artefactphil

In my recent interchange per video with Dean Rickles (Exploring Three-Dimensional Time with Michael Eldred, recorded on 07 May 2026), I neglected to mention several salient points of my temporalogical thinking. Here I have the opportunity to remedy at least a couple of these desiderata.

Dean and I touched upon and even delved into crucial aspects of my thinking through our back-and-forth. I notice that there is a constant danger and even inevitability of relapsing by spatially reducing the phenomenon of time, say, by thinking of the openness of three-dimensional time as a kind of quasi-space, implicitly confusing ‘when’ with a non-temporal ‘where’. That’s no wonder, considering the millennia-long tradition of Western metaphysics and our resultant ingrained habits of thinking.

Three-dimensional time is nowhere at all. It is ‘pre-where’, prior to any whereness. (It is also pre-physical and thus pre-material.) A possible event/occurrence presencing from the future in the mind, for example, but still absent as a present event, and perhaps never presencing in the mind as coming from the present, has its futural ‘when’ and may still present itself ‘whence’ as present for the mind. In general, events eventuate temporally from one or other of the three possible whens when presencing in the mind.

In the case of genuinely creative eventuations from the future, these happen spontaneously ‘out of nothing’, futurally from their own characteristic ‘when’. They cannot be reduced to some kind of more or less complicated permutation of what has already come to presence for the shared mind in the present. The futural dimension of imagination is the genuinely creative source that may combine with and build upon what is already there and presences in the mind, thus rendering inventiveness of any kind temporally hybrid. (The futural nature of any kind of genuine creativity or inventiveness allows us to see the fundamentally delusive nature of any kind of Artificial Intelligence, no matter how sophisticated, since A.I. can only generate algorithmically from what is already there, viz. from the given data.)

I could have made the temporal meaning of being itself clearer by speaking of presencing, absencing and essencing for the understanding mind, and pointing out that all three can be seen as temporalizing (re)interpretations of Greek οὐσία (_ousia_). Οὐσία is the principal concept of Aristotle’s ontology that continues its career throughout Western thinking under its mistranslation and misinterpretation as ’substance’. Properly speaking, οὐσία has to be interpreted in its intimate temporal proximity to παρουσία (_parousia_, presence) and ἀπουσία (_apousia_, absence), all formed from the feminine present participle οὖσα (_ousa_, being) of the verb εἶναι (_einai_, to be). Thus, reinterpreted temporalogically, ‘beings’ become ‘essents’ essencing ‘participatively’ in the temporally three-dimensional psyche by presencing in and absencing from the mind.

Furthermore, when Dean and I discussed historical hermeneutic casts of mind, I could have done better by outlining the hermeneutic cast of our present age as the cast of interior subjective consciousness vis-à-vis an external objective world. In our age it is almost impossible for us to think in any way other than in terms of subject, object, consciousness. It seems self-evident, with its distinction between inside and outside, and the concomitant, apparently independent objectivity of the external world. Without this hermeneutic cast, we would not be plagued today by A.I.

Temporalogical thinking allows our mind to break out of this corset, first by recasting consciousness hermeneutically as the psyche belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time and then by realizing that the so-called objective world of material, physical objects is itself encompassed by this temporal psyche (it can essence ‘no-where’ — or rather, ‘no-how’ — else than temporally).

At the other end of the spectrum to temporalogical insight lies an apparently ‘external objective world’, misconceived as somehow ‘internalized in our heads’. Defusing this fateful misconception is just one of the daunting historical tasks and challenges facing the alternative temporalogical way of thinking da capo.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

It seems to be incontrovertible common sense, willingly adopted without further ado by philosophical and scientific thinking, that we humans have eyes so that we can see. The bodily organs of the eyes are used for vision, as any ophthalmologist will confirm. This vision is sensuous and therefore restricted, or truncated, to seeing things visible in the present, just one of the three temporal dimensions. The truncation of sensate vision of the eyes, or more generally, the necessary truncation of sensate perception to the sensuously present, amounts to the psyche’s mental faculty gaining access to the world only through a slit, whereas in truth, the mind is not only free to move imaginatively throughout all-encompassing three-dimensional temporality, but also to have a temporally threefold overview. The term ‘trifocal’ is therefore misleading because it is too close to sensate vision of the eyes. What has just been explicated with regard to three-dimensional mental presencing, however, gives the lie to the orthodox, common-sense way of thinking about sense perception via sense organs: it is because we see, i.e. mentally presence understandingly, and that ‘all at once’ into all three temporal dimensions, that we have eyes to see, in particular, sensuously visible things in the present. For the most part, however, we see non-sensuously ‘all at once’ in all three temporal dimensions.

