The Concept of Acceleration (Session 8)

Hello and welcome to the final session of the concept of acceleration with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him now. Okay, thanks Theo and thanks to everyone who's here. I'm sure everyone shares my confidence that we're going to neatly wrap up all the things we've been talking about in this session. I've got a I think there's actually three sort of threads running into this one and I'm going to assume that that somehow they're going to converge is I think mostly comes

from Amy is that is the request that we end up with a discussion of time time not in us and I definitely think we should do that and the second is last week's we got into a kind of I don't know whether I should call it digression but it'd be wandered into lots of sort of concrete political recent political history stuff and I think certainly some people wanted us to carry on with that and so that's also something that I think is kind of hanging over us

and and we might want to pursue further today and the third thing which is basically comes from me as the sense of obligation which I honestly don't think I'm going to be able to fulfill very well is to is to spend some time talking about the extremely super recent accelerationist developments that have been weirdly happening I think with this class at mostly goes under the kind of unconditional accelerationist label and the person to bully about that obviously would be Vincent who I think has gone AWOL so that that's perhaps that's

perhaps reason for some pessimism even greater pessimism that than I already had that we'd be able to address that my sense really is that this is something that's that's going into another to my mind extremely fascinating wave of cultural process that all we're seeing right now is the uh is the initiation the triggering of that and it's going to be something going forward that we've perhaps been lucky enough to to catch it a glimpse of but but certainly it belongs here to the degree that we're able to capture it which which is perhaps limited and I should just throw in no

doubt a sort of fourth point that any of the multiple open threads of discussion that we've we've had so far over this over this couple of months this is this is going to be our chance to at least pursue them a little further if not do anything it's a nice neat knot in the end of it so I think you know in a succession of increasingly sorry I don't know when my audio just went berserk for now and yeah so in a succession of increasingly ragged sort of prefatory

remarks I'm gonna probably exceed myself in raggedness today and and just basically introduce one little well I'm gonna say something ridiculous okay I mean it's a one little topic I mean every every element of that description is utterly misleading and to the point of complete ridicule and self-paradic. So I'll walk that back a little bit. But I'll launch something that is a candidate for a kind of nutshell response to this question,

which I hope has at least been intermittently operating through this course about what is the basic transpartisan basic fundamental concept of acceleration in the sense that it is relevant to accelerationism and the candidate that I want to put forward is that accelerationism is the philosophy of spiral temporality so I'll just say a few things to try and defend that thesis and then basically throw it over in terror to to everyone in the

class and and we'll see how how things develop um so why would anyone at all be interested in in spiral temporality um I think for reasons that have been sort of recapitulated in our discussion in this class because um when the philosophy of time is treated um in its most historically concrete context um it tends to divide into a sense of there being these

two enormous cultural macro systems of time conception. To my mind, the language associated with this is always unsatisfactory, so it might need some poking around at. But something like linear or progressive on the one hand versus cyclic temporality on the other hand and I and I see this kind of basic opposition between these two fundamental cultural formations of time thinking arising over and over again and it's particularly interesting in from the

perspective China on this because the the interpretation is often put up on Chinese modernization in these terms is that China was forced eventually to surrender its traditional cyclic conception of temporality to a Western capitalistic modernistic progressive model of temporality and you can in quite a little concrete detail um discuss the sort of tortured process of china's kind of cultural accommodation to modernity using these terms um you know offshoots of which include um the the adoption of the

Western calendar sorry I'm pausing here only because I've just gone back into this oh no I don't think it's associated with art in our problem so I'll forge ahead and so in this in this very large kind of it's more cultural historical I think then then in some sort of tight sense philosophical and on this level mode of discussion the figure of the spiral is incredibly compelling because it seems to be a diagonal response to this option between two basic modes of

historical and temporal thinking the the the the spiral is a diagonal between a cyclical and progressive model of time I think you could alternatively say the spiral is a diagonal circuit or a prolonged diagonal and among the the features of the the spiral is that then the fact that it's diagonal fractal rhythmic and cybernetically positive and one that I think needs to be added which is a synthetic element because we're still left with the with the spiral

we're still left with two options and I think the the natural intuitive option is to treat it that a spiral is something that from an origin spirals outwards expansively or extensively and that certainly to us in a certain way seems to fit a model of amplificatory positive feedback that it's something that is both a reiterating rhythmic periodic process and also a process of amplification but i think it's really crucial to give it its full philosophical force to invert that sense of the spiral and to treat the spiral as involutionary that the spiral has as its asymptote

