Brute Press

Just in Time for Cyber-Time 

By Adam Rothstein 

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press 

May 1st, 2009 

www.brutepress.com 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. 

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Just in Time for Cyber-Time 

Neo: “Are you saying I can dodge bullets?” 

Morpheus: “I’m saying that when the time comes, you won’t have to.” 

Today, the government appointed a “cyberspace czar” to oversee National Internet security. In using the word “cyberspace”, the government made use of a term coined by SF author William Gibson, which he used to describe a virtual realm of information in his 1982 story, “Burning Chrome”: 

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” 

Meanwhile, on the Internet (or perhaps more accurately, in other areas of the Internet) William Gibson has lately been riffing on the concept of time via posts to his Twitter account, a timeline microblogging service. (@greatdismal – presented in reverse chronology, as is standard Twitter format) 

The most intelligent 21st-century fashion strives for a radical atemporality. Probably because the digital is radically atemporal.6:31 PM May 25th from web 

Your bleeding-edge Now is always someone else’s past. Someone else’s ’70s bellbottoms. Grasp that and start to attain atemporality.6:28 PM May 25th from web 

Otherwise, result will be “now-bound”. Or, actually, for me, a non-starter.6:22 PM May 25th from web 

When I look for collaborators I look for atemporality, whatever relevant kinds of historical literacy, and fluency in recombinance.6:20 PM May 25th from web 

Less creative people believe in “originality” and “innovation”, two basically misleading but culturally very powerful concepts.6:15 PM May 25th from web 

Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by the “now” factor, by latest things. Access the whole continuum.5:39 PM May 25th from web 

Elsewhere in the same place, Gibson mentions his current work in progress is titled, “Zero History”. One might infer that the author responsible for visualizing the spatial concept of our information network still used as the official, dominant metaphor, is now moving further into metaphysics, exploring concepts of “cybertime” as relates to history and our informational conceptions of past, present and future. What he refers to as “atemporality” seems to be an ability to move at will across the historical dimension as we have envisioned it, violating its continuity for the benefit of participants, much as his cyberspace was envisioned and the Internet is used, as a sort of plateau or group of plateaus through which those clever enough to grasp the concept might manipulate the real world, or the intersections between this plane and the real world. 

SF investigations about speculative concepts, such as Gibson’s work, are often tinged with an idea of the “future”: a world existing in a different temporal existence from the one in which we live. The temporality of “the future” is a trope we utilize to explain how, via these fictions, familiar concepts can be seen in an unfamiliar way, or how some unlikely or impossible features of the world might exist when they currently do not. The fact of it occurring specifically, further down the flow of history is not so crucial as it’s occurrence out of the familiar temporal flow of the world as we know it. By imagining a fictional scenario to be in the future, we can extend our knowledge of the present temporal world into a related, yet fictional mode of existence still connected to our current times, yet not literally existing now. “Now”, as a state of immanent temporality leading into the past as well as the future, is a measure of existential possibility. To keep track of the difference between what exists now and what does not, yet potentially could exist in a modulation of the present, the exterior, spatial environment of our “now” world is crossed with an interior, time-based conception, giving our world temporality of past, present, and future, allowing possibility to give dimension to reality. Without this temporality, we would have trouble understanding ideas more speculative than objectively existent. 

This abstract aspect of interior conception which I’m calling “temporality”, allowing the understanding of possibilities of radical change in our exterior world, is often far more relevant than the exterior differences itself-for example, the notion that faster-than-light travel might be possible is more important to many SF projects than the actual description of how it works. Therefore, SF doesn’t necessarily require future innovation to explain its possibilities-it can just as even look to an “alternate time” in our present world, or to an “alternate history”-though future innovation in our current technological climate is often the most readily-available trope. Just as easily as one might be inspired to create a work of SF by current technological trends, one could look to ancient or archaic forms of knowledge and technology to begin constructing an interior universe, in which the exterior plot devices might make sense and be imaginatively compelling. And, many authors have done so, expanding this internal view to encompass possibilities not conceived externally. It is easy enough to call this imagination, and have done with it. But perhaps, metaphysically, there is more going on in the relations of these perceptions. 

