Temporality of the Future

NYU, New York NY, April 22, 2016
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
Temporality of the Future
Part of a Series on Cryptophilosophy
cryptophilosophy
Melanie Swan
Time Theorist
Philosophy & Economic Theory
New School for Social Research, NY NY
melanie@BlockchainStudies.org

April 22, 2016
Temporality of the Future 1
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

April 22, 2016
Posthuman-class
problem: how can we
make more time?

April 22, 2016
Thesis Statement
3
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

April 22, 2016
Part I: A New Theory of Time
4

April 22, 2016
http://www.robotandhwang.com/attorneys/
Law Firm,
San Francisco CA
How to develop empowering human-
machine collaborations, especially when…

April 22, 2016
…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
6

April 22, 2016
What is time?
7
“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

April 22, 2016
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
8
Source: Bergson, Henri. (1889, 2001). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Dover Publications,
London UK.

April 22, 2016
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)
9
Source: Husserl, Edmund. (1991, 1964). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer
Academic Publishers: Dordrecht NL.

April 22, 2016
1. Retention 1. Protention
Present
Now
Primal
Impression
2. Recollection 2. Expectation
(Discrete) (Discrete)
(Continuous) (Continuous)
Husserl’s Internal Time Consciousness
I. 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

April 22, 2016
A “Middle Third” Time term is needed
 Overcome either/or conceptualizations of time
11
 Discrete
 Snapshot
 Digital
 Quantitative
 Objective
 Recollection-Expectation
 Computing Clocktime
 Machine-time
 Continuous
 Flow
 Analog
 Qualitative
 Subjective
 Retention-Protention
 Physics/Biology Time
 Human-time

April 22, 2016
Why? Cognitive Bias
We 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
12
Sources: 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.

April 22, 2016
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
13
Source: 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.

April 22, 2016
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?
14
Source: 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

April 22, 2016
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 Consciousness
II. 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

April 22, 2016
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)
16
Source: 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

April 22, 2016
Part II: FutureNow Posthuman Temporality
17

April 22, 2016
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
18
Source: 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.

April 22, 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
19
Source: WoW = World of Warcraft http://www.wowace.com/addons/prat-3-0

April 22, 2016
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 future
3. Blocktime: time becomes future-assignable,
future-creatable
20

April 22, 2016
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”
21
Source: Swan, M. Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blockchain Arbitrage. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Swan20151202

April 22, 2016
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
22
Source: MTL (machine trust language) time primitives: http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2015/11/machine-trust-language-mtl-
human.html

April 22, 2016
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
23
Source: Swan, M. Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blockchain Arbitrage. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Swan20151202

April 22, 2016
“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
24
Source: Carr, D. (2014). Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World.

April 22, 2016
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?
25

April 22, 2016
Thesis Statement
26
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

April 22, 2016
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
27

April 22, 2016
Kurt Vonnegut
“Salami-mercury (quantitative-qualitative) theory of time”
28
“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, 2016
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
Melanie Swan
Time Theorist
Philosophy & Economic Theory
New School for Social Research, NY NY
melanie@BlockchainStudies.org
Thank You! Questions?
Part of a Series on Cryptophilosophy
cryptophilosophy

Temporality of the Future

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