Similarly we do not hear because we have ears, but have ears because we hear temporally three-dimensionally, that is, for the most part non-sensuously. ‘Audible’ is therefore not synonymous with ‘sensually audible’. We remember and hear, even ‘play’, a tune from memory, and a composer hearkens creatively, imaginatively, into the future to hear the music he or she will compose by drawing — or rather, being receptive to — the as-yet-unheard music arriving from future into the present. In this sense, hearing is not primarily bodily perception enabled by the ears, but temporally threefold. We humans do not hear because we have ears, but have ears because we hear three-dimensionally. A salient example of this temporally three-dimensional hearing is the already deaf Beethoven’s composing his late string quartets, which he hears coming from the future whilst having in mind also what he has already composed earlier and is still able to hear, albeit non-sensuously. He writes down his astoundingly creative new compositions arriving from the future in the present, which he would not have been able to do were it not for his temporally three-dimensional auditory receptivity.

One can even go a step further to gain the insight that we humans are able to think and understand not because we have brains, but rather that we have brains (and other assisting bodily organs) because we have understanding minds essencing imaginatively in the three-dimensional time of the psyche …

(Excerpt from the revised section 2.5 Temporally threefold mental presencing of my OHT.)

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024 (OHT).

Thinking of Music: An approach along a parallel path kdp, 2015.

Video: Exploring Three-Dimensional Time with Michael Eldred an interchange with Dean Rickles at Serious Jester.

Ever since our mind fell, or rather, rushed headlong, into “die schlechte Unendlichkeit” (the bad infinity - Hegel) of empirical research and experimental science, and said bye-bye to any attempt to gain knowledge of the essence, there is no end of progress. There is always a discovery to be made at the cutting edge of the experimental sciences. Theoretical models have to be tweaked and modified to fit newly established empirical facts about movements begging for causal explanation, in which the sciences believe absolutely, even when some statistical fuzziness intrudes. Efficient causality, the bread-and-butter of science, works along the time-line, with cause preceding effect. Thus events are (conceived to be) generated causally into the future from behind. Some effects call for multiple causes. When all the necessary causal conditions are fulfilled, these are (conceived to be) sufficient to trigger the effect that is then effected. (Artificial neurons in today’s A.I. mimic this kind of additive causality that thus grotesquely models human intelligence.)

There is also always yet one more critically revealing story to be told about the empirical state of the world, as chaotic, unjust and gut-wrenching as it may be. Historiography and sociology continue to tell their factually based stories about how it came to be this way, to enlighten consciousness about how bad things are and what stories have been suppressed. They explain the world along a narrative time-line, drawing upon the facts gleaned from archives as proof of the story they tell. This event happened, then that happened. Some events call for multiple preceding events to explain them satisfactorily. Explaining the world narratively is never-ending. In our epoch, endless stories are told about capitalism, although the very different stories are essentially the same. Why this endless repetition? How can the truth of the essence ever be disclosed, since empirical knowledge can never get at it?

Explanations, whether they be causal or narrative or hybrid, presuppose that the world is understood, which amounts to how it is pre-conceived, i.e. conceived in advance, in an implicit interpretation, starting with the most elementary phenomena, the ones that do not presuppose any more elementary phenomena for their conception. The world only shows itself to the mind through its interpretation that consists, in turn, when laid out, of interconnected concepts that hang together for the mind. Thinking through this conceptual scaffolding of the mind’s interpretation of the world is what is called dialectical thinking that shows, first and foremost, how the most elementary phenomena hang together conceptually and thus how the world is built for the historical mind: an epochal hermeneutic cast of mind. This is the task of hermeneutic phenomenology: to disclose the world’s most elementary conceptual scaffolding.