Time and space, two concept Gibson is exploring, are not only the grounds for inventing new SF, but also meta-concepts, necessitating a certain play in order for the speculative work to take place, as he alludes to in his Twitter comments about atemporality and the creative process. Imagination seems to rely upon temporality as a possibility of its abstract thought. Additionally, Gibson is hardly the first to be interested in the creative interplay of time and space, now, or in the past. 

Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, explores these concepts in detail in the first part of the book, “The Transcendental Aesthetic”. It seems to me, that not only is Kant’s exploration of the concepts quite fertile in terms of metaphysics and speculative philosophy, it also sets the ground work just this sort of temporal reflection upon our relationships to the past, present, and the future that would help the process of SF, or creative atemporality in general. The metaphysics of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism doesn’t go so far as to speculate about an connected network of information supported by electromagnet radiation some three-hundred years in the future-however, it does provide a structure for understanding the Internet in terms of our consciousness, and our sense of time. It seems, if one is convinced by Kant’s arguments, that there is actually no such thing as “cyberspace” at all; instead, we are actually in the midst of a growing “cyber-time”, a radical atemporality, now expanding out from our mind’s interior over what we previously knew as “past” or “future”. The Internet did not develop exactly into Gibson’s vision of cyberspace-there is no “flying” through the information. But on the other hand, his comments on atemporality are much more to the present point-large-scale infrastructural and cultural elements still understand the Internet and the information it composes in terms of spatial metaphor, but the folks who really understand what is going on, and can see where it is going, now and in the future, look to the radical conceptions of time like those explored in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Through an understanding Kant’s time-relations, we can view the Internet, and in fact our entire worldly lives as an expanding interconnectedness of cyber-time, through which we move seamlessly, our own creativity and capacity for abstract thought our only obstacles to existence “across history”. Metaphysics and SF join together in this concept, digging deep into the structure of time, space, and our consciousnesses, to forge new understandings of existence between ourselves, our imaginations, and our technology. 

Now I should say that I’m a pretty strict materialist. However, I’m coming from the perspective of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, himself referred to as a “transcendental materialist”, as a way of a ironic reference to his equal affinity for the philosophy of authors like Kant and Marx, who otherwise are considered to be at odds over ideal or material metaphysical structures. I’m not going to attempt to justify Transcendental Idealism in this essay; not only has it been argued for and against in much better terms than I can provide by many authors in many, many arenas, but I am coming at this from a speculative perspective. Therefore, I am considering as given Kant’s method and logic, and merely extending conclusions from his own conclusions. Additionally, I only got a B+ in my graduate course on the First Critique, so you can take that both as a caveat and as a limit of my own horizons. 

But something must be said about empiricism, if we are going to make any headway at all. Empiricism works from the standpoint (in general terms) of trusting the perceptions over the mind’s thoughts and intuitive abilities. This may seem materialist; however, I believe Kant’s breakthrough is looking for the fundamental intuitions of thought that allow us to have perceptions in the first place: a sort of productive relations of perception, if you will. More materialist than thou, in other words. Whether his logic holds or not, the Transcendental Ideality is composed of just these sorts of metaphysical relations regarding consciousness that define its existence; i.e. intuitions defining the nature of the mind. I think this is a pretty important part of materialism’s efforts, and one which conscientious materialists do cover as well. Hence, we will seek to look at what sort of concepts are necessary to perceive anything at all: to have consciousness. 

What sort of concepts are necessary prerequisites for consciousness, and therefore, perception? Time and space. Let’s cut the build up, and get right to the point. Now-we all think we know what we mean by time and space, but it is important to understand what Kant thinks they are, because only in his exposition do we see how they really function so crucially. Kant begins with Space, so we will as well. To do this as expediently as possible, I am going to quote the Exposition of the Concept of Space, and insert my editorial explanations in italics. You can’t really beat Kant when it comes to his writing, so I won’t try. However, his language is a bit dense, especially when reappraising these concepts for the first time, so I’ll bastardize them in this format to make my case as we proceed. 

1. Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside on another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must be presupposed. [If we think about space, by abstracting spatial things (I can imagine the shirt in the store window on my body, even though I have never worn it) then we must admit that space is not simply what we see, but a representation of space in our mind. Space itself is not as important as our ability to think of space abstractly.]

 

2. Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent upon them. [Furthermore, even space devoid of object is still "spatial". We think of all things in terms of dimensions, whether they are full or empty. So, any object we could ever imagine existing needs the idea of space, otherwise we could not imagine it. Before any perception, we must already understand what "space" means.]

 

3. Space is not a discursive, or, as we say, general concept of relations of things in general, but a pure intuition. For, in the first place, we can represent to ourselves only one space; and if we speak of diverse spaces, we mean thereby only parts of one and the same unique space. Secondly, these parts cannot precede the one all-embracing space, as being, as it were, constituents out of which it can be composed; on the contrary, they can be thought only as in it. [This basically means space is all-encompassing, because of two facts: first, because although we can think of multiple objects existing, we cannot think of two concepts of space existing simultaneously. Other "dimensions" are precluded in this understanding, because that is saying there is additional, universal space in which two spaces may exist. You can assume as many dimensions as you like, but for them to interact, they must be part of the same continuum of the concept of space. So the second part follows pretty easily: if there is only one space, nothing can be thought of as outside of it or before it or after it. For the concept of space, there is only "in" space, and nothing else.]

 

4. Space is represented as an infinite given magnitude. Now every concept must be thought as a representation which is contained in an infinite number of different possible representations (as their common character), and which therefore contains these under itself; but no concept, as such, can be thought as containing an infinite number of representations within itself. It is in this latter way, however, that space is thought; for all the parts of space coexist ad infinitum. Consequently, the original representation of space is an a priori intuition, not a concept. [I've been referring to the concept of space, but this is not really accurate. Concepts can be thought of iteratively, as the abstract of an infinite number of actual situations. However, we have just said that all understandings of space do not occur in an infinite number of situations-space is an underlying characteristic of any number of concepts. We can come up with hypotheticals, but space underlies them all, and is not represented by them. This is the crucial difference. So space is not a thought, but an intuition: a given of our very ability to think.]

 

Space is Ideal, simply because we can’t think of anything else. My graduate course members came up with about fifty “what-ifs” and “but-imagines”, all of which Jay Bernstein (our professor) easily shot down. Bottom line: you have to understand space as an intuitive concept to even think of a way in which there might be no space-and therefore, space is a a priori intuition. 

However, space only applies to our external world-yes, our thoughts of the external world, but still the external world. What about feelings, or other sensations? These internal things don’t take up space, though they may refer to it. Enter the other sibling, time: the Cain to space’s Abel. Now, the Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time: 

1. Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. For neither coexistence nor succession would ever come within our perception, if the representation of time were not presupposed as underlying them a priori. Only on the presupposition of time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time (simultaneously) or at different times (successively). [This probably sounds familiar. Similar to space, if we can think of what happened yesterday as different from what happened today, we must have some sort of continuum. Things can exist at the same time, or different times, and so we must have an understanding of time as an underlying and prerequisite concept to our perception of something happening "now".]

 

2. Time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions. We cannot, in respect of appearances in general, remove time itself, though we can quite well think time as void of appearances. [Again, quite similar to space. We can think of something happening in time, or something not happening in time, but we cannot think of something happening outside of time. Even if we imagine a different continuum of time, it still must be "timely", for lack of a better adjective. Time is "the universal condition of the possibility of appearance".]
3. Time has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive (just as different spaces are not successive but simultaneous). These principles cannot be derived from experience, for experience would give neither strict universality nor apodeictic certainty. [Okay, Sfers: you are in a unique position to understand this better than others. Think of time travel. You might be about to change time, right? Yet you cannot have two simultaneous times. John Connor cannot both kill the T1000 and be killed by the T1000. Even if you can travel through the continuum, you must still abide by the rule of not-simultaneousness, by the nature of what time is. Kant would hate that example, but it still holds the point. No matter what the future holds, and regardless of cat's in boxes, nothing is actually in two different temporal states at once. (More on Schoedinger in a bit.)]

