Time is in boundless supply as the driving force for all mechanical axions. Time allows for axion and everything else, yet at the same time (see that there), it limits us. We are not four-dimensional beings, we are three-dimensional machines in R4. A two dimensional drawing on 3d paper can’t get up and walk out of the plane; that drawing is bound to the dimensions of its creaxion, regardless of the space it occupies. It’s the same for us. I understand there is no escape from linearity, at least not in a material sense, but that doesn’t mean we need it to enframe us, to inhibit our thinking and the choices we allow ourselves.
See, in reality, time is a lot more complicated than we might first believe. This is not just a philosophical adage either; General Relativity and the emergence of modern science has demonstrated to us (though in a way through its own enframement) that time is malleable, not always constant, divergent, and far beyond linear comprehension. A year on earth is exchanged for around a month on Jupiter, though neither of these remain constant either, gravity fields are always changing, the flow of time is multitudinous.
Time has been enframed by our mechanical imposition of linearity upon it. The present is the convergence of history in totality, like the integrated metric in a PID controller, and an array of all possible futures. This node remains temporally stationary while one possible future moves on the axis into history and all other possibilities previously allowed are made void from our perspective. History does not contain all possible pasts, these are personal conjectures only. The point of the present is either variable or constant, differing in the modal or mechanical planes of perception (more on this later).
The present is nothing more than summation between the concrete past allowed for by mechanical temporality (tau in the diagram) and the recent potential, that is the last addition to this history which dissolved all over potential futures at the previous linear frame of the present, a frame which is now a point on the previous future. The variability on a temporal node in the mechanical plane, that is the time t we quantify as the present, moves with the observer, absorbing actualised potentials into history, dissolving unactualised potentials, and constantly changing in allowances and paths for potential futures. However, these paths are not infinite.
For mechanical temporality, the node of the present is a vector of the entire past (this itself made of infinite or near summations) and the recent past (the last actualised potential future) summed. This means, in the mechanical plane, the present can only be understood as this. It can never be the totality of history added with an unactualised potential, that is a future which could have come to pass but did not. The mechanical only allows for that which may happen and that which did. There is no speculation of history.
You may notice the erasure of potential. This is the largest trap of mechanical experience, the enframement of linearity. We indeed may individually speculate on ‘what-ifs’ of our own timestream, or in the case of comics of a fixional one, but there is no material basis for any of this. From the mechanical standpoint we go about our lives in, mostly through force from biological confinement, potential futures dissolve the moment a single path is chosen. Those personal speculations are fun, but invalid. This helps also to explain the changing node of the present, through a variable reference frame, this moment to the next, the present is always behind us and out of our reach, the mechanical cannot exist truly in a single moment but rather a confluence, a convergence, always in flux.
All of this is different for the modal observer, for the 4d beast with a million eyes. To that frame, potentials are maintained in history and nodes are constant. If we, as an observer on the modal plane, dropped a node at one instant in time, it would remain, just as if we dropped a node in space, on a graph, ceteris paribus. Naturally, if we followed back all potentials they would infinitely stretch both backwards and forwards, so for simplicity, the potentials are only in observance of the dropped node.
Much is not as it seems. Now let us abandon our mechanical chains, break free of the enframement, those of linearity which providence has allotted for us, and undertake a modal analysis of temporality (one which accounts for all potential, variations of worlds, and studies time on its own terms, seeing as a 4d dimensional observer might). This will require, naturally, temporal nodes. Think of these as we would points in Carteseanal space but instead bound to the domain of time. That is, if we were to look at them on a spacetime graph, there may be movement along the space axis but none along the time.
In mechanical terms, these nodes are variable, as we have seen with our conception of the present, represented by t. There is actual movement, that is, the actual substance of t is variable.
For the modal plane, time as time sees itself, this is constant. Once a node is dropped, it remains until it is moved to another place in time-space. This explains the allowance for potential histories because there is no movement of the node to erase these potentials, instead, like a warp engine, the apparent flow of time moves around the point, as space would move around a warp bubble with the appearance of super-light travel.
All of these in conjunxion, give a clear example of enframement--that which allows for a supposed good at the expenses of potentials. In the case of mechanical linear enframement, this is the literal erased potential eroded by present movement forcing actualised pasts. This also means, because of this enframement, mechanical temporality allows only for linearity, allows only for actuality, and, in fact, anytime we individually speculate with ‘what-ifs’ and branching butterfly effect trees, we are actually viewing time modally, the best that we can, even if these historical potentials are not truly unactualised futures. This is one way to circumvent mechanical enframement.
To understand our poisoned view of time, that of the mechanical plane, we need only understand two simple things. First, the present is the vector t, a vector formed in summation of the all the previous actualised potential vectors, which points from our understanding of time’s beginning to ‘right-now’, there by highlighting the ‘moment’ (whatever flawed measurement we might use) in which that assessment of the ‘present’, the convergence, the snapshot, takes place (always variable and dependent on the ‘moment’ of observance, as in the variable reference frame).
Figure 1
Second, that mechanical history, that set of lies Bonaparte tells us we agree upon, whether factual and material or flawed, is all the constituent parts of the summation vector t, meaning all the actualised futures, all the ‘true’ potentials, tracing backwards and forwards along the line that points to ‘right-now’. This too, represented by tau, is also variable, as its value in this lens is dependent on the value of the present, of t and its nodal position.
Both of these are destroyed in modal temporality. T can still be thought of as a vector, but it’s in a constant spot, never moving, and the origin for the arrow is not from one actualised past but pointed too from all historical potentials, all converging at the node and then splitting of again into even more infinity futures, think ℵ null to ℵ 100, always increasing, always adding infinity upon infinities.
Thinking this way may seem hard or even impossible. It’s true we are confined by the chemical construxion of our minds to the mechanical plane, but our consciousness is in a way transcendent. Because of this, we have the potential (as all of history and antihistory) to create within our minds, to break free of chains, and to experience every ‘moment’, the present, as an endless array of potential instead of being confined to one. We can free ourselves. Allow for ourselves the freedom which sentience begs. We need only imagine beyond the ordinary.
*Correxion: Figure 1 should characterise Tau as the magnitude of the vector t.