# Everything is history and time is a god with four faces
Everything is history. In the beginning there was above all *a
beginning*. History is everything that exists and that has existed in a
single long edited series. That which exists, exists in time. Nothing
that exists, exists outside time. To be outside time is to not exist at
all. Anything of that nature is impossible to even imagine.
## Why?
Well,because what we call existence consists of two physical quantities that
require an anchoring in precisely time: either objects that we fixate
and apprehend as encapsulated in a kind of being, that is connected to
the time axis, or dynamic phenomena whose development and constant
change we observe along the time axis as an indispensable reference.
Thus the history of philosophy becomes a single long dialogue between on
the one hand being and on the other hand becoming *vis-à-vis* this
indispensable time axis. Which really is precisely indispensable. We
tend to think of space as the enormous receptacle of everything, as some
sort of storage container where being and the Universe spin in eternal
trajectories, but time is the receptacle, or arena, in which space
itself takes place, and where nothing is static, save the mathematical
models that physicists and philosophers construct to cast a spell on all
the alarming instability.
## So what then is time?
We apprehend it as extremely real in our everyday lives; our lives play out as a series of moments lined up along a time
axis, one after the other. But since Man for long has imagined that
there is a higher reality than the empirical, a transcendent dimension
of being in the style of Plato's world of ideas, one has within a main
current of both philosophy and physics long chosen to regard time as an
illusion. The really true, one argues within these schools, must be an
eternal truth, or it simply is not true. Consider the laws of nature! --
someone surely will object. For they must be eternally valid, you sort
of get that from the name. They must in some mysterious way precede the
nature that is subservient to them. But laws can of course be rewritten
and abolished when they for sundry reasons have lost relevance and
validity, and what we call laws of nature should rather be viewed as
deep-rooted habits -- with roots in nothing but a highly arbitrary and
particularly local extreme state -- which nature merely follows as long
as a particular set of conditions are at hand.
This in no way means that the laws of nature are eternal or timeless,
merely that they can be observed here and now, and that they probably
will exert a considerable influence in the near future, since the
conditions in question do not change just like that. But at some point
they will change, everything that exists in time changes, and as soon as
we start speaking about some kind of laws or some kind of mathematical
construction that so to speak precedes and dictates the reality that
actually is real, we have entered the realm of the fairytales. We
imagine that our ideas about nature are discovered instead of created by
ourselves. Then we believe that the truth about the world is to be found
not in the world but outside the world. Outside dark caves and beyond
reprehensible societies. Which makes everything much more difficult and
compels us to start cheating. Since we of course do not actually have --
and by definition cannot have -- any access to the timeless world, we
will, as American physicist Lee Smolin points out, sooner or later start
making things up. Which is what both physics and philosophy largely have
devoted themselves to. One has made things up. For instance that time is
an illusion.
Isaac Newton's breakthrough and influence over all conceivable sciences
is of course connected with the fact that his model of the Universe was
timeless -- an eternally hovering equilibrium underpinned by eternal
laws. This equilibrium became the Holy Grail that researchers in every
field sought. The whole business was made simple if you, just as Newton
himself, were deeply religious. For him absolute space quite simply was
a theological postulate, something that was preordained by God.
Everything that remained genuinely incomprehensible about absolute space
-- for instance that one never could observe or study anything other
than phenomena in a relative space in a reality that Newton and all
others were forced to be content with -- one could calmly hand over to
God to take care of, to the extent that he felt like it. Naturally,
creation was perfect and thus eternally immutable. Therefore change --
and time -- must be illusory and nothing to attach any importance to.
Hereby the conception that mathematical models underpin and therefore
also are primary *vis-à-vis* the material cosmos and physical nature
themselves, is confirmed. And mathematics is by definition unalterable,
it lies outside time. However in reality change continues incessantly.
There, one moment is incessantly followed by another. There, time is
real. The solution to the problem is to insist that change merely is
illusory, since it only entails that already known facts are arranged in
new constellations: the same thing but with a somewhat modified
appearance.
He who, on the face of it, definitively weeded out time from the
physical equation was Albert Einstein with his two theories of
relativity. According to Einstein, time becomes one of several
dimensions of space, and this newly-discovered reality of spacetime
manifests itself in a so-called *block universe* where the entire cosmic
history is real at once -- that is: past, present and future are all
equally real and there is no meaningful distinction to be made between
the one and the other (and the third). Everything is the same thing in a
single solid great block where the present has no special privileges
whatsoever. Despite all apparent processes of change that are
observable, the Universe is fundamentally static -- a block of compact
spacetime. However this entire approach ignores what is called
*directionality*: the development toward increasingly complex systems.
And this is where we reconnect with Lee Smolin: Complexity is improbable
and demands an explanation. It cannot arise unless there is a gradual
development in many small steps, since a single giant leap from the
simple to the complex presupposes magic, and then of course we might as
well stop doing both physics and philosophy. Our universe has a history
and this history unfolds in a time that is anything but illusory, a time
that is most real and the very prerequisite for the necessary sequence
of minor displacements and changes. Complexity cannot even be imagined
in a static universe. And if there is no time, then nor is there an open
future to speculate around or try to influence.
There are early insights into this being the case -- thought systems
where time is divine. The Zoroastrian *zaotars* in ancient Persia
created, for instance, a secret process religion of their own called
*Zurvanism*, that the priests resolutely kept for themselves behind
closed doors. Within this teaching, which was transferred orally rather
than in writing between generations, one worshiped the god *Zurvan*,
which was the name of the sole authentic god who concealed itself
beneath all the other gods, who merely functioned as useful fictions, as
a sort of hand puppets in a theatrical piece for a crowd with no deeper
insights. The zaotars were simply compelled to sweeten the truth for the
masses. This Zurvan is neither more nor less than time itself -- a time
without space or any other substance, a sort of sexless monster with no
beginning and no end, a demon that manipulates existence completely at
its own discretion, without sparing a single thought for the conceited
humans and their well-being.
No religion could very well call for a more brutal grounding in reality
amid a clergy than this Zurvanism, which thus becomes the total
antithesis to the escapism that otherwise is popular among the masses.
Zurvanism eventually migrates to India, where it is transformed into
*Brahmanism,* the Indian priesthood religion within which one worships
the breath of existence as the only god behind all other illusory gods.
