finding time

Time is hidden. It's a meta-condition of any sequence of events; and it requires itself to be regarded by a consciousness, which itself was shaped by a time much longer than its thought process or the biological ones that gave rise to it, individually.

Where do we find time?

We substantiate it in the clock. And we work with it to organize a society. We define it from without in order to establish proscriptions that effectively segment and order activity. To determine what worth one's hour of labor is is but one peculiar and representative manifestation of time as a means through which power is administered to the 'realities' of people's lives. Time gives meaning, albeit unfairly.

Without identifying where time is we may all be sure in our own pedestrian understanding when it is, now, yesterday, and tomorrow. Time is but a segmentation of an eternity, which cannot be measured, and which does not exist in reality.

Consider the choices that a general makes or a head of state or a pilot handling a foundering plane. The choices are simple enough that anyone could make them. A general may move a specific direction in a battle, something that anyone can do. A head of state may choose to raise or lower taxes, a decision not far out of the ken of any of us. A pilot, and here's the kicker, may adjust the throttle, yaw, and rudder controls to fix a rapid descent, and those actions are simple movements of hands on devices that any grown person could reach and manipulate. Sundered from the specifics of person, action, and context they're simply movements. Read against the situation in which they occur, they become examples of wisdom, leadership, quick thinking, bravery, heroism. On the one hand you have the big story and on the other you have the actions that anyone could have done. So the actions of peoples are orthogonal to the story told of those actions; they're merely incidental to the substance of events but an instrumental aspect of the narrative. Stories take time to tell, planes and nations take time to build, and the words we use to participate in or describe our world are also old luggage, still functional but belonging to no one person or no one time. Time in this sense is like a residue covering everything, which cannot be washed off. As sure as we can be of existence, so to is time; yet we only see its traces, its effects.

Time exists as a property of every thing, from the whale in the ocean to the atoms that currently constitute its body. Time is an essential category of life itself. The complex helix of proteins that instruct a cell contain a history of interaction with an environment that both shapes the cell and allows the cell to shape its environment. Time exists in the peculiar arc of development and organization of life and through it we find an unbroken chain of life-events from the earliest strings of proteins awash in a primordial sea to that ocean inside of us all. Our bodies and their homeostatic conditions are living memorials to a billion year old ocean that contained the mere and quite incidental conditions for giving rise to molecular complexity and eventually life.

Now let us retract a statement previously made. Time is not a residue on things. Things are a residue upon time. Why a molecule could substantiate time by retaining a 'memory' of its own replication is hard to grasp. How it does is the easy part, but what is it about the peculiar arrangements of molecules, which are themselves beholden to the physics of attraction, repulsion, and atom-level connectivity, that allows time to become a condition of all substance to begin with?

I leave this half-thought only to state an obvious but sacrosanct idea; intelligence is an emergent property of organized complexity. And all organized complexity, outside of the abstractions of people, is literally stuff--surfaces and shapes, which, through time have sundered the incidental features of form from environment to establish a motive over the course of time. In its final overture, what intelligence does is create and maintain the internal environments that allow its molecules to continue working to keep that internal environment in existence. The selective membranes surrounding genetic material are but one materialization of stuff with motives elicited by a much smaller and uniquely organized category of stuff--genes. Life is how time goes from being a non-dimensional property of a physical world to one that is of that world in full dimension.