singularity and i think that you can you can preserve all the all the things that you want to do sort of systems dynamically with the with the expansive spiral with the involutionary spiral but what you what is emphasized when the spiral is spiraling inwards is something like time implosion it's something like compressive temporality it it i think dramatizes the kind of questions that we were talking about last week that i think uh at that point i attributed particularly strongly to paul virilio about acceleration being understood

in this ethico-political sense as a collapse of time horizons and a dehumanization a collapse of sort of the space of decision that pure speed leads to this compression to a point of impossibility decision making and therefore intrinsically to a an ethical political crisis little phrase that I think is really worth recalling here because it's very evocative but I think it's something that has to be again turned upside down or twisted or turned inside

out which is that I think needs googling more than I've yet googled it because it's one of these it's has an anonymous source but it's treated treated as something that captures a sort of dilemma of the kind of neoconservative epoch of Western I think it's sort of attributed implicitly to an Afghan hill warrior or some one of these other challenges to to the new concept of project which is you have the watches time and I think this notion you know the time is something that it's useful to see explicated there because the possibility of the prospect of deep

strategic political possibility seems to me fundamentally attached to this notion we have the time and if the rejoinder to say no you don't have the time time is collapsing it's imploding it's it's compressing and all your expectations about the extent of ethico-political decision-making need to be re-situated, space of accelerationist compression in which the walls are closing in,

in which everything that you've been led to expect about the opportunity you have for reflection and for long-term strategic decision making are no longer historically practical then you are in a new and i think extremely traumatic epoch which i want to say is the epoch of acceleration um it's the epoch we're in and i think it's the it's it's this is ultimately at a at a point that approaches the transcendental structure of this um political quandary

this is why our epoch recent epoch is so thoroughly characterized by shock and trauma you know the the real content of that is not some particular empirical events that have happened however disturbing they may be it's the sense that the very space of political response is being squeezed out of existence on this involutionary spiral of technomic acceleration that leads to certain kind of confluence of the position of the political with as a

extreme panic a time crisis so actually I think that's I think that's me Donald in introductory mode on this and I should just go straight to open the popping up for our last chance to turn these things over. I'm happy to jump in if you can hear me, because I've not got a microphone.

No, I can hear you really well. I don't know about everyone else. So is this conception of time of accelerationism dependent on acceptance of the idea of a singularity? This is something that is destined to happen and that will, when it happens, have this sort of, you know, the effects that it is traditionally said to have? I'm just wondering. Yes. It seems it seems as if it's it's being assumed or you know, it's taken or sort of taken for granted But as an end goal as if forget there are definitely sort of Yes Well, I think there's several elements to this. I mean look go peeling back your question from the end I

think if Idea whatsoever about what the singularity is supposed to um is supposed to bring with it or you know the associations we have or i can't remember exactly the way you formulated this but if there is some positive conception or idea of singularity i think the notion is being misunderstood um because the because singularity is just the horizon beyond which one cannot see like verna vinge's line line on i think is absolutely excellent that it's a wall across the future um so it's just a limit it's just a limit and and this is why

then i think we get to peeling down to the just previous level of your question and this is big so i'm gonna have to just try and control myself a little bit and and maybe leave certain things suggestive here but i think kurt's file is an extremely interesting figure like this because because what is the the difference between there's a really crucial difference at stake here which is really the difference if we're going to just treat it in the coldest uh geometrical sense the difference between an exponential and hyperbolic curve and an exponential curve doesn't ever it doesn't have a singularity there's no natural tendency to it you know so

so kurzwald's whole construction is that you know stuff keeps doubling and doubling and doubling but stuff can double i mean maybe you know there are physical limits or all of these empirical factors that could could limit it but but conceptually or philosophically there's nothing about an exponential trend that implies singularity at all whereas a hyperbolic trend actually does reach singularity actually reaches vertical and i think yeah i think this um theo's stuff is totally right i think if you

want to it's it's it's very crudely but but i think suggestively whether you think about some factor x doubling over over some given unit of time some period or you see time itself compressing for some unit of change you know time compression is hyperbolic i would say intensive and some sort of some other some growth factor increasing in time is exponential and doesn't imply singularity so kurzweil is not a singularitarian in any strong sense because he's an because his he doesn't really want to push beyond exponential