To the Persian zaotars, the symbol for existence's constant mutability
along the relentless time axis is fire; to the Indian yogis, it is
breathing. Nothing in these images is fixed, everything is in motion and
constant change. Existence is in a state of *panchronism*. Everything is
within time. Nothing is outside time. The eternal, the perfect, and the
infinite are phenomena that only can be found in the world of fables.
Martin Heidegger is probably the closest we come to a (reasonably)
contemporary Zurvanite. Heidegger forcefully rejects -- as did Hegel a
century earlier -- all attempts to transcend time and history. We call
this stance [[Absolute Historicism]]. By this is not meant that one can
rule out the presence of extraordinary events that fundamentally change
history -- quite the contrary! These events only assume more weight and
greater importance. In his classic work *Being and Time* Heidegger
argues that nothing ever can escape or posit itself outside time; but
that inside history anything can happen. Here there is contingency and
not necessity. It is further, argues Heidegger, temporality and not
spatiality that gives a thing its specific *being vis-à-vis* its evident
becoming. Thereby an exciting, alternative thread in the history of
philosophy appears, stretching from Zoroaster and Heraclitus -- the
earliest process philosophers during antiquity, both with roots in
Persian culture -- up to German thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche and
Heidegger. From this perspective space does not have the same original
status as time. It is possible to imagine time without space, but it is
not possible to imagine space without time. And this is exactly how the
natural sciences also function. Einstein's mistake was to presume time
as the fourth dimension *vis-à-vis* space in Einsteinian spacetime, when
he could have placed the three dimensions of space on top of time as the
foundation instead. But then Einstein was only concerned with a single
dimension of time. Today we are experimenting with four -- two of them
ontic and two ontological. Einsteinian spacetime quite simply only
corresponds to one of the four necessary time dimensions. These four
dimensions must in turn be studied as a series of different synergist
dialectics in the aggregate metaphysics that we call *transcendental
emergentism*.
In the opening chapter of our book *Syntheism -- Creating God in the
Internet Age* we write that everything is religion. And then we add that
this applies in particular to the convictions that imagine themselves to
be something completely other than religion, rather these are to be
viewed as particularly treacherous precisely because they lack
self-awareness. It can, for instance, be a case of sundry sorts of
political ideologies to which one recruits new disciples. So when we now
say that everything is history, it does not constitute a contradiction,
but that we add a complementing dimension to this basically
existentialist reasoning. Everything is religion *and* history at once.
Another popular name for this all-encompassing religious history and
historical religion is God. History is thereby, on closer inspection, a
[[Chronotheology]], a journey through time from, to, or in parallel with,
the divine. And the perspective is gradually displaced with time. As
long as one could bring oneself to regard the stories in the Old
Testament as valid, a total history comprising 6,000 years was a
near-infinite period of time. But with today's Internet-driven view of
history, and with the new cosmological knowledge that now is common
property, the more than 200,000 years that we humans, *Homo sapiens
sapiens*, have existed are just a tiny drop in the enormous ocean of
history. History as a god has expanded, just like the Universe, and
continues to do so, just like the Universe.
There is a connection between conceptions of time and the only radically
new, original ideas that we can discern in the history of ideas. The
original [[Nomadology]] in the orally memorizing nomadic tribe viewed
everything as the eternal recurrence of the same, without exception.
Which is logical considering the nomads' cyclical existence, built on
the changing of the seasons. Zoroaster then adds [[Eventology]] -- the
idea that a unique event, a new idea, or a new mode of architecture, can
lead history in a completely new direction and achieve enduring change.
That insight is of course built upon the dramatic effects of information
accumulation during the Bronze Age, with the first empires and nations
as a result. It is not possible to build an empire unless you have an
established court language so that orders from the power center can be
communicated undistorted to the periphery of the realm. And with a
written court language information accumulation suddenly takes a
gigantic leap, which automatically brings a completely new complexity to
the societal structure and a new historical turn.
It becomes decisive to be close to the court and speak its specific
tongue to have any power and influence to literally speak of in the
feudalist society. Eventology arrives with the birth of civilization and
Zoroaster is thereby the first *civilizationist* in history. The world
of the son need no longer be identical to the world of the father, it
can even aspire to be regarded as an improvement. Zoroaster does *de
facto* found the entire philosophical discipline -- the ancient Persian
term *mazdayasna* means "love of wisdom", a concept which is translated
to the Greek *philosophia* circa 1,200 years after its first documented
use -- which since then cannot be regarded as anything other than *a
series of footnotes to Zoroaster.* Sure, nomadology is with hindsight
history's rule, but eventology is history's exception that both confirms
and dialectically completes the rule. Rather Zoroaster's idea is the
only radically new idea during the entire written history of ideas, and
all other ideas worthy of the label stem from his ingenious insight and
the ensuing *dialectics of process and event*. The existentialist
*dialectics of mortido and libido* and the metaphysical *dialectics of
oscillation and negation* are merely developed variants of the same
basic dialectics of the permanently nomadic and the temporarily settled.
From this insight during the Bronze Age, it takes all the way up until
the early 19th century before a genuinely new and pioneering idea is
developed and introduced within philosophy. It is then that Hegel in
Prussia completes the dialectical method by adding *the negation of the
negation* which precedes both the process and the event -- a sort of
philosophy's equivalent to the epochal event within mathematics when the
zero was presented to the world (in Mesopotamia). Thereby we join Hegel
when he describes his new order as *the absolute*, or to describe the
matter even more Hegelian: when he completes the ultimate revolt against
all previous revolts. *The real* precedes *the imaginary* and *the
symbolic*. And out of the negation springs *the negation of the
negation* that drives a constantly mutable existence onward. Man patches
up his various phallic fantasies in the seismological landscape that is
called existence. But there and only there existentialist freedom can be
found. For until these fantasies are established only *the contingent
chaos* prevails (sexually personified as the hypersexual virgin), while
thereafter the eternalisation of the fantasies is nothing but *the
law-bound necessity* (sexually personified as the asexual matriarch).
