Temporality of the Future

NYU, New York NY, April 22, 2016Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga

Temporality of the FuturePart of a Series on Cryptophilosophy

cryptophilosophy

Melanie SwanTime Theorist

Philosophy & Economic TheoryNew School for Social Research, NY NY

[email protected]

April 22, 2016Temporality of the Future 2

Melanie Swan Time Theorist, Philosophy and Economic

Theory, New School for Social Research, NY Founder, Institute for Blockchain Studies Singularity University Instructor; Institute for Ethics and

Emerging Technology Affiliate Scholar; EDGE Essayist; FQXi Advisor (Foundational Questions Inst)

Traditional Markets Background Economic Theory Leadership

http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Blueprint-New-World-Currency/dp/1491920491

Book: Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy


Posthuman-class problem: how can we

make more time?

April 22, 2016Temporality of the Future

Thesis Statement

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A concept of temporality is needed that is adequate to the future; a model that has an open possibility space for both the form and content of time; that is multiple and complex; discrete and continuous;

and integrates the unstoppable flow of physics and biology human-time with manipulable compute-time


Part I: A New Theory of Time

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http://www.robotandhwang.com/attorneys/

Law Firm, San Francisco CA

How to develop empowering human-machine collaborations, especially when…


…humans and machines are running different time paradigms Human-time of physics and

biology is continuous, inexorable, flowing unidirectionally Fixed endpoints: birth and death

Compute-time is discrete and malleable, interruptible, with multiple temporal regimes (discrete time, no time, asynchronous time), and the possibility of evolving new paradigms such as blocktime

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What is time?

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“A nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of

events which succeed one another from past through

present to future” – Merriam-Webster

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/time


Bergson’s Duration (1889) Two time paradigms

1. Objective (quantitative): Measurable clocktime

2. Subjective (qualitative): Internal experience of lived time (flying by, taking forever, flow state); duration

Claim: exercise of free will is possible, by tuning into our internal qualitative experience, and acting from there

9Source: Bergson, Henri. (1889, 2001). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Dover Publications, London UK.


Husserl’s Retentional-Protentional Internal Time Consciousness (1893-1917) Three time paradigms

1. Bergson’s measurable clocktime (quantitative) as objective time

2. Bergson’s internal sense slow/fast (qualitative) as phenomenological time

3. A third domain where we comprehend and distinguish 1 and 2

Any present moment is comprised of a primal impression (pure perception) plus a link to what it retains of the past (retention) and what it anticipates of the future (pretention)

10Source: Husserl, Edmund. (1991, 1964). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht NL.


1. Retention 1. Protention

Present Now

Primal Impression

2. Recollection 2. Expectation(Discrete) (Discrete)

(Continuous) (Continuous)

Husserl’s Internal Time ConsciousnessI. Classic Diagram

Primal Impression: pure perception of the present-now moment

Retention-Protention: the link of the primal impression to what it retains of the just recently-elapsing past (retention) and what it anticipates of the rapidly-arriving future (protention); the horizon might be immediate (only surrounding the present-now point) or extending to include all recollections and expectations

Recollection-Expectation: discrete elements (snapshots or flows) composed into re-plays or re-presentations of present-now moments in new present-now moments when requested or imagined

Source: Husserl, Edmund. (1991, 1964). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht NL.

Past Future


A “Middle Third” Time term is needed Overcome either/or conceptualizations of time

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Discrete Snapshot Digital Quantitative Objective Recollection-Expectation Computing Clocktime Machine-time

Continuous Flow Analog Qualitative Subjective Retention-Protention Physics/Biology Time Human-time


Why? Cognitive BiasWe know that we are not good at thinking about the future

Always “20 years out” - AI, nanotech, life extension, fuel cells, grand unified theory

Minsky: computer vision=summer project Blackswans: positive/negative outliers occur

with greater frequency than anticipated Procrastination and fMRI studies: we

procrastinate because we think of our future selves as strangers, third persons no different than politicians or celebrities Supports Parfit: personal identity is not required

for survival, but relational experience between past/future selves and experience is

13Sources: http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/why-we-procrastinate citing van Gelder JL, Hershfield HE, Nordgren LF. (2013). Vividness of the future self predicts delinquency. Psychol Sci. 24(6):974-80, and Pronin, Emily. (2008). How we see ourselves and how we see others. Science. 320(5880):1177-80.


Thus we need a Temporality of the Future A temporality in a more

open non-determined possibility space of both form and content, where new trajectories might be possible

A temporality of multiplicity and complexity Non-linear, dynamic, emergent,

open, unknowable at the outset, interdependent, self-organizing

14Source: Morin, Edgar. (2007). "Restricted complexity, general complexity." Trans. C. Gershenson. In Worldviews, Science and Us: Philosophy and Complexity, ed. C. Gershenson, D. Aerts, and B. Edmonds, 5–29. World Scientific, Singapore.


Inspiration: Light’s Wave-Particle Duality The first ever photograph

of light as both a particle and wave (Mar 2015)

Light's wave-particle duality imaged in physical reality for the first time

Schrödinger's cat: dead or alive?

15Source: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html, http://actu.epfl.ch/news/the-first-ever-photograph-of-light-as-both-a-parti

The bottom 'slice' of the image shows the particles, while the top

image shows light as a wave

Particle

Wave


1. Retention 1. Protention

Present Now

Primal Impression

2. Recollection(Discrete) (Discrete)

A middle kind of time: time as a ‘raw material’ existing uncollapsed as simultaneously discrete and continuous; a snapshot and a flow (like light as a superposition of a particle and a wave); a perdurant khôra-spacing; time is an

uncollapsed raw material until deployed into a specific situation

Adds to our conceptual model of time

(Continuous) (Continuous)

Husserl’s Internal Time ConsciousnessII. Adding a New Kind of Time: X-tention

Husserl’s Missing Middle Third term

3. X-tention 3. X-tention

2. Expectation

(Discrete and Continuous) (Discrete and Continuous)

Source: Extended from Husserl, Edmund. (1991, 1964). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht NL.