growth and there's a whole lot of kind of super exponential trends that that don't quite go hyperbolic so he he can occupy that space but but not reach this crisis that if you want to go hyperbolic if you want to reach singularity you go as theo says to xeno where you know you never reach the wall because you you go half the distance the wall and half the distance the wall and half the distance the wall and you never reach the wall that's a hyperbolic trend that's time compression and that does that does uh strongly imply necessity singularity

and so I think the thing is if we're starting from the position about the collapse co-political decision space then the natural tendency is to be on this hyperbolic line of time compression rather than on the the softer Kurzweilian line of um exponential growth of some relevant factor i mean sorry you you should you should definitely come back here james because i worried about him as you know wandering off your concern here

yeah okay so let me i i'm still trying to wrap my head around it really and so the weather spiral and the spiral ends at the end of this where the the height of the hyper hyperbolic curve reaches it's either sort of vertical horizontal depending on way yes if you've got if you're it's the limit is that yes yes it's the limit it's the limit in terms of the fact it's you could obviously articulate it in different ways but on one hand it's the zeroing out

it's the final definitive zeroing out of that of the space of ethical political decision-making Yeah, it is interesting because, I mean, I've been sort of wrestling for quite a while with, you know, the idea of sort of cyclical history versus linear history. But it really is, I mean, you say diagonal, but it's certainly something completely different from both of them. You know, on a really sort of fundamental level. I mean, my conception sort of previously had been this idea, I sort of bought into cyclical history.

but thought that perhaps some capitalist acceleration sort of offered a way to sort of like an escape velocity, to sort of escape the cycle. But that way of thinking about it really puts a new, totally different perspective really, isn't it? I'm going to tune out because I'm still, I haven't gathered my thoughts, but yeah, thanks. I think the thing is that, you know, it's, there's a sense of this kind of gathering triumph of a kind of linear, progressive, whatever vocabulary you want to use, history, you know.

And as I say, the Chinese story is told about them just switching across, just abandoning this cyclical notion. or it's often associated with pagan time with a historical notion of temporality you know where each the time is like a year that's constantly you're moving through these seasons without a kind of um a kind of definite historical gradient of any kind um so there's a kind of story about that but it's a it's not a very convincing story in the sense that there's this constant return of the repressed, you could say, of this cyclical conception. And just in this course, we've constantly been coming back to these various types of long waves

and, you know, that in theorizing capitalism, which is supposed to characterize the most extreme sort of modernistic type of temporality, various types of wave theories are constantly reimposing themselves you know at every level um and i think it's it's just a sign that there's something that can't be shucked off in this kind of cyclical cyclical process that there's there's a there's a absolutely relentless necessity of cyclical thinking and and so what the the spiral does is that it accommodates that it adjusts itself to the fact that you know time is never able to become

simply non-cyclical it sort of demonstrates its inability to become non-cyclical you know and our thinking about time and history is unable to become non-cyclical um but but i think in a much more productive way than some suggestion that we should just flip back to some traditional node mode of the cycles of time and history which to me someone like greer to to my favorite foil for this because he's the anti-kurtz file um you know he would be happy just to say look let's just go back to cyclical time that seems to me just not not a realistic option and that that's a kind of

argument with him that i would i would kind of wage under the banner of the time spiral you know it's just like this is what we have and it isn't going to simply resolve itself back into neat neat sort of pagan cyclical temporality and there's one there's one other thing that springs to mind which is the question of assuming there was the there's a spiral it's when did it when did it begin or we know did it have a beginning and that sort of thing.

And there's one thing that is brought to my mind, which is, I can't remember what the film is called, but has anyone seen the Werner Herzog film of about maybe four years ago? The one that was about these caves in France, where they've got the, they uncovered these caves with the Neanderthal paintings, cave paintings. You should be able to Google it pretty easily. I think it was called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. But the most impressive thing that I took away from it and that I remember from it was this idea that before certain period, time sort of greater in its scope and he was talking about how

they'd analyzed the walls of the caves and paintings and there were these instances where someone had started a drawing on the side of the cave and then someone, they say 10,000 years later, had come and made some more You know, adjustments to it, had added to it. But it's like, you know, this idea that sort of between the, over those 10,000 years, nothing really has happened. That people were living the same way and expressing themselves the same way. And, you know, whereas if you, obviously, if you look at like the last 500 years, what's happened with art? I mean, you know, it's bananas.