The phallic freedom can only be manifested in the actual and mutually
admiring collaboration between the imaginary *will-to-transcendence* and
the symbolic *will-to-intelligence* behind [[The Barred Absolute]]. We
call this necessary creation [[The Two-Headed Phallus]].
In the book *Less Than Nothing* (2012), Slovenian philosopher Slavoj
Žižek builds his variant of *dialectical materialism* on what he sees as
a basic incompleteness in Hegelian metaphysics. Please note, however,
that there is no need for any basic incompleteness as long as we can
abandon the Platonist and Kantian axiom that there can only exist one
single time dimension. If we instead may be as bold as to presume at
least two time dimensions, we will right there have created a
seismological relation between eternalist hypertime (the negation) and
mobilist spacetime (the oscillation). The time axes will inexorably
grind against each other. This entails that everything atop the
underlying [[Subphysics]] in such a physical universe must oscillate. If
for no other reason than a total fixation requiring far too much energy.
And if everything oscillates, there is really no need for incompleteness
in order to set things in dialectical motion. There is nothing that is
fixated in itself, quite simply because there is no absolute space and
no stable point of reference to relate to. Everything is in motion in
relation to everything else, even within itself. The
*implicata-as-virtuality* can, but need not be, some form of preceding
variant of the coming *explicata-as-actuality* albeit minus some kind of
anal, mysterious ingredient. Rather, it is a case of various virtual
membranes that have not yet collided with each other -- within
subphysics such a hypertemporal state is called [[Subsistence]] rather
than *existence* -- so that our relationalist universe can be manifested
as an actual nature.
We thus replace Žižek's dialectical materialism with *transcendental
emergentism* which uses *the dialectics of eternalism and mobilism* (see
for instance our book [[The Global Empire]]) as a starting point for a
*radical relationalism*. Matter is not incomplete, matter is mobile in
itself. And matter is not even fundamental, since there is a hypertime
that precedes and operates beneath the spacetime where Žižek and other
*monochronists* get stuck with their beloved matter. Hypertime is namely
not bound to a mass that requires space, and is therefore not material
in a classical sense, as British physicist Roger Penrose remarks in his
book *Cycles of Time* (2010). In the book *Einstein's Unfinished
Revolution* (2019) Penrose's American colleague Lee Smolin launches the
excellent concept *temporal relationalism* for a worldview that places
time before space. Space is, according to Smolin, nothing other than the
description of the historical network of relations between events. For
instance, a phenomenon like *quantum entanglement* cannot be explained
in any other way. Smolin explicitly argues that quantum entanglement is
a remnant from the point in history when only time and no space existed.
A subphysics before and beneath physics. A remnant that lingers on in
our universe as a reminder that existence is fundamentally temporal and
as such aspatial.
Without himself using the concept, Smolin has thus formulated a time
that *temporally precedes spacetime* without need for space and this is
of course [[Hypertime]] which we add to the discourse of temporal
relationalism. Hypertime is thus fundamental, while spacetime is
emergent and contingent *vis-à-vis* hypertime. And quantum entanglement
must be understood as a hypertemporal phenomenon. It is true that
entropy and information constantly grow in an expanding universe, and
that the expansion in itself consists of entropy and information.
However, the expansion of entropy and information is a byproduct of
time, it is not time in itself. Neither in the spacetime where the
expansion occurs, nor in the hypertime where the expansion no longer
matters, since hypertime in itself lacks mass and thereby also lacks
space. Physicists can then sit and tinker with time back and forth and
discuss its reversibility. But what is unique about hypertime is
precisely that it is so radically irreversible. The fact is that it is
precisely time's irreversibility -- what we in popular parlance call
*the arrow of time* which only points forward -- which is its most
hypertemporal rather than spatiotemporal quality. Or as physicist
Martina Cortez expresses the matter; the asymmetrical and the
irreversible in time is exactly what proves that it is more fundamental
in existence than space which *de facto* can be bent to and fro in a
kind of reversible eternity. *The big time* precedes *the big space*, as
Tibetan monk Tarthang Tulku describes the matter in his exposition of
Vajrayāna Buddhism's cosmology.
The reason for the natural sciences finding it so hard to embrace these
thoughts and put them into practice is, as Smolin observes, that the
natural sciences constantly get stuck in what Einstein condescendingly
terms *constitutive theories* instead of first building relevant
underlying *principal theories*. The metaphysical emergence vector
theory that we are devoting ourselves to here is such a principal
theory, the various natural and cultural sciences that then develop
within the emergence vectors in question are however merely constitutive
theories. In the actual context we express this as hypertime being
*subphysical* and not physical, it has a kind of passive [[Subsistence]]
rather than some kind of active *existence*, as Danish philosopher
Alexander Wrede Elung points out. Above all, hypertime is continuous
rather than discrete, it cannot be reduced to delimited ones and zeroes
and can therefore not be measured by clocks -- since hypertime lacks
mass, and clocks can only exist inside a universe consisting of
spacetime-bound, gravitation-generating, quantitative mass -- to the
despair of many 21st century Platonist computationalists. The Universe
is not a computer. Rather, subphysics consists of an implicate, virtual,
continuous and passive subsistence brooding in hypertime, pending its
being able to give rise to an explicate, actual, discrete and active
existence once spacetime arrives. Only then do, literally, the relations
and the diversity that characterize our universe explode. Negation
morphs into oscillation. As a temporal relationalism with spacetime as a
byproduct.
The rest is a question of -- and only a question of -- relations
interwoven in countless other relations, which expresses itself as
increasingly tight and increasingly complex domains developed after
various dramatic *emergences* (so-called *emergence vectors*) where our
own universe's *big bang* (or rather *big bounce* if we take hypertime
seriously) is the most well-known example. This does not least apply to
the relation between hypertime and spacetime in itself, whose
*seismology* replaces Žižek's mysterious completeness minus one as
metaphysical foundation. The contingent before the necessary is not
triggered by some kind of mysterious imbalance in the contingent. The
contingent is contingent for real, *there is no balance there*. It is
rather this constant quest for balance that time and time again
throughout history leads thoughts astray. When Hegel writes that
necessity only arises afterward, he means precisely this. The relation
must arise in order for the world to be enriched with *relata,* and only
relata can provide the illusion of even the least temporary balance
between the plethora of oscillations in existence. A balance that the
eternalist subject is extremely eager to interpret as sustainable and
enduringly fixed objects drenched in imaginary and symbolic meaning.
