Sun Dec 6 07:43:21 2020
<98799208> +public!
— Waves, Spirals & Amphibian Lemurs: Nick Land on Time
— “I have become time, the destroyer of worlds”
—Hindu god Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita
“In philosophical terms, the deep problem of acceleration is transcendental. It describes an absolute horizon – and one that is closing in. Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already”
—Nick Land, “A Quick & Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism”
In previous blog posts, I’ve explored Nick Land’s relationship to libertarian thought, as well as his subversive irrationalist reading of Kant. So far however, I have neglected to tackle what he himself considers the central plank of his worldview: his philosophy of time. Land’s understanding of time, following in the tradition of Kant, Bergson and Deleuze, and bringing together insights from cybernetics, urban economics and thermodynamics, provides the ontological structure for his accelerationism and all his other major ideas.
Energy, Time & Entropy
In 1965, Robert Oppenheimer reflected on his experiences at the first atomic bomb test, saying it brought to mind an ominous line spoken by Krishna in the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. It’s generally agreed that Oppenheimer mistranslated this line; “I have become time, destroyer of worlds” might have been a better rendering. The mistranslation of time as death may seem strange but, in a certain sense, time and death are very similar phenomena; both are closely related to the physical concept of entropy.
A living thing dies when it falls apart, when it ceases to be an integrated system. In a broader sense, death always means falling apart. Cosmologists talk about the “heat death” of the universe, a potential scenario in which matter and energy throughout the universe become so evenly spread out that no events can take place anymore. Change requires the dissipation (spreading out) of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as intensive differences i.e. asymmetric organisations of matter and energy. Once everything is spread out as far as possible, there can be no change and thus no life.
After heat death has occurred, there is also no time, i.e. time no longer exists. This can be a very difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, since we tend to think of time as a kind of absolute framework in which everything resides. But time (the time of physics at least) is something in the universe; the universe is not inside of time. Physicists define time simply as “that which a clock measures”. In which case, after heat death there would be no clocks and no possibility of there ever being a clock ever again, so hence no time.
This is not just a silly semantic issue, but a truly substantive one. A clock is able to measure time in the first place because the clock is animated by energy that flows through it in a process of dissipation. Things change when energy asymmetries dissipate. And if things did not change, we would have no conception of before and after, and hence nothing to think of as “time”. The process of dissipation that allows the clock to tick is what the clock is measuring*. Just like a ruler is only able to measure space by being a substantial, extended object that exists in space.
Dissipation is not just something that happens; it is, at root, the only thing that ever happens. This is what gives us the second law of thermodynamics: things always tend to fall apart, energy always tends to spread out; more technically: entropy tends to increase in a closed system, where entropy means disorder or “spread-out-ness”. This is a statistical law rather than an absolute one, but it is so inviolable at a general level that it might as well be necessary and absolute. The one inescapable fact about the universe is that everything dies. The key issue then is how death can be postponed, and what it means to achieve that.
Entropy & the Arrow of Time
Unlike space, time has a direction: past comes before present comes before future. We can walk backwards and forwards in space, but time always seems to just march on unchallenged. This directionality of time comes from the second law of thermodynamics: since the natural tendency of everything is to fall apart, and since change depends on this process of dissolution, the direction of time is simply the vector along which things fall apart. To go forwards in time is to dissolve.
It is our perception of whether things are falling apart or not that allows us to judge the direction of time. A simple example: you watch a video in which a glass falls from someone’s hand and smashes on the floor—alarming perhaps, but quite normal. Next, you watch a video where the glass begins as smashed pieces on the floor; these then spontaneously knit themselves into a perfectly intact glass, which promptly flies up into the air and into someone’s hand. The video is clearly being played backwards. How can you tell? Because a glass spontaneously mending and jumping into the air violates the second law of thermodynamics (and our seemingly innate intuitions about the behaviour of objects).
Yet, as Land points out, processes just as remarkable as a glass knitting itself back together are occurring around us all the time, we just don’t notice because we’re used to them. When an apartment block gets built for example, a massive increase in order—i.e. a massive decrease in entropy—has occurred. Disordered materials have been ordered into a building. Why is this any less astounding than the glass spontaneously mending itself? The obvious answer is that the building was constructed by the energy input and agency of human beings—but this just replaces one astounding phenomenon with another even more astounding one: continued human orderliness.
If we accept a materialist ontology, human beings consist of nothing but matter. How then does this matter, which loves to fall apart, manage to maintain itself in such a complex, orderly arrangement as a human being? Physicist Erwin Schrödinger sought to explain this “negentropy” in his landmark work What is Life?; Schrödinger argues that living things (and by extension, complex self-sustaining systems in general) maintain a high state of order by exporting entropy. Humans actually create more disorder—in the form of heat and waste products—than order, but this waste allows us in a certain sense to purchase a temporary orderliness.
Order is always maintained by riding on the back of entropic dissolution. At the macroscopic scale at least, something else must always fall apart to pay for an increase in order. This dissolving substrate supports an emergent ordered layer, forming a complex system. Land’s rather fascinating contribution at this point is to bring the concept of time back in: if time’s direction is simply a function of whether things are falling apart or not, then reductions in entropy are like reversals in time. A complex negentropic system like a human being could be said to rely on the creation of a time anomaly, a temporary and local reversal of the direction of time.
This is not quite as bonkers as it sounds. Land, in his Bitcoin & Philosophy seminars, compares this local time reversal to eddies: eddies are little temporary reversals of flow in a stream of water; they are local reversals, sustained by a general underlying flow in the main direction of the stream. They are emergent phenomena, dependent on an underlying disorder, but they are real reversals of the flow. Similarly, negentropic processes such as life, economic development, the accumulation of intelligence and so on could be seen as temporary, local reversals in the flow of time: negentropic processes as eddies of life in a river of time-death.
Waves, Loops &…