It's gone so quickly. It's almost difficult to know why I don't even know where we are now. Even the last hundred years it's accelerated hugely. But that film, it's a great film to watch because it just gives you, it puts so many things in perspective. But you almost feel that maybe those 10,000 years between the one guy marking up the wall during a I don't know what I said it was in France a deer or something and the other guy making another mark on the wall was was before some kind of this a process had been started it was like not pre time but

pre-time in a sense of some fundamental process. I don't know. Has anyone else seen the film? No, but it sounds great. I must see it. I've seen it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sort of curious if we can talk a little bit about beginnings, middles, and ends in the way that James is sort of bringing up and how that would fit into this notion

of the time spiral. And then I want, I sort of also want to bring this into the conversation about blockchain, blockchain obviously has this beginning middle end structure in terms of up from a peer to another to another peer so it has a directional flow yes yeah but what what i think is really great about the spiral is the line is a line i mean it's not that you're abandoning linear temporality You continually move forward along the timeline, you know all of that is

preserved It's just that the line is itself Fractal diagonal or involutionary cybernetically positive. I mean you're not it's completely consistent with the most relentless Asymmetric time gradient um so it doesn't seem to me that there's a there's a problem about the fact that these you know blockchain temporality is successive and linear and all of this are fine totally you know that that's something that that the the line of the spiral would be or the line of a non-spiral if you want to argue against the spiral of course that you know it's not that it rules that out

but it just but it's not the case that demonstrating temporal linearity is an anti-spyrodynamic argument it's it's completely neutral on that um yeah i'm just have to confess look i mean it might be that everything really goes dead i'll be able to catch up with the sidebar but that seems to me hopeful in extreme so I hope that people are going to try and throw that stuff arena rather than go complete parallel processing on there yeah if people could scroll up to their favorite questions and read them out in the hangout space that'd be great I've

I've got a question following one from Theo's mention of blockchain time. Because when we started talking about time a few weeks ago, it kind of was based on Vince's question on Twitter, which was something like, how do you reconcile teleoplexy, the blockchain, and templexity? Right. And I think you responded something like, that's as difficult as trying to explain Fermat's Last Theorem in a tweet, which is interesting because then, like, I just caught up and read that Ted Chiang story, which is awesome. And the model of time that is being proposed there is like what Theo was kind of alluding to right at the start,

a sort of point outside of time. From what I know, Hugh Price talks about it as an archimedial point and kind of corresponds to this, you know, like fundamental physics, Minkowski space idea of symmetrical time or really just space. Yes. It might, because I've been, this kind of just occurred to me yesterday. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, because I don't know Heidegger at all, but what he calls Abgescheidenheit when he was writing about Trackel, which obviously you've written about. which would I suppose be completely antithetical to this idea of asymmetrical time that we're

talking about now in relationship to modernity and accelerationism. Right. So if Fermat's last theorem can kind of like somehow give you an explanation of why of how you can reconcile templexity, teleoplexy and blockchain time does that mean that sitting behind like as a kind of most at the most abstract level the theory of time that modernity unfolds in with its like perhaps linear progressive enlightenment moment its cyclical pagan moment before it all of these different temporalities blockchain time which we're heading towards which is a kind of absolute tense time um all perhaps you could argue a transcendental i don't know that might be

be a little bit of a big one to throw out there um do they all sit inside symmetrical time well yeah I think this is obviously great and extremely complicated question I mean look I'll just go with my own extremely half-baked intuitions and and just hope this whole thing spirals you know um because my sense of this is that is that asymmetric time and is just time um so so that the that side of the modernist project that hugh price brilliantly represents is really an attempt to completely exterminate

the concept of time and and his antithesis is someone like heidegger i mean i think heidegger is just a kind of you know in this respect is just a kind of nominal name that you put on that position that holds on to the transcendental problem of time as we've inherited it from camp so you know there's nothing special or magical about it it's just the refusal of the dissolution of that of that centuries old transcendental time problem in which time is not space that's there's a distinct there's a distinct uh form of intuition actually that

as assigned to time because of the fact that time is essentially asymmetric and and i think you know hugh price is just basically wanting to say and and he's got a massive kind of tide of modernity behind him of a certain kind he's just saying let's just kill time it's just an embarrassment we we don't need it um and um everything this asymmetric you know i would say from his perspective this asymmetric can just be kind of edited out by this by the the fundamental trend of of science that has been in certain respects just confused and