Which usually works fairly well, up until the next existential
earthquake. But first there are always relations and only later follow
relata, as British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead establishes. Or to
express the matter in the spirit of Hegel and Heidegger: First there
must be a *project*, it is only in the active engagement with one
another that a *subject* and an *object* can arise.
Before Einsteinian spacetime arises and physics is born, there are
already lots of virtual fields or membranes. This is called *subphysical
membranics*. The virtual fields do not behave as fields within classical
spacetime. They are first of all both infinitely small and infinitely
large, since they need not take space in the usual sense into
consideration. And they exist only ontically, but not actually, since
they need not take space-bound time in the usual sense into
consideration either. It is rather when these virtual membranes collide
with each other that the first relations are generated and it is with
these relations that processes arise as actualities. This is what we
call *radical relationalism*. The virtual fields are metaphysically
spectacular since they are precisely virtual rather than actual, but
they must still be regarded as ontic rather than merely ontological.
What is important is to understand that the virtual membranes are not
ontic on their own, but that they receive their onticity precisely
through being in motion *vis-à-vis* collisions with, and thus establish
relations with, other virtual fields. We express this as the virtual
membranes being *fields of virtualities* and belonging to *the implicate
order* in existence, while the radical relations that arise when the
virtual fields interact with each other are called *fields of
potentialities,* which belong to *the explicate order* in existence. We
can quite simply regard the implicate order as a kind of nature's own
subconsciousness, while the explicate order is a sort of nature's
consciousness, where only the latter is possible for us to observe and
measure in any meaningful sense. And it is of course possible to study
the difference between consciousness and subconsciousness in the same
way, as an explicate and an implicate order respectively, that meet in
the emergent moment that Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke
calls *relevance realization*.
The moment we accept the possibility that there may be several different
dimensions of time, we also have to consider the possibility that there
are several different gods; or perhaps rather several different
religions. We have, to start with, the two ontic time dimensions *global
hypertime* and *local spacetime*, where global hypertime belongs to the
implicate order, while local spacetime belongs to the explicate order in
the natural sciences, where the explicate order for instance can arise
via a [[Negative Dialectics]], that is: there is suddenly something
missing in the implicate order that enables the actualization of the
explicate order. The transition from subphysics to physics entails for
instance a shrinking and not an expansion of the basic prerequisites. A
related narratological example from the biblical world is how God was so
perfect as *The One* that God was forced to split in two and become man
and woman as a human and thus be actualized. The abstract implicate
order is in this case Man, and the concrete explicate order is the man
and the woman as incompatible but still inseparable entities. And then
we have hardly even begun to study how the majority of humans gladly
would have stayed and subsisted as an inseparable unity with the
maternal body's [[Mamilla]] their entire lives to avoid having to exist as
independent creatures of their own.
In the book *The Field -- The Quest for The Secret Force of The
Universe* (2008) British philosopher J M E McTaggart sets out the
distinction between an A series of time and a B series of time, where
the A series is time as continuous duration and becoming, while the B
series is time as discrete time and being. McTaggart's A series makes
the present the only real time, while the past and the future lack
substance. But his B series makes all points in time equivalent, it
eternalizes time itself as a kind of timeless being. Naturally this is
the case of two necessary time dimensions, hypertime as the time of the
entire Universe even before it had arisen, and spacetime as a dimension
bound to the expanding space to harbor the Universe's information,
energy and matter. We need and there really are two dimensions of time:
global or continuous hypertime versus local or discrete spacetime.
Global time precedes *the big bounce* and is independent of space and
its content. Local time arises in conjunction with the big bounce and is
through and through dependent on space and its content. To this we add
the two ontological time dimensions *vis-à-vis* which Man and his tribal
psyche orient themselves, namely *phallic linear time* which is
manifested philosophically in eventology and *matrichal cyclical time*
which is manifested philosophically in nomadology. Where phallic linear
time refers to the explicate order and matrichal cyclical time refers to
the implicate order for civilization in its entirety.
Thus the global, the matrichal and the virtual belong together, and the
study of this *emergence vector* we call *the cosmic nomadology*. The
local, the phallic and the actual also belong together, and we call the
study of this emergence vector *the cosmic eventology*. We thus write a
philosophy about world history as a story of processes and events. The
interaction between process and event is the fundamental pattern for
this project and -- we maintain -- for precisely everything else. Thus
it very much becomes a story of values. The cosmic nomadology sees
everything as a recurrence of the same. Thereby everything that happens
is bound to cause and effect without exception. There is quite simply
nothing to learn from history since everything is repeated all the same
and nothing changes, therefore nothing can improve (or deteriorate)
either. Therefore, according to cosmic nomadology, there are no valid
reasons to build a library full of accumulated, relevant information to
promote a development that may be seen as generally favorable to
humanity. Instead every activity in existence is based on a pagan
*karma*. There is no forgiveness and thus not any hope of being accorded
a second chance in life either. This is the core of what we call *the
religion of nature* (and please note how history and religion constantly
are interwoven -- everything is religion; and history). Meanwhile
nomadology can of course not be revised until it is confronted with the
cosmic eventology, which starts from the idea that a single, unexpected
event can upend the playing board and provoke the emergence of
completely new rules for how the development occurs in the future.
Suddenly a completely different, previously inconceivable, future
becomes possible. And now information accumulation becomes immensely
valuable. History contains learning that is useful for those who want to
comprehend and equip themselves for -- and perhaps even change and
control -- a development that no longer is completely predictable. Both
successful and unsuccessful experiments are useful; the latter signify
which chosen paths are fruitless, which is extremely important to know.
Thereby *forgiveness* becomes a foundation in all eventological
worldviews. If you fail, get up and try again. One mistake is not the
end of the world, you have (hopefully) learnt something from it, which
improves your prospects of succeeding at your next attempt. Further, the
recording of experiences becomes important. And communication. Write and
let others read, share your experiences just as you benefit from others'
to avoid repeating their mistakes. By and by we jointly filter out the
blind alleys of development. We build a culture, and thus atop the
religion of nature we establish *the religion of culture*. What then
remains is *the syntheist revolution* -- a transition from *the
nomadological religion based on magic* to *the eventological religion
based on technology*. When architects and engineers have the opportunity
to unimpededly experiment in a phallic spirit, a state that
British-American engineer E M Burlingame calls *the endless game*.