Thus, everything depends upon how close the mind gets to interpreting the most elementary phenomena adequately through concepts. A misinterpretation of the most elementary phenomena leads to grave misunderstandings of more derivative phenomena, including their explanations by science’s theoretical models. Such models are built to explain movements in the world, starting with the physical, in order to predict and control them along linear time. The sciences, both natural and social, know only of linear time, along which they offer their explanations, both causal and narrative.

For hermeneutic phenomenology, however, that sets out to understand the world through careful conceptual interpretation, starting with its most elementary phenomena, the linear time of explanation cannot be presupposed and taken as self-evident. Therefore, efficient causality also cannot be taken as absolute. There are kinds of movement other than the physical, notably, the movement of the mind itself. The most elementary phenomena are being itself and time, and indeed, the very meaning of being itself is temporal, for we mortal humans are open to the world first and foremost through the openness of three-dimensional time (and not merely through sense perception in the present). To ‘be’ means to essence in the openness of three-dimensional time for the understanding mind as such-and-such which, in turn, is a faculty of the psyche. Our psyche belongs to, and resonates with, the shared openness of three-dimensional time. In this sense they are identical. Our resonating with the openness of time renders us mooded and thus musical; our psyche is attuned with the world.

Neither the sciences nor today’s philosophy know anything of this, but instead presuppose it implicitly, for we would not be human if we did not partake in three-dimensional time and ’see’, threefoldly ‘all at once’, into the three dimensions of time. We would be blind to any kind of movement as such whatsoever. Modern science and philosophy skip over apparently self-evident phenomena. The sciences deny that there is any deeper dimension to their causal explanations cobbled together by way of theoretical modelling. Such modelling is invariably judged by its effectiveness, i.e. its predictive power in explaining experience. They thus refuse to interrogate their pre-conceptions, by dint of which the phenomenal truth is covered up by correct empirical prediction as a substitute.

This is our predicament in the Modern Age, initiated above all by Descartes and Newton. It is the continuation of an historical trajectory that starts with Aristotle, who set up physics as the foundational science, providing the material-causal basis for our never-ending explanations of how the world moves. Physics has long since foundered on the rocks of quantum indeterminacy, owing to its misinterpretation of the phenomenon of time, that was stripped down to countable clock-time already by Aristotle. Even the most sophisticated, mathematized quantum physics and cosmology employ still this vulgar conception of time, suitably mathematized, or even try to eliminate the pesky time variable altogether from their equations of motion. The conundrums of quantum indeterminacy in mathematized physics are of its own making, by misconceiving, i.e. vulgarizing and spatializing, the phenomenon of time.

The conception of linear time first cast by Aristotle needs to be recast by going back to scratch. This is difficult and meets with savage resistance in the guise of complacency. Modern science and modern philosophy are too heavily invested in our reigning historical cast of mind to countenance such an unheard-of project. They continue to work instead at the cutting edge on the algorithmization of our mind and the world, i.e. on our self-abolition, through what is sold to us in our thoughtless gullibility as progress.

Neither empirically based science nor modern philosophy is able to fulfil any historical change of mind as articulated in the Greek phrase περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς, i.e. turning around the entire psyche. This the proper task of philosophy: to disclose the truth of the phenomena starting with the most elementary. But today’s philosophy has been thoroughly co-opted and corrupted by modern science; it serves as its handmaiden, entrusted condescendingly with ethical mopping-up that always comes too late.

Thus mathematization does make idiots of us all,
And thus the native hue of the phenomena
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of models,
And changes of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the urge of necessity.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld Appendix: ‘A demathematizing phenomenological interpretation of quantum-mechanical indeterminacy’ De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Quantum indeterminacy and the will to precalculate motion.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

An Invisible Global Social Value.

E = m.c^2

KABOOM!!!

Further reading: Three laws of movement (again).

Sidere mutato,
mens eadem,
unfortunately.
M — C — M+ΔM
M — C — M+ΔM
M — C — M+ΔM
…
Keep digging,
keep drilling,
Sunburnt Country!