“All time exists all the time” –from the video What is Reality?
(This essay originally appeared at Bright Lights Film Journal.)
Emancipate yourself from the tunnel-visioned timekeeper! Return the unbending arrow of time to its quiver!
One of the key concepts behind Physics’ E8 Lattice Theory is that the future works hand-in-hand with the past to create the present. In religious circles we approximate this process (with no small dose of anthropomorphism) as redemption, that is, not so much co-creating as going back and repairing what wasn’t performed properly in the first place.
This brings me to my favorite Walter Benjamin quote, below:
I would characterize Benjamin’s brilliant intuition as an instance of Edgar Allan Poe’s ratiocination which Timothy Green defines here as, “a kind of imaginative reasoning, the ability of intuition to make sweeping connections between seemingly small and disparate details, a leap from all the might-have-beens to what probably is. It’s a counterfactual logic that’s able to reveal deeper truth.”
Poe prefigured many modern Physics concepts before the science itself expounded them in theories. In terms of their front-running explanatory power, much the same can be said of the Bhagavad Gita or the Torah.
In Abrahamic traditions, we recognize an eschatological process. History is not shambolic but rather a purposeful convergence on an end-point or telos. Furthermore, human history (a 3D phenomenon hobbled by unidirectional time) is the process during which the Prince of This World accrues and compresses all earthly wealth and power (via the arithmetic determinism of usury) into a convergent geometric form or totality not unlike the tapered point of a pyramid’s capstone. We are building, brick by brick, towards the apotheosis of evil; Evil Concentrate as opposed merely to Evil Incarnate. Moreover it doesn’t take a blathering Internet Illuminati-head to recognize the geometric implications.
Of course human history is as slow as molasses. (Actually in micro-increments it’s more impressionistic, at times seeming to crawl or fly.) When is Jesus coming back anyway? What goes around often takes a helluva long time to come around, if it comes around at all.
Alas, we are not psychologically constructed to perceive time as anything other than a sequence, a duration, a happening, a sentence necessitating a verb. This self-contained geometric block stuff is a mental stretch. Time for us is a capricious bitch of an arrow that rises with our alarm clock each morning to deliver either a coveted job promotion or a fatal arrow in the back. And they wonder why we’re riddled with fear and anxiety. Oy! Our time –down here in the world of unevenly meted-out fate– could end in a world of hurt at any moment.
Now go forth and have a copacetic day.
My belief for what it’s worth? That the end of human history will be a climactic moment when a Messianic figure anesthetizes the Beast or Antichrist/Dajjal (recalcitrant, accumulated cobwebs of an indigestible past) after which Benjamin’s ‘fullness’ is recovered for all eternity. (T.S. Eliot’s still-point is much the same).
Imagine Plato’s reductive cave-fire being overturned and the freed prisoners graduating to Klee Irwin‘s full-blown 8D nirvana. [A curious note: Irwin, Research Director of Quantum Gravity Research who frequents ‘What is Reality’ suggests that 8D reality could offer a more immanent (and simplified) version of existence than the strangely shuttered and shadowy 4D world we presently experience. So for all of you prone to anxiety disorders, please hang in!]
Here’s the genius Walter Benjamin again (below). The last sentence veers polemic and feels too much of its time. Progress is a temporal-bound illusion, the purview of politicians, yech. But otherwise, the Angel of History is mute because the wreckage of history acquires coherence (redemption) only with the ministrations of the future, to which the angel’s back is turned until the End.
He is stricken and aghast. His limited vantage (human history) precludes him from a comprehensive ‘time qua block’ understanding. Unbeknownst to him, the future is rushing in at all times on a redemptive mission. The storm in his wings that emits from Paradise is a curative for the retrospective wreckage he surveys and is nothing to be bemoaned or feared. He would be a grateful student of the E8 Lattice Theory.
Another analogy…
In a nature program years ago a fox takes a maple leaf in its mouth before entering the narrow waters at the edge a small stream. Facing downstream, the fox very slowly immerses itself in the water, all the while grasping the leaf in its mouth. Just prior to release, the leaf has become a drunken boat of fleas. The fox sends the leaf down-river. In so doing, the creature has methodically ‘redeemed’ itself from the fleas that beset it. Is this process analogous to human history? Is a leaf strategy being employed to gather up and consolidate the full extent of evil for a final sudden expunging? The maple leaf makes a neat stand-in for a pyramid capstone.
Perhaps physics is grappling with the same redemptive drama albeit couched in the dispassionate language of physics (mathematics). Is redemption a process that ultimately has a mathematical expression? Redemption is inherently a co-creation, albeit with a time interval –or so we perceive. Reality is created in the first instance by present conscious beings, then worked upon by a telos-consciousness from the future in order to forge the causal chain that will make that telos-conscious possible. And yet, this is no tautology. As attends the Mystery of Babylon, there is a degree or two of freedom, thus assuring a non-deterministic outcome. We’re not pre-programmed robots. Moreover there is nothing to say that, in the geometric block of time, redemption doesn’t occur simultaneous with sin. Absent an arrow of time, why should anything precede or follow anything else? )
There are Jungian/Anthropic echoes here too. Man is the eyes and ears through which God beholds the particular beauty of his creation. This is consistent with quantum theory as well. Without a battalion of on-the-ground soldier ants forging causal chains, the universe would remain an unbeaten path, an unMANifested formless void.
A paradox may be an 8D truism that lacks coherent expression in the causal-bound 4D world. One such truism is that free will and determinism perhaps operate as co-creators. May we anthropomorphize this into Man and God, respectively?
This brings us to a fascinating (if maybe at times a little too cutesy) video, What is Reality? This rather ambitiously-named title lives up to its name and is well-worth the 30-minute watch. It introduced me to the E8 Lattice theory. If as the theory claims (among other things) “reality is geometric”, why can’t human history be pyramidic?
The Golden Ratio which explains many structures in the universe (including Donald Trump’s comb-over) also plays prominently in the theory as the video describes
Physicists hate us journeymen sloshing about in their field unaided by the language of mathematics. Who can blame them? Nonetheless E8 resonates with much of what the religionists have been delving for millennia. So there.
One more observation. The video poses seven clues intended to bolster the E8 Lattice theory:
- Information
- Causality loops
- Non-determinism
- Consciousness
- Pixelation
- E8 crystal
- Golden ratio
Of these seven, consciousness may be the stickiest wicket of all to situate within a Physics rubric. (See 3:58: “We need to bring the element of consciousness into physics.”). A Holy Grail for many physicists is to encapsulate consciousness into his or her favored hobbyhorse. But what if consciousness doesn’t want to go? What if it’s a perennially elusive fit?
It’s said that if the world’s physicists were asked to name their greatest living colleague it would be Ed Witten, the string theorist pioneer. What can I, mere poet, do but go along?
I return often to the following Witten interview snippet on Youtube. Here we have a consummate insider whose instincts on the frontiers, parameters (and yes, potential finitudes) of the physics discipline warrant our keenest attention. Here too is a man who would not be contested much were he to, in a lapse of hubris, lay claim on behalf of his beloved physics to the full expanse of all that exists under the sun.
And yet, Witten exhibits the greatest genius of all –the genius of forbearance– when he claims human consciousness is, most likely, something else altogether, perhaps even a permanently withheld mystery. That a great mind can intuit the lurking curtailments of its own intellectual purview makes it that much greater in my book.
Perhaps the E8 Lattice gang has managed to eclipse clever old Ed. Only time will tell.
