Tilt_Shift
Blurring the peripheries of time and adjusting the frame-rates of our movement through reality, amidst all the granules of possibility
“Our life is a combination of atoms, our thoughts are made up of thin atoms, our dreams are the products of atoms; our hopes and our emotions are written in a language formed by combinations of atoms; the light that we see is composed of atoms, which bring us images. The seas are made of atoms, as are our cities, and the stars.
It’s an immense vision: boundless, incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful, on which the knowledge of a civilization would later be built.”
- Carlo Rovelli
Temporal Pareidolia
Riding the tides of the past toward the shores of the future, it’s easy to become perceptually disoriented in the chaotic expulsion of events in time.
Too often, we try to consciously be everywhere and everywhen all at once, which not only stunts our ability to move effectively through matrices of possibility, but also dilutes our experience of reality altogether.
And while there are infinite ways to consciously toggle awareness between now and then, what seems to matter most is the foundation of what and how we consider time to be.
If we adjust our fundamental perception of time away from the idea of an accumulative linear flow and towards more of a free-range meshwork of probability — less like a stream and more like the whole of the water cycle — we expand our navigational capacity for moving alongside the workings of probability.
The trick is to remain steady in the present while catalyzing the informational streams of what we call ‘yesterday’ into our unending discoveries of ‘tomorrow’.
Ruts and Rutters
In how ancient sailors used rutters to chronicle uncharted waters before a territory had been effectively mapped — jotting characteristics like the hues of waters or reef patterns — we’ve been doing as much with our conscious perceptions through the fogs and pastures of reality.
From religious scriptures to mathematical formulas, we’ve routinely leveraged our observations of the natural world into a blueprint of ourselves, learning not only how to adapt and survive but to evolve and thrive.
And because we of today predominantly view reality through a lens of physicalism back-lit by western principles of scientific reason, we heavily lean on the palpable order of thermodynamics (of mass and entropy and decay) to define how to interact with the world.
So we too often demand the verifiable data — a good thing for material innovation (and, with it, increased quality and quantity of life), but a messy existential practice — a three dimensional trip that skims along under the surface of a much higher-dimensioned world.
In the specific way that we’ve hopped along the various milestones of our evolution, we’ve come to discern certain temporal (and temporary) functions of our perspective, and of our capacity to move through the world in all of the ways we do — biophysical, neurochemical, psychosocial.
A funny thing happens when we increasingly uproot the classical perspectives — those that barely begin to contextualize our existence as a singular fleeting event from point A to point B — we get some curious results as we deviate from the standardized parameters of what we deem probable or possible.
The trajectories of probability bifurcate, as does our proficiency in navigating them.
Like a veteran seafarer who can read the winds and stars, wise to waves and prescient to pressure fronts, the shaping of probability becomes an art — a fusion of instinct, knowledge, experience, timing and, in the best cases, an unrelenting curiosity.
“Probability does not exist in the physical world. It is a construct of the mind to deal with uncertainty”
- Bruno de Finetti
Quantum science, for example, has evolved from renegade theory to computational practice, as the hardware has nurtured the software, and non-classical understandings of physics have begun to barnacle themselves to slowing paradigms of how the universe is assumed to work.
Awareness grows like the rising tide, and from the cross-currents of consciousness and the physical world (of the subjective mixing with the objective), we learn that reality is made of this endless dance of vibrating quantum grains — a fact that doesn’t mean too much in practicality, but can mean everything in theory.
Lensing Effect
And so to recontextualize our experience not only as a cumulative collection of causes-and-effects but as part of an ever-shifting sea of possibility — it changes the way we interface with the surrounding world.
To granularize everything is to free up the combinations of perceptions — to open assemblies of perspective on everything from culture and politics to our place in the world and in the universe.
To understand the impermanence of the physical and the permanence of the non-physical, whether religious or mathematical, and to not skew the sight needed to enact the right perceptions, even amidst the wrong outcomes.
We can’t always have progress; we don’t always achieve balance; we don’t really need comfort. Reality is built on change, not constancy, and the more we come to accept this, the more we move from the floor to the stage.
“The present is like the flatness of the Earth: an illusion. We imagined a flat Earth because of the limitations of our senses, because we cannot see much beyond our own noses.”
- Carlo Rovelli
To view probability as being in such a state is to enable a more open landscape of possibility, one that allows us to influence the yields of our effort; to not really master or control things, but to at least better work the fields of probability.
Within how we perceive the world around us lies the ultimacy of our point and purpose, and we continuously make gains in seducing the idea that a surrendering of the objective affords us all the control that we need in the subjective.
It thus takes a leap of faith into the unknown by unfastening the tethers of past and future — to drop the training wheels of yesterday and not rely upon the daydreams or certainties of tomorrow.
In freeing the granules of sand from the hourglass, we remove the lensing effect that warps the way we interact with time and space.
No longer over-reactive to past and future, the present becomes the truest form of existence, if not the only thing that can be experienced with any relative certainty and meaning.
And so we may not be sure in where we’re going or how we got here, but we can, at least, be certain of where we are.
From such a clear vantage point, we can see life less as an isolated event in time and more of a string woven into the whole of space, a thread composed of countless threads, within each of which everything unfolds.
From such a thread do we better spin the meaningful fabrics of our existence.