Yesterday's magic is transformed into tomorrow's technology. This ideal
state of the information age is what we refer to as *netocratic
protopianism*.
After the arrival of eventology in the history of ideas it becomes
impossible to regard the nomadological conception of history as anything
other than a defense of a hypertime that finds itself over, under and
beyond linear spacetime itself. It is this division that enables us to
conceive of an emergence vector before physics that we call
*hypertemporal subphysics*, while physics as an emergence vector only is
introduced with the genesis and expansion of Einsteinian spacetime, a
hot topic which is discussed in an all-encompassing theory construction
within physics and cosmology called *loop quantum gravity*. Thereby all
similarities between hypertime (and if one wishes, an associated
hyperspace) on the one hand, and classical spacetime on the other,
disappears. Nomadology and eventology are reduced to two equivalent but
incompatible metanarratives about the future. Absolute historicism is
thus the Hegelian idea of the coexistence of these two metanarratives in
an interconnected world where the stories are used for radically
different purposes. We land with eventology as our *yang* and nomadology
as our *yin* in a dance where their continued coexistence is guaranteed
through their unambiguous incompatibility, the metaphysical state which
Lee Smolin, a pioneer of loop quantum gravity, calls temporal
relationalism.
The crux of the matter is that hypertime always precedes hyperspace in a
way that does not occur within classical spacetime, which has dramatic
consequences for temporal relationalism. When quantum physics was
revealed to the natural sciences, it was discovered that two particles
could behave synchronously with frightening precision even if they were
located several light years apart. This phenomenon is called *quantum
entanglement* where thus the very entanglement only operates in time,
clearly independent of space. Thus there is no ongoing transmission of
information between the particles. A phenomenon such as a quantum
entanglement can appear in wildly differing places simultaneously, but
never have a symmetrical identity at different points in time. Thus it
is space that fundamentally is an explicate phenomenon, while time is
both an implicate phenomenon (as global hypertime) and an explicate one
(as local spacetime). It is important to note that it is only hypertime
that moves via subphysics from a universe to another at a big bounce,
and that thereby has both ontic and ontological qualities. Even
information transmission between universes can occur without any space
of significance, via a phenomenon that American philosopher Alex Ebert
calls *compression*. Time always precedes space, above all in an
implicate sense. Space only arises when the mass in a universe needs a
space. And secondary spacetime only arises when space is forced to
interact with primary hypertime. The history that follows within this
universe is then a kind of dialectical squeaking between hypertime and
spacetime, with phenomena such as quantum entanglement as proof and
reminder of a brutal subphysical reality beneath classical physics.
Existence is monist and not dualist. Not because it must be so, but
because it happens to be so. Thus nor is there any [[Moralator]] or
objective evaluator who can determine that one emergence vector is more
important than another -- it is merely the Gnostic yearning for
objective value hierarchies (with the Gnostic himself on top) that
generates the dualist illusion of a separation between creator and
creation -- wherefore monism must be neutral in terms of valuation in
order to be credible. This has pervasive consequences for civilization's
history about itself. According to the eventological principle that time
precedes space in metaphysics, it must be when and not where an event
occurs that determines the event's significance for history. And this
valuation can and should constantly be reevaluated dialectically, as
both Zoroaster and Hegel point out. The chronology controls the
topography and not the other way around. This also means that *absolute
historicism* gets the upper hand *vis-à-vis neutral monism* in our
narratology. Only time can be absolute. History is fundamentally
chronocentric and not topocentric. And ironically all this has to do
with the cyclical nature of hypertime.
Or as we write in *Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the
Network Society:* everything begins and ends with mortido and its
matrichal circularity. Libido and its phallic linearity never becomes
anything other than a temporary protest and a vain wish to escape the
existential, eternal recurrence of the same, not least on a cosmological
level. We are born and we die, and the same thing applies to the
Universe itself. What is produced in between can never be more than a
transient protest before death ultimately afflicts both us and
everything else. On a metaphysical level it eventually becomes
impossible to oppose the Indian *Jains* and their eons of hypertemporal
cycles. Whereafter the Persian Zoroastrians complete what Man can
achieve with his phallic fantasies of an eventological history and
existence in protest against Jainism's matrichal superloop. History in
between them is *the history of processes and events*. The history of
processes we call [[Nomadology]] and the history of events we call
[[Eventology]]. The Greeks of antiquity make a distinction between the two
time gods *Chronos* and *Kairos*. It is Chronos who has the
nomadological qualities and Kairos who has the eventological and never
the twain shall meet. While the Greeks, in line with the Persians, pay
tribute to *the kairotic event* as their existentialist ideal.
History consists of two implicate time dimensions and two explicate time
dimensions that together comprise everything else. Together they form
*the chronotheological quadrant* which naturally matches *the
syntheological quadrant* that we present in *Syntheism* -- *Creating God
in the Internet Age*. The implicate time dimensions are natural and
profane, while the explicate time dimensions are cultural and sacred.
The implicate time dimensions we call hypertime and spacetime. Hypertime
is the ontic and virtual time. Syntheologically it is called [[Atheos]].
Spacetime is the ontic and actual time. Syntheologically it is called
[[Pantheos]]. Hypertime is mortidinal while spacetime is libidinal. The
explicate time dimensions we call cyclical time and linear time.
Cyclical time is the ontological and nomadological time, that is to say
ploytheist being in all its rich variety. Syntheologically it is called
[[Entheos]]. Linear time is the ontological and eventological time, that
is to say the monotheist future with its completion of history.
Syntheologically it is called [[Syntheos]]. Cyclical time is mortidinal
and linear time is libidinal. Hypertime generates subphysics as the
first emergence vector. Spacetime generates physics as the second
emergence vector. Cyclical time generates the nomadological
metanarrative and linear time generates the eventological metanarrative.
Together they lay the ground for the metaphysics of processes and
events. The dynamics required to comprehend these stories are the year
and life as *the dialectics of cosmos and chaos*, that is to say the
dialectics of eternalism and mobilism.