 

4. Time is not discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition. Different times are but parts of one and the same time; and the representation which can be given only through a single object in intuition. [Time is the possibility of a continuum. This is just like point 3 about space; any part of space must be part of the same space, and all concepts of time must be part of the same unified continuum of time. If you are still confused about the time travel bit, just wait, because I'll come back to it.]
5. The infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of one single time that underlies it. The original representation, time, must therefore be given as unlimited. [Congruent with point 4 about space; Time is Ideal, because if there can only be one indivisible continuum of time, any possible concept of time requires time as a prerequisite intuition.]

 

So you might have noticed we ended up with one more point about time than we did about space. The extra is step 3, the limit of time to one dimension. Kant notes after the exposition that space, in certain ways, relies upon time, as in motion. Whereas the capacity of space is in a sense larger, allowing the possibility of many objects both similar and different distributed throughout space, time is more limiting, because every object in time must be unique along a single temporal axis. Because time is a single dimension, the three dimensions of space actually require time as its own prerequisite intuition. Things can only exist in a point of space because they exist singularly in time. 

We’ve been taught to think of time as the fourth dimension, but in this way it is actually the first. Things must be able to exist, before we can say where they might exist. As Kant puts it, 

“Space as the pure form of all outer intuition, is so far limited; it serves as the a priori condition only of outer appearances. But since all representations, whether they have for their objects outer things or not, belong in themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner state; and since this inner state stands under the formal condition of inner intuition, and so belongs to time, time is an a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever. [...] Just as I can say a priori that all outer appearances are in space, and are determined a priori in conformity with the relations of space, I can also say, from the principle of inner sense, that all appearances whatsoever, that is, all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in time-relations.” 

Anything that exists in the world must exist in space, but anything, whether it exists or not, must first exist in time as thought-and so, all thought both in the world and in our minds must be in a certain relation of time. Time-relations… kind of sounds like “relations of production”, doesn’t it? We’re not that far away from materialism. 

To perceive anything, we require the inner sense of time. This is to say, by jumping straight to it and cutting a lot of discussion, that consciousness is reliant upon this sense of time. What would the consciousness be without perception? Even illusion, to the extent that it is not in the external world, still is a perception, and therefore must be oriented in our time sense for us to perceive it. 

So what of this time-sense? The time-relations? It is a one dimensional, primary intuition. But what is it really, even if we understand it is crucial to consciousness? 

The time sense is precisely what we said it was (clear as mud, right?): an infinite extension of magnitude, found within a transcendental intuition to unify any concept derived by it. In other words, it is an infinite dimension, but only a single dimension. To put it bluntly, time is our capacity to think of a line. If we can think of two points, connected by a line segment, we must be thinking of time. It is a subjective necessity. Consciousness is a point-from there, to extend to anything else, we must be able to understand a different point and connect the two with a line. Self-consciousness is not a singularity, but an extension of the original point into a second point. The vertical line of the I is the motion of time-from top to bottom or bottom to top, to signify the self there must be the understanding of simultaneity, and of succession. Henri Bergson, who explores the concept more deeply, calls this “duration”: our ability to exist in time, by extending in its dimension. To exist now, or to exist from now until any other time, both rely on this unifying principle. It’s existential, its metaphysical, and its transcendental (or as people say now, simply, “meta”). It is not something vs. nothing; it is the possibility of the simultaneity of something/nothing. 

