Kant and Vance, Pt III

On page 120 of the Ace Paperback edition of his novel Big Planet, Jack Vance has a human native of the eponymous world mention the “Temofluxion Dogma.” To quote –


... the advouters claim that as the river of time flows past and through us, our brains are disturbed – jostled, if you will – by irregularities, eddies, in the flow of the moments. They believe that if it were possible to control the turbulence in the river, it would be possible to manipulate creative ability in human minds.


This interests me. I’d read a five-hundred page tome expounding on this. Know of any?

What fascinates me is this “river of time” concept. What could it possibly be? I can understand a deity influencing us, whether through dreams or synchronistic coincidences or moving us about like chessmen on a chessboard. Perhaps He (or “It” or “they”, I’ll grant for the speculative nature of this post) uses this timestream to influence us the way Hercules diverted the rivers to clean out the Augean stables.

I’ve always imagined God and reality this way: Picture the universe as a big, long, self-contained box. Oh, let’s say three feet high by three feet wide and thirty feet long. A clear, transparent box. Sliding down the length of the box is a thin pane of glass. The pane represents the Present Moment and slowly moves from one side of the box to the other. God stands in the “space” outside the box, looking in. He can see everything that happened in the past, where the pane has passed through, and everything in the future, where the pane is heading towards.

Simplistic and unimaginative, perhaps, but I think that my way is generally how most people view reality. (Remember, here in America polls have consistently shown that around 90-95 percent of us believe in a Deity.)

Let’s zero in on that box. Or more specifically, that clear pane – the “Now” – that’s moving steadily from Past to Future. That’s the River.

One might initially think, for the purpose of Vance’s idea, of this pane as more of a finely-meshed net. Not a fixed, static net, but one which constantly shifts, one whose openings shrink and enlarge and connect and divide and move about. All depending on the desires of the controller, the He / It / they who stand outside the box. Maybe those percolating multiverses or branes you here contemporary physicists talking about.

But wait a minute. Time doesn’t flow past us. We flow with time. We’re bobbing about this river. In “reality” we’re attached to the pane. Therefore, something that stands independent inside this box must form the eddies and irregularities in the flow of the river. He / It / they toss(es) a quadrillionplex of stones out into the box, all according to His / Its / their will, and that pane push-pulling us forward in time brings us into contact. Then the ripples the “stones” cause within the pane affect us – our “creative ability”, according to Vance.

Move this all up into a higher dimension or two or eleven or twelve (or a million), and I think we might possibly have an accurate model for this type of reality theory.

Homework: Figure out the kinematic equations of the stone tossing and the force relationships of stone-pane contact, and then reconcile with the quantum wave function (or matrix mechanics, whichever’s easier).

Now let’s move in still closer. What does it mean to say that turbulence in the river manipulate human creativity?

Obviously we’re not talking about physical manipulation. We may not know what “time” is, and we may not know what “human creativity” (a.k.a. thought) is, but we know neither of them initially manifest as physical objects.

So we’re dealing with the immaterial.

Now, I am far from an expert; really just an interested sideline observer. Some dude who’s read a few books. Not much more. And these are just random, spare-time musings. But – does this hold any water? Yesterday I mentioned quantum mechanics, specifically how it syncs up a lot with the Kantian conception of reality.

A major part of quantum mechanics deals with equations that describe the properties of atoms. I remember spending close to a month studying Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom, the simplest of all atoms. I think I understood that, but the subsequent chapters of the textbook for that course left me dazed and confused.

A major proposition of quantum mechanics is that the atom is neither a wave nor a particle, but something that is in some inexplicable way, both without being either. In its very basic building blocks, matter is not matter as we know it on a macro scale, but something shady and ethereal that is undefined until we observe it (much like Kant’s noumena). Matter – in the most commonly referenced case, the electron – is best described by a probability wave.

Might the concepts of “time” and “thought” be more akin property-wise to this noumena than to anything physical? I know that’s like asking, is an apple more like a color or a number, so I acknowledge the statement may be meaningless. But might it at least be possible that it would be best to describe them in some sort of comparable way, like the way quantum mechanics describes matter? Like a probability wave, only we’d be talking about –

Time waves

and

Thought waves

In some sort of higher-higher-mathematical sense. To figure out how the two waves influence each other, you’d need some phenomenal genius

first, to derive them in their self-contained forms,

second, to set them equal to each other (or to zero) and then solve.

I have no idea what the physical implications of any of this is, nor if I’m just babbling about like some village idiot championing something like [1,001x^2e * the arctangent of the Earth-Sun < on 4,004 BC / pi * 42] ! * the MEEP function = Life. Nor if I come off sounding like the rantings of the Time Cube guy (google it).

But I enjoyed typing it all out yesterday afternoon.