The natural sciences have always wrestled with the problem of
existence's innermost essence and [[Determinism]] versus [[Indeterminism]].
The question does not become easier by processes being able to behave
locally deterministically but still result in globally indeterminist
outcomes, as well as being able to behave locally indeterministically
but result in seemingly globally determinist outcomes. And then the
question is whether it is the process in detail or the process in its
entirety that shall decide if we are facing the one or the other. Upon
closer examination of processes within subphysics and physics, it turns
out that determinism often appears reasonable when processes are studied
afterward, but that indeterminism becomes the only logically sustainable
possibility when processes are taken into account in advance. This
entails that the problem of the dichotomy determinism versus
indeterminism is fundamentally erroneously conceived. We must rather
regard it as yet another pseudo-problem that constitutes a remnant from
the old traditional fairytales of dualist creator-gods, who precede the
creation, and the like.
Existence is instead characterized both as entirety and in detail by
[[Transdeterminism]], a concept that we have developed in a series of
podcasts with our colleague Alexander Wrede Elung. And once we develop
transdeterminism we discover that the erroneous thinking that prevented
its development is intimately connected with fantasies about infinite
magnitudes and infinite tininesses. Any such infinities and
infinitesimals are however neither found in nature nor as precise
numbers within mathematics, as German mathematician Georg Cantor shows
in the early 20th century when he names the outermost numbers
*transfinities* instead -- there is no infinite number in itself, the
only things that can be formalized are infinities in relation to other
infinities, hence the concept transfinities. Rather, we had better speak
of *enormities* that have expanded and *enormitesimals* that have shrunk
to the extent they have been able to do so far during the history of the
Universe. Spacetime contains neither infinities nor infinitesimals.
However, spacetime contains enormities and enormitesimals that are free
to expand, but also solely can expand, along the time axis. And with
these tools we can only measure either discretions or continuities --
and then just locally and not globally -- however not both
simultaneously.
Thus *the principle of universal oscillation* in a relationalist and
transdeterminist universe reads: Since the relation between the exact
circle and the exact discrete number is inexact, this means that
everything that is real in existence is inexact as soon as it relates to
anything else. Eternalism can only precede mobilism in the hypothetical
world of a mathematician. In the emergent reality it is on the contrary
mobilism that precedes eternalism, since the mobilist *relation* always
precedes the eternalist *relata*. The objects may be fixed and dead, but
the phenomena move and live. Everything oscillates. The zero vibrates,
the one vibrates, the circle vibrates -- as soon as they leave the
culture and find themselves in nature. The oscillation in the actualized
phenomenon cannot be measured at the same time as the phenomenon is
being fixed as an object (which in the natural sciences is called
*Heisenberg's uncertainty principle*). The dialectics of eternalism and
mobilism is thus also *the dialectics of discretion and continuity*. And
consequently there must also ultimately be two separate time dimensions,
a fixed local time (spacetime) for the discretion, and an oscillating
global time (hypertime) for the continuity.
We can only experience and measure classical spacetime. But we see the
consequences of hypertime within classical spacetime in retrospect. We
express this theologically as though we are torn between a constantly
present god (physics) and another god who only makes his presence felt
through his equally constant absence (subphysics). This neither means
that existence is minutely controlled in advance, that is to say as a
clock that is wound up by a divine creator hand and keeps on ticking as
it must (determinism). Nor does it mean that every event conceals an
unpredictable randomness (indeterminism). Rather, existence in its
*enormous but not infinite complexity* behaves transdeterministically
when processes are scrutinized, and when the actual processes interact
with other processes in a multitude of different directions. The
contingency thus has no need for chance in order to be contingent. It
merely needs the causal freedom, and causal freedom contingency receives
from hypertime since the future does not exist yet, which specifically
within spacetime is expressed as the future's level of complexity not
yet having been attained. Thus we can also see transdeterminism as a
necessary condition for [[Relationalism]] as a principle for all known
emergence vectors in our neutrally monist universe. Above all for the
development of a *systemic perspectivism* for which we strive to include
all emergence vectors as a metaphysical whole.
This brings us to the distinction in part between ontics and ontology,
in part between virtualities, potentialities and actual events. After
Immanuel Kant's philosophical revolution in the 18th century the
noumenal environment is converted to ontics and the phenomenal
experience to ontology. The only snag is that once we accept that
existence consists of processes and events and their underpinnings, we
also accept that existence fundamentally consists of emergences and
their vectors rather than of physics and matter. Physics and its
materiality is but one emergence vector among others. This entails that
we must accept a subphysics as a basis for physics and with that we also
accept fields of virtualities, and it is only when these membranes
collide with each other and establish relations between each other that
existence is actualized and Einsteinian spacetime becomes a necessity.
This means that we accept virtual fields as ontic realities without them
actually having been potentialized yet. Actuality is fundamentally
composed of processes and relations, and we call this
process-philosophical ontology *radical relationalism*. The virtual and
ontic world exists along the hypertime axis and in principle requires no
space. But when the virtual and ontic fields collide with each other,
Einsteinian spacetime arises and the result is an actualized world that
emerges as a physical world out of subphysics. The materiality is
actualized.
Everything is history and history is everything. There is nothing
outside history. The present is merely history's most recent
manifestation. The future is a blank page that thus does not yet have
existence. Existence is neither characterized by determinism nor
indeterminism, but is instead subordinate to transdeterminism. Certain
things cannot be predicted at all. Other things can be predicted with
frightening accuracy, but never with completeness. Thus we stand open to
the future. What happens, happens without our own influence as a result
of infinitely complicated processes beyond our control. And the fact
that we live in a transdeterminist universe means that the metaphysical
struggle between emergentism and reductionism is settled. Existence is
fundamentally emergent and not fundamentally reduced in any direction.
Emergences happen, vectors form, and laws and rules arise and apply
locally within the actual emergence vectors but nowhere else in the
Universe. If spacetime arises only after the (re)birth of the Universe,
this means not only that there are at least two time dimensions, but
also that subphysics precedes physics as the most fundamental building
block of our transdeterminist universe. Furthermore, it is no big secret
that chemistry, biology, biological intelligence and technological
intelligence follow as emergence vectors after subphysics and physics.