Space, as it turns out, compared to this dramatically existential dimension, is merely a bit of a distraction caused by the outside world. All those objects and shapes are very interesting, almost convincing us that our consciousness is less important than that big, physical world. But to place the world secondary to its perception is not solipsistic. All our observations, dependent on time-relations, lead us to logically believe the world would continue to exist if and after we were to disappear. But if these logical apprehensions disappeared, or had never existed, there certainly be no way to conclude the existence of the world. We can also logically believe the world existed before our perception, by the very nature of our ability to perceive it now. Are you starting to feel the magic? The world might exist before or after as well as during our consciousness; but what are all these words? They are time. Only by virtue of the world being linked in a time-relation to the solitary line of the “I” can it be said to do anything understood as “existence”. 

Now we can see the fallacy of Schroedinger. In his riddle of the cat, he is relying on a spatialization of time, that is, in two diverging “paths” of an outcome, he is trying to convince us that two exclusive time-relations are existent and simultaneous; or at least this is how the problem is popularly understood. Two different worlds may exist in our minds at once. But these worlds only exist as concepts, and it does not duplicate, fold, or double the infinite intuition of time. When we project these possible worlds, we are imagining two different futures-not actually observing the present. If we never open the box, we haven’t conducted the experiment. When we open the box, one world will evaporate, and the other will be real. But neither is real until they are real, and only then are they unified in this reality by the unity of time as an intuition. To believe that the spatialized possibilities of the future or the past are all real, floating out there waiting to exist (note the spatial metaphor of “floating in space”), is to treat time as we treat the world. We can look at a forking path in the woods and know it leads to two different places, but on looking at a closed box containing a cat, we do not actually see two cats, but one temporality extending into a single future, in which space will change, but time will remain continuous. Time cannot offer extra dimensions, because it is only the primary dimension. Because we have put one cat in the box, there is only ever one cat in the box. History and temporality, in the past, present, or future, is never the fact of what we speculate. It is the possibility of perceiving when it is perceived, and is limited to being the intuition of this existential dimension. This is all a very complicated way of saying what we already know: we cannot perceive everything at once, whether it be the the past, present, or the future. We can only say that what we perceive, we perceive. Schroedinger’s cat merely points out that we have the ability to speculate about the future. Pretty disappointing, perhaps. No zombie cats-only us, the world, and the possibility of a cat in the box. 

So a time-line itself and things speculatively plotted along it are not real, because time-relations are not spatial relations, but a single, infinite, metaphysical and existential relation. Of course, we spend our entire lives wandering around in a spatial world, so it is by far the easiest metaphor for us to understand things, and therefore we use it often. We bump events “up or down” a time line, we remember “back and forward”, and we “look” through our memories to find facts. It’s no wonder then, that the Internet was originally conceived in spatial metaphor. Surfing, highways, and pipelines all help support our impression of massive quantities moving at speed, which in the universe of non-digital information is the factor we seek to improve. You get a telegram delivered faster than a letter, and you get an “e-mail” “delivered” to your “inbox” even faster than that. Speed itself is a spatial metaphor, relying upon derivatives of the Cartesian plane, treating time as yet an axis to give us a spatial representation of one time as opposed to another. Sixty miles per hour is not twice thirty miles per hour, because neither are actually things. They are an understanding of space in relative relation to the infinite intuition of time; one is only “twice as fast” to the subjective notion of stillness. This is basic relativity theory: nothing is really moving except in relation to an observer. We measure, in space, the relative relations of all manner of objects, but in time as a general intuition, all things are equal. 

It would be nice to think of our messages flying along the tubes, as fast as light, just as it seems cool to think of us flying through the tubes all around the world to connect with all our pen pals. But when do you actually fly on the Internet? On Google Earth, which is a spatial visualization of data. There are other visualizations, of thesauruses, or of data networks or wikis or hyperlinks, all of them straining your computing resources to provide you with a cool-looking visualization-a spatialization of data. The data isn’t actually located in any particular locality, it is simply visualized as such to aid a certain way of understanding it; just as Schroedinger used the uncanny image of a live/dead cat to teach us something about the exactitude of probability. 