misguided by certain you know by his mind very confused interpretations of thermodynamics and and and quantum mechanics that that that suggests he thinks erroneously the persistence of some um so so i just want to say about this look you know at least admit that you're trying to eliminate time and and transcendental philosophy just is basically so much the opposite it's basically folding everything into time and you just have to eat the fact that time is asymmetry intrinsically it's tensed if you don't if you if you don't have tense just stop talking about time this whole um

you know a series b series type nonsense is nonsense like if you know there is not there is no such thing as tenseless time if you're saying time is just a dimension spatialized it totally and time has disappeared in the sense that anyone with any commitment to transcendental philosophy should be willing to accept so yeah just final comment then so so in saying that there is a kind of that the the blockchain is um is fundamentally tensed that that that that it's the asymmetry is the whole of what it's about and and and that that

asymmetry is the really deep current of cryptography that is captured by bitcoin because because asymmetric cryptography is also the same the whole the whole usage of a trapdoor function that you can get in more easily than you can get out that the whole of the whole of contemporary cryptography is based on the usage of that um and that that is what temporality is about um i'll just say sorry just one tiny more just to confuse it a little bit more is that is that um the distinction between the the synthetic and the analytic is also about this

that that the distinction between the synthetic and the analytic ultimately rests in cryptography in the sense that that the synthetic the synthetic is that which takes work and the analytic is that which at least comparatively doesn't take work so it's the difference between a solution and checking a solution and that difference between a solution and checking a solution is what all of cryptography is based on that you can you can you know in the most simple sense you can multiply together you can you can find the product of two large primes vastly more simply

then you can then once you have the product of two large primes factorize that number to extract the two large primes that is that is the model of modern cryptography and i think it's that it should be our definition of what the the analytic synthetic distinction is about that that basically analysis is checking and synthesis is production um and so cryptography i think is the great ally on the defense of time against these these trends that hugh price brilliantly represents um towards the the annihilation of time its dissolution into space as one particular

very influential t loss of of modern science I don't know I like just totally lost your question here because I mean no no no you answered it actually perfectly the way I'm going to um Theo and I've been kind of talking about this last couple hours trying to figure figure out which is the the reigning theory of time. And that kind of like makes a couple of things interesting but the question that I think both of us are really interested in is obviously you then have to throw out, well maybe a better way to phrase this question is how then does determinism operate? Because

in the symmetrical theory of time it's completely locked down, there is no such, there is no possibility for free will and I think that Dr. Banks in the Chiang stories is really great at kind of giving a sort of like pop explanation of this and that it's just not relevant, it's just a different kind of perspective. Free will isn't a meaningful kind of concept in that concept of time but it is obviously in asymmetrical time because it seems like a spontaneous way of of apprehending what is coming at us as a kind of space of nothingness, like at the top of my screen right now. So if we're going to say that there is some kind of aspect

of fatalism in tense to asymmetric time, in the terms that you've just given with a spiral involution that is the model of accelerationism, what exactly is its status? is it a sort of is it strong fatalism like absolute predestination or is it which means that you then have no space for like novelty or chance or I know surprise individuations or something or is it a kind of like weaker determinism in the way that it's used like in cybernetics where you have a kind of system that needs to have a noise input it sort of has a kind of basis in chaos but then it develops a tendency and moves towards an attractor and so

you have a sort of systemic tendency which is seen as a kind of determinism but it's not fully realized teleologically in the way that there's a kind of end already proposed that is pulling everything towards it what is the status of fate in in terms of asymmetrical acceleration as time yes good question i just wanted to say that i just wanted to happen and say something really quick that statistical determinism seems like the only type of determinism that were offered after hume's uh like damning problematic of induction but unless nick wants to say

something different that's my understanding of um look okay i'm going to just take a step back because i think it might take a little while to re-reach the summit of of amy's question and i take it you're also yours here there which is that determinism if you if you're looking for determinism you know strong laplacian determinism you have to go with who q price surely you know like that that's the only basis of the deter the neat determinist story is if you have rigid determinism you must have a symmetrical time because rigid determinism

means that it makes just as much sense to proceed from a effect back to causes from a cause to an effect there's there's complete there's complete symmetry in there and the notion of asymmetric temporality