When we say that existence is fundamentally emergent, we mean precisely
this: existence is emergent and not physical. Which may sound
counterintuitive, but even so this follows by necessity from the
prerequisites we have discussed.
Reincarnation as the eternal recurrence of the same must sooner or later
give rise to the fantasy of an exit, a total and final breakdown for
cyclical time -- this breakdown is called *ekpyrosis* in Greek. But
behind every ekpyrosis the world is still born anew, which most aptly
can be likened to a spiritual big bounce, which we in retrospect can
define eventologically as *the ekpyrotic event*. Cyclical time, often
mythically symbolized by the self-eating snake *Ouroborus*, is according
to this analysis infinite and thus in a real sense timeless behind the
clearly delimiting spacetime. This concept is called *zurvan akarana* in
the Old Persian language Avestan -- or *sarvanum akarnum* in the Indian
twin language Sanskrit -- that is to say, the primordial origin of
everything else. Please note that *zurvan akarana* is neither a subject
nor an object, nor is it even dependent on a place or even on space in
general. Instead it is a case of a primordial time that precedes
everything else in existence and from which everything else stems. We
are now speaking of time as an attribute and not as a dimension. A
universe where nothing ever is erased. At least not before this universe
collapses, loses most of its information, and is replaced by a new one
out of the remnants from its predecessor.
It is out of this eschatology of one world's demise and another world's
birth within nomadology that we find the germ of what later in history
will be expressed as eventological thinking. If worlds can die and be
reborn within eschatology, decisive events must also be able to arise
during the development of the linear time that changes history once and
for all. It is of course this emergent event that propels the birth of
eventology. Absolute historicism is thus *eventology par excellence*,
which in Hegelese can be expressed as *the history about historicism
itself* being the pure eventology -- while *Jainism* in India is an
excellent example of a consistently applied cosmic nomadology, a
religion without gods but with eons of constantly repeated cyclical
time. A religion claiming that God is constantly available to us, or
that we are constantly available to God, is thus a religion underpinned
by a foundation of untruth. The hypergod behind God is forever
inaccessible to us and we to him. Between us and the hypergod *the
principle of explanatory closure* strikes with full force. Which makes
God himself inaccessible to most behind what we call *the barred
absolute*.
In the information society -- with its dramatic dissolution of space and
the insight of acute planetary limitations -- the ancient Greek time
gods Chronos and Kairos are pretty much converted into two demons.
Nationalism begets the nation as an event. Imperialism begets the empire
as an event. But beneath everything hovers capitalism as the global
phallic force without events or limits (see [[The Global Empire]]),
followed by the abstract dream of *communism* via [[Attentionalism]] as
the recurrence of the original nomadic tribe, [[The Sociont]]. However
since the space within which the demons expose themselves is finite,
these demons have in concert invoked a crisis from two directions
simultaneously. The fantasies of an immortal philosopher-king who
expands his perfect territory in an infinite space has reached the end
of the road. Mortality, imperfection and finitude have caught up with
Man. There is nothing else to do but to endure the brutal crash landing
that is inflicted on the Platonist roller coaster, to return to an ever
deeper history of humanity, to thus find a new stronghold, a new
[[Root-Of-The-Phallus]], to be able to build a new and more robust phallic
vision for informationalism. The old demons must be tamed and submitted
to the new *protopias* we aim for. And the path leading there goes via
the Protopia which rises from history as though it really was there all
along, which is called religion, and which for our paradigm bears the
name [[historiography/texts/Process and Event/glossary/Syntheism]] and which we explore thoroughly in a book fittingly
called *Syntheism -- Creating God in the Internet Age*.
No matter how strong libido is, mortido is still invariably stronger.
The will to life is always trumped by the death drive. The snag here is
that Man generally only is conscious of his libido but not of his
mortido. It is solely in conjunction with extremely powerful experiences
that we call *ecstasy* or *trauma* that mortido steps out of the shadows
and commandeers Man's conceptual world. Ecstasy creates this effect
through enticing Man with immortality; trauma through enticing Man with
life's immediate termination. We call these experiences decisive events,
both with regard to a dividual human life and with regard to the history
of an entire society. The doctrine of how these events control our lives
is called eventology and it is, of course, driven in the reverse by *the
dialectics of libido and mortido*, which we deal with in our book
*Digital Libido -- Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society*.
In the same way that mortido governs our very earliest impulses in life,
it is mortido that also returns and takes charge at the moment of death,
which expresses itself in the acceptance of our personal mortality. What
eventology underlines -- with the greatest conceivable clarity -- is
that mortality always is preferable to immortality and what Man can
strive for never can be anything deeper than survival and life
extension, not immortality in itself. This is because libido, the will
to life, merely is conceivable against the backdrop of a conception of
life's finitude, of the definitive termination of every history, which
of course entails that another story can commence. Life only receives
color and meaning through being presumed at some point to reach an
ending, the thought of an eternity ultimately becomes unbearable. This
means that history also only receives color and meaning through being
presumed to reach its ending at some point. Which entails that society
only receives color and meaning if it at some point is presumed to reach
its ending. Which means that humanity only receives color and meaning if
it at some point is presumed to reach its ending. This is what spacetime
teaches us as spatiotemporal creatures, namely that all that *exists*
rather than just *subsists*, also has an ending.
It is only thanks to the four different time dimensions that we can
comprehend this fully. Hypertime is -- and is only -- the metahistorical
container within which the other time dimensions are played out.
Spacetime is the arena within which Man, technology and their mutually
developed relations are played out. Hypertime reminds Man of the virtual
infinity within which all actual finitudes, such as himself, his
humanity and his technologies, *de facto* exist. Spacetime reminds Man
of the actual finitude that makes him finite. This means that hypertime
(*Chronos*) is mortidinal in nature while spacetime (*Kairos*) in
essence is libidinal. And correspondingly, among the ontological time
dimensions, nomadology and its eternal recurrence of the same
corresponds to *the matrichal mortido* as the origin and objective of
everything human. At the same time as eventology builds *the phallic
libido* as a kind of temporary and -- even from the start, literally
speaking -- doomed protest against mortido's indomitable power.