In fact, when we think of what the Internet actually consists of-electromagnetic pulses, magnetic or molecular sectors involved in infinitesimal state changes-we realize there is almost nothing spatial about it at all. It may behoove the government, a Nation-State with a certain reliance upon another outdated spatial metaphor, to continue to convince the public it is guarding a certain place or thing. But what is it really protecting? It is protecting a vast number: a particular, ever-changing arrangement of ones and zeros that has meaning only in relation to its observers. A one or a zero is no different than the presence or absence of a single, solitary line; and what we value about these data is their capacity to represent a world for us, by existing or not existing in any particular time when we apprehend them. Data are a new exteriorization of our consciousness, and in this sense it is a space-but this space is dependent upon that ultimate, primary dimension: time. 

Even though time is infinite, this does not mean it is static and beyond our control. Cats continue to live and die in time, and the time-line, though only a metaphor, is a powerful intersection between space and time. This temporality, when considered as the multiplicity of space viewed through the singularity of time’s intuition, can be quite useful for manipulating space. If you don’t want the cat to die, pull him out of the box! By noodling through Kant’s most boringly simple observation, that we can only perceive that which can be perceived in the way it can be perceived, we now have the ability to begin to manipulate our perceptions-which in the end, might even more powerful. Temporality, understood as a fallacy proper to our consciousness, is a real tool for using our consciousness to its fullest extent. The ability to manipulate temporality in our minds is what we have called creativity, or a capacity for abstract thinking. 

There are people who are already skilled at manipulating space, and they do so by manipulating time. Having the data in the right place, and moreover, at the right time, can make a material fortune, in these days when value is only another vast number formed from algorithms, either visualized in property (or lately, visualized suddenly as nothing). If you show the right information to the right people-at the right time-you can change the world. When did so-and-so consciously apprehend such-and-such? Minds in time-relation want to know. You can manipulate consciousnesses on a global scale, and through this altering of perception, create any number of changes in the trivial, “real” world. As information quickly becomes divorced from the material which held it back, it becomes instantaneously accessible, and all the more powerful to manipulate our understanding of time. Information wants to be free, and by this we mean accessible, readily timely, across a number of hypothetical temporal states. Books don’t want to be free, dollar bills don’t want to be free. The information does, because information is data in its immediate and timely apprehension. The easier information can access you, the more real it is. 

The “nowness”, the living, breathing, existential substance of the world as we perceive it, is a box not limited to constraints of space. If we know how to work it right, we can fit two cats in the space of one. We can bring back ghosts from the past, or create ghosts for the future. We can slide across the continuum of spatialized time with ease, raising armies of knowledge from the dead, or birthing them from thin air. Spatialized information tuned to the apperceptive immediacy of our existential consciousness could be a weapon more powerful than any we have ever known, because it would not be dependent upon space, and could therefore violate the time-line, cybernetically jumping through time at will. 

SF is on the forefront of this process, defending information, spreading it, and priming our minds to apprehend as much of it as possible. Of course, this cyber-time-the constant re-imagining of our conscious time-relations thanks to cybernetics-is not as easy to understand as the spatial metaphor of cyber-space. It is much easier to understand the power of a bullet flying through the air than the correct information instantly at hand. This is because humans have been dodging bullets for some time now, and have only recently needed to hone their information dodging skills. But think: if you knew a bullet was coming, it would be a lot easier to dodge, wouldn’t it? Better yet, if you could stop the trigger from being pulled, you wouldn’t even have to dodge it. We’re not there yet-but the span of the present is growing significantly. The present, the relative space we control on the timeline, can possibly encompass more today than it ever has, and is reaching out ever further into the past and the future. Time, in its ability to immediately apprehend the world via our minds, is extending itself into the gaps of these spatializations of “past”, “present”, and “future”. Where they might be exist on the number line is not important, because we are discovering that it is all equally accessible. When time travel eventually occurs, we won’t see “the future, today”, or “visit the past”. Instead, certain aspects of the past will disappear from the number line. The present will extend for an entire week before the future really begins. Our conscious apprehensions will continue to grow. We won’t feel much different. We’ll still strive for the future and the past, just out of reach. But the space of our cyber-time will continue to grow.