Past Future


Composability of Physical Time Information Theory

Formulate spacetime as simultaneously discrete and continuous (Shannon’s sampling)

Time and matter are composable at small scales Matter at the atomic scale

(1×10−9) via positional nanoassembly (actual)

Possibly time and matter at the Planck scale (1×10−35) via Lego-like time fabric bricks (loop quantum gravity) (theoretical)

17Source: http://www.dedoimedo.com/physics/what-is-time.html, Kempf, Achim. (2010). “Spacetime could be simultaneously continuous and discrete, in the same way that information can be.” New Journal of Physics. 12.

Atomic-scale Positional Nanoassembly of Matter

Planck-scale ‘Lego-like’ Assembly of Spacetime


Part II: FutureNow Posthuman Temporality

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Posthumanity: Current Situation

Algorithmic Reality Increasing presence of technology Everything is a math problem Automation economy

Explosion in classes of compute technology BCIs (brain-computer interfaces),

personal robotics, drones, IoT (Internet of Things), quantified self wearables, smart cities, smart homes, self-driving vehicles, factory automation, big data analytics, recommendation engines, deep-learning neural nets

19Source: Swan, M. Rethinking Authority With The Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment. Response to The Edge Question 2016: What do you consider the most interesting recent news? What makes it important? John Brockman, Ed., 2016.


Posthuman Futures

Radically-different situations Life extension, digital societies, cloudminds

Temporality and spatiality have been the fundamental organizing parameter in the physical world but less relevant in digital situations Example: “location” not among 20 features in WoW

event-recording software Prat Need new models for correspondence between

internal mind/experience and external objects Meillassoux: conceptual grounds for the necessary

contingency of reality

20Source: WoW = World of Warcraft http://www.wowace.com/addons/prat-3-0


Temporality Paradigms Human-time

Continuous flow of physics-biology time Compute-time: computing clocktime eras

1. General: time becomes stoppable and malleable

2. Machine learning/big data temporality: time becomes future-addressable All human and natural patterns modeled Shifts focus from reactive response to proactive

attending to the real-time present and future3. Blocktime: time becomes future-assignable,

future-creatable

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Blocktime: Temporality of the Blockchain Blockchain: decentralized computing

software protocol upon which cryptographic ledgers like Bitcoin run

Blocktime: the temporal regime of cryptographic ledgers and smart contracts; time is specified in units of transaction block confirmation times, not minutes or hours like human-time or variability like “park closes at dark”

22Source: Swan, M. Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blockchain Arbitrage. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Swan20151202


Specify Future Time with Smart Contracts Time has not been future-specifiable

before, in the way that it can be assigned in blocktime smart contracts Example: assign MTL (machine trust

language) time primitives to a micropayment channel dapp as a time arbiter

Temporality as a Smart Contract feature Contract-specifiable parameter per drop-down

menu, just like legal regime Blocktime specifications: time speed-ups, slow-

downs, event-waiting, prediction markets, future event-positing

23Source: MTL (machine trust language) time primitives: http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2015/11/machine-trust-language-mtl-human.html


Conjecture: Blocktime “makes more time”

Any compute-time like blocktime creates a differential with human-time

Since there is a differential, it is possible to ‘make more time’ by accessing events in other time trajectories; thereby getting access to more time

Hedge or arbitrage between time regimes Example of Blocktime Arbitrage: a

decentralized peer-to-peer loan coming due in blocktime, without there being enough physical-world time cycles available for generating the ‘fiat resources’ to repay the loan

24Source: Swan, M. Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blockchain Arbitrage. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Swan20151202


“More time” Parallelism Argument Core argument: having sense of “more

time” due to ability to access events in other time trajectories Future could be running parallel: Flesh-

space self and various digital selves; thus acquiring “more time” through multiple and parallel experienced trajectories

History is a form of time parallelism Time parallelism already exists via history

where we access events pre-dating and existing outside of our own direct experience of time as individuals

25Source: Carr, D. (2014). Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World.


More philosophical questions raised… Do we need “more time”? How can we experience the

benefit and meaning of more time and alternative time trajectories?

How to integrate myriad subjective time regimes and event trajectories?

Moore’s Law for time? Limits of computational

complexity and time?

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Thesis Statement

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A concept of temporality is needed that is adequate to the future; a model that has an open possibility space for both the form and content of time; that is multiple and complex; discrete and continuous;

and integrates the unstoppable flow of physics and biology human-time with manipulable compute-time


Conclusion FutureNow as a Posthuman

Temporality Merges human-time and compute-time Extension of Husserl: time as

simultaneously discrete and continuous Make more time through access to

alternative time trajectories Could help orchestrate posthuman

futures such as human-machine cloudmind collaborations, digital smartnetwork societies, and algorithmic reality more generally

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Kurt Vonnegut “Salami-mercury (quantitative-qualitative) theory of time”

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“I think one of the biggest mistakes we’re making, second only to being people, has to do with what time really is. We

have all these instruments for slicing it up like a salami, clocks and calendars, and we name the slices as though we

own them - when in fact they are as likely to break into pieces or go scampering off as dollops of mercury.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country, p. 119

NYU, New York NY, April 22, 2016Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga

Melanie SwanTime Theorist

Philosophy & Economic TheoryNew School for Social Research, NY NY

[email protected]

Thank You! Questions?

Temporality of the FuturePart of a Series on Cryptophilosophy

cryptophilosophy