This means that what all the world's engineers and other
civilizationally tamed warriors and hunters really are devoting
themselves to during all of civilization, are two separate construction
projects. Consciously the engineers build the Saoshyant or the Messiah
machine that is to save humanity from the apocalypse. But subconsciously
the engineers ultimately simultaneously build the god who is to succeed
and take over after humanity when humanity itself has perished. The
syntheist project is thus the ultimate expression of *womb envy*. This
is ironically manifested with the most nomadological construction
project of all throughout history, namely *The Silk Road,* which bound
together East and West across the entire enormous Eurasian landmass. The
trade routes are of such dignity and achieve the interconnecting
function. In history we find three different types: the land route, the
sea route, and what we may add as the air route -- to which we include
both the modern air transportation that has made the entire planet (in
principle) physically accessible within 24 hours, and the satellite
communication that has made the entire planet potentially accessible in
a second.
The deepest subconscious motivator of eventology is that the man himself
shall bring forth the son that executes and replaces him without the
influence of the matriarchy (*the patricide*). This is the fundamental
fantasy that propels the enormous mortidinal engine behind the phallic
libido. We plan and we construct, just as Man always has done, to make
ourselves immortal. But we do not only do this on our own behalf when we
are confronted with our mortality, but we also do this for civilization
in its entirety, just over a much greater time span. And it is basically
this and only this that is the primordial source of sexual desire. The
expression "I feel that I'm alive" can only be understood as an
expression of an intense feeling of immediate mortality. Man can sit and
divide his narratives between *logos* and *mythos* to his heart's
desire, but in the existential conflict between the gods and the
authentic priests, he has no access to any other narrative than *the
pathical dialectics of libido and mortido*.
In that conflict mortido must ultimately triumph, and as a consolation
prize libido is awarded a hope of transcendence after the inevitable
death, that is: the dying libido is replaced by a new libido *ad
infinitum*, physiological or technological matters not one bit, at least
not between engineers. We should always contemplate the somewhat
shameful fact that it is precisely when we leave this fundamental
Zurvanite understanding of our existential conditions -- particularly
during the axial age and enlightenment epochs we naively and
uncritically have praised -- that we humans create all the world's evil;
a misery and a confusion that only entails complicated detours for
ourselves. For it is then and only then that the necessary authentically
phallic chieftains and priests are replaced by smug but impotent
boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints. The Zoroastrian *mobeds* constantly warn
us of what the Gnostics can bring about. They saw already back in the
Sassanid empire of ancient Persia how the Gnostics through their
mendacious separation between body and mind soon started to fantasize
about the mind having a freedom that only machines but not humans could
be assigned.
This means that the necessary re-write of the entire history of ideas
that informationalism requires of us, must begin with a humble
manifesto. We realize that we are all born to be *the slaves of Zurvan*
and we accept this as a logical and existential necessity. The
dialectics of libido and mortido teaches us that we are all going to
die, that there is a single cohesive history for humanity, a history
that is not determinist but that we all participate in creating.
Further, we learn that this history has a mortidinal objective, and that
this objective is our own extinction. Which conveniently is an objective
that we as humanity cannot fail at. Thus Man need not focus on that
objective; rather, we can comfortably place it far away in a distant
future and call that objective God. Instead Man can devote his energy to
worrying about what he should do with the time during the time.
## How do we handle the pathic power that we call libido?
All this requires a new and deepened understanding of time in itself as
a phenomenon. It is interestingly enough probably a voyage -- as Lee
Smolin observes in the book *Time Reborn* (2013) -- that hardly even has
begun, since all the boy-pharaohs and pillar-saints of the past three
millennia have preferred to dwell on infantile phantasms such as
eternity and immortality, rather than on pragmatically tangible
engineering matters such as time and space. This ironically means that
we must commence the necessary re-write of philosophy's and theology's
history with one massive *back to go*. We must start over. The simple
fact is that if we are to carry out informationalism's [[Exodology]], we
must not only have a sense of where we are going -- that is to say which
libidinal objective we set for our own age before the barred absolute,
while this protects us against our collective mortido -- we must first
of all know where we are and how we got here. And to do this we must
delve deeper into history than we have ever done before. Thanks, dear
Syntheos, for there being machines to aid us in this too. Welcome to the
brave new world of data anthropology.
Paradigm shift shock is the chaos that awaits when a new
information-technological paradigm breaks through. It takes time for the
constant Man to adapt to the variable Technology. The first millennium
after permanent settlement was established was for instance the
bloodiest period in human history, since the participants in question
still lacked a metanarrative about connectedness that could serve as a
foundation for a long-term, strategic collaboration. Everyone simply
helped themselves to anything they could as soon as the opportunity
presented itself. One reasoned short-sightedly and selfishly. No actor
invested in any form of future. It was not until organized religion
arrived and built joint temples on the shamanic borderland between the
river valleys -- from which it preached the new grand narrative of the
shared root-of-the-phallus -- that fairly long periods of peace could be
maintained, and trade and growth could flourish. And there is no reason
to believe that the present paradigm shift from industrialism to
informationalism, and from capitalism to attentionalism (see *The
Netocrats*), will be the least bit easier than previous ones.
Particularly since our entire world is shifting paradigms simultaneously
this time. While no one seems to understand what is underway while it is
underway, since the dominant actors are strapped into their old
political, industrial and academic models that have become completely
irrelevant. They are acting in a new world while they are thinking in an
old one.
It is time to not only go back to history, but also to re-write history
as though it had a new Hegelian necessity about it. And this new
necessity to which the root-of-the-phallus points is *the
informationalist paradigm*, with its shift from a religion based on
magic -- via pathetic attempts to no religion at all -- to a religion
based on technology. Everything is history and since it concerns a
paradigm shift, the new paradigm can only be understood if it receives
its own new history. We once again visit history to understand
ourselves, but this time we do so with social-technological and
data-anthropological glasses. If religion has stopped being magical and
instead has become technological, the phallic hope will no longer be
based on a faith, but actually on what Hegel calls *absolute knowledge*.
The old Zoroastrian dream that the truth (*asha*) one day shall defeat
the lie (*druj*) in a battle of near-cosmic proportions comes true, when
the free and open algorithm plays its hand. Welcome to the information
society and the development of its necessary stories about itself.