’s probably the best way to describe the resonating effect.
For instance, delinearizing time and acknowledging the progressions of cycles helps us to operate and maneuver with greater predictive capability; an organism mastering its surrounding reality.
With change, it’s no different. Understanding the impermanent nature of reality can help us contextualize changes as they come. If we accept that anything and everything is subject to the peaks and valleys of changing experience, we can move with the currents and driving forces, looking at (or for) any opportunities between the lines of variable happenstance.
It’s not at all to say that we can truly ever control change, and it’s certainly not possible in every case, but on the rare occasions that we can make the most of it in ways that may have an impact on our existence, such a perceptual shift is more helpful than just about anything.
It boils down to the simple idea of better understanding the forms and functions of the world we inhabit, something which happens naturally over the course of a lifetime anyway. What helps to accelerate this journey of discovery, I’ve somehow found, is to really question (and often break down) some of the cultural constructs that have been overlaid onto our perceptions — because many of our perceptions on the big, meaty variables of existence (like time and change) seem to have been misappropriated by compliant societal utility.
And so we have to work out of these grooves wherever we can or wherever we seem to need to, reconfiguring our intuitive interactions with reality.
Time isn’t a race from point A to point B and the impermanence of reality isn’t something to fear; both variables shouldn’t function to limit our movement through possibility; instead, they should enliven it.
When we begin to uncover the various overlaps that pour out of an eclipsing of theories contrary to those we’ve been programmed with, we can begin to see and feel and understand real reality.
We begin to be part of the opportunity that time and change create, not as they operate as variables outside of us, but because their ultimate function emanates from within us.
