About time
how little we have
In the mid-1980s, on a windy slope with a view, overlooking the shallow waters flowing in the Murrumbidgee of the Monaro, in southern New South Wales, a clean-cut hippy drummed deep into the weed-invested night. Hippies had peaked in influence over a decade before, but those who had recapitulated the back-to-the-landers of the post-war period had their hills and valleys to hide between.
He came down from Sydney on these missions. Too much interference in the big city I guess.
One morning he came into the icosa which served as a communal kitchen, stood in front of a cobweb covered print of a girl with a pearl earring, and announced to a small post breakfast crew, “Entropy is the rust on time.”
As coffee was being drunk everyone politely listened as he elaborated. He stood and fidgeted in one-piece teal-turquoise sports wear thing he had hitchhiked in. They were not called onesies back then. Then in an instant he head-rushed up the hill
I shook my head and said to the crew. “Without entropy, there is no time.”
And there my knowledge, or investigations, or mission-briefing notes, or worries, stayed in place for a decade, watching him walk back up the hill to the rickety drum of a windswept caravan. My comment was almost straight from my physics and chemistry classes. Surely everyone knows that.
Less than a decade later I read Deleuze on Bergson, the noted French philosopher who clashed with Einstein in his space-time continuum. But Bergson’s ideas ended up as metaphysics. Though I quite like ‘compositional” to described how we move, gathering ourselves up into selves in space from the things of our wants and desires. It has a poetry of effort.
Really meika, do you think so? What about going on a mission to drum drugs into your dreams on a windy hill, as emphatically going into ourselves seeking answers we indugently quest? Is effort, is labour always a cleansing fire?About a decade after that I read more on the debate between on Einstein & Bergson, especially about time. Einstein has the mathematical predictions that have been confirmed. Einstein’s idea assumes that time is a foundational dimension, just like space/s’, and it won out. Time is subsumed into a continuum, experiments confirm the mathematical insight.
But why did I like the Bergsonian ‘compositional’ framework so much, even if it excused/explained that dreadful drumming into the night. Because it worked for being an animal, it describes an umwelt.
See my compositional poetry page.
And now another decade after that book on the debate, I read Barbour more directly on time. His idea is that time arises from the interactions of particle/waves, and that inter-complexity and its relationship (composition with) ‘entropy’, that which we notice, as compositional animals, as the ‘rust on time’ or the ‘mange on our fur’ perhaps. This relationship complexity/entropy is what Barbour maps with some mathematics, and as a description of this, which Barbour calls the Janus point. And I like Janus as a dancing god of the thresholds, so his books were pleasing.
He says time arises out of matter in space have a relationship, with themselves providing a 'measure. It's not a continuum in origin.
Now this last month, a year or more after reading Barbour, I discover there are other ideas on time that are the inverse of Barbour’s. That space and matter arise out of time. This has really interrupt my writing on this.
I’ll have to read up on them now, once I get hold of them. I suspect the inversions are both right, in some kind of mathematical gastrulation of perspective/s objective/s … One that subsumes Barbour’s complexity/entropy subsumation with whatever it is they are doing. (I have some analogical power but lack the mathematical skills).
So this post is about the lack of skills I have, even as I drum into the night on that hill of memory.
Below the references here are some riffs and rhythms I been composing with as I lay dreaming. This is the sixth or seventh start on this piece. I've included them for my own notes. Don't read them.
It recently started because I almost started reading Edmund Husserl, because of the writing of J.N. Nielsen. Some of the workings below repeat the comment on his 'The Infinite Telos of Reason : Edmund Husserl and scientific civilisation’. But for now Husserl himself is bracketed on the back-burner of my woodstove in that icosa, which has long since collapsed.
This is crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com
Julian Barbour, 2020 --The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time (First edition.). New York: Basic Books. ‘A History of Thermodynamics’ is PDF addendum to The Janus Point (via http://www.platonia.com/A_History_of_Thermodynamics.pdf )
Jimena Canales. 2017. The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Gilles Deleuze. 1988. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books.
J. N. Nielsen ---
‘The Infinite Telos of Reason : Edmund Husserl and scientific civilisation’, Geopolicraticus. Retrieved 10 June 2024 from https://geopolicraticus.tumblr.com/post/649393792377634816/the-infinite-telos-of-reason.
‘Husserl’s Other Philosophy of History’, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon. Retrieved 28 April 2025 from
.
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. 2025. ‘Space Could Emerge from Time’, New Scientist (3539): 10. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2475257-space-could-emerge-from-time/
Saman Pushpakumara. 2014. ‘Edmund Husserl’s Transcendence of the Early Buddhist Theory of Consciousness’, International Journal of Business and Social Research 4(3): 44–54.
Icosa Hut Frame by Resurrected Refuse Action Team. RRaction 2009.
Evan Thompson. 30 September 2024, ‘Who Really Won When Bergson and Einstein Debated Time?, Aeon. Retrieved 5 October 2024 from https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einstein-debated-time.
Let us assume that Specious time is short term memory, and also that the logic of punctiform time arises in the record of “long term memory”. But how so? The question reminds me, as an inverse analogy, of Julian Barbour’s arguments, that time arises when there are enough relations among physical parts that the relations between the majority of parts can be ‘measured’ by the occasion of one more bit. Which, I then guess, this extra bit then acts as the observer. (Barbour reckons the minimum for this to occur is in 3 physical dimensions, with time arising out of relations therein). (We can map more dimensions onto our physics (one for each physical property of various forces) including time, but Barbour says these would not be parsimonious theorising) Where does this observer record its observations? In the whole system. Why? There is no where else. The observation collapses the observer and observed into the record that is reality passing by. Gone.We have this reality 'ere because we reiterate this basic schema, it would be hard to bracket this with any success, or at least, with any sense that success would mean anything to us outside our meaningfully dependent ways and means. Here, in my use of Barbour, inversely, we find the subjective in the objective, even though it means we finds ourselves, once more charging into the breach. Which is as it should be if object-ly true and will be true is subject-ly observed.
The objective reality intersubjectively arises into time.The human world Husserl starts with a bracket or two, thus begins in, and is, a gastrulation. The POV, or “observation” as consciousness is a johnny-come-lately and not constitutive of reality, but only as of the world which intersubjectively re-iterates the moment of creation, and so says into that originary moment, we have always been here. Which is, unfortunately, neither true nor a lie. The record is deep. We begin again.
(for anyone following tis comment, (!?!) my reading of Julian Barbour is found in a subsection of the following linkpost page https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/janus-ratio-whats-the-point/ )
Time enough for the world, childOn my to do list of reading philosophy is Husserl. Because bracketing. What gets in the way are other lists of reading, usual more current, as well of course of the slop current of social media, and the news more generally. Fiction has a lower priority, but actually gets read ahead of that list of reading philosophy. So there are lists, there are priorities and then there is what is actually read, which is often whatever book I happen to pick up on the day. This can be from that pile on the proverbial nightstand by the bed, but just as likely, bought at a charity bookstall run by the local volunteer fire brigade last weekend. So today’s riff begins with the post ‘Husserl’s Other Philosophy of History’ by J. N. Nielsen on Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon, and may well not make much sense without some knowledge of Husserl on time/philosophy, or reading that post, and the riff itself sees parallels with Julian Barbour’s popular science on fundamental physics, i.e. time/cosmology. There are three posts discussing themes out of Julian Barbour’s book The Janus Ratio at the post Posts on Janus ratio, or what's the point?
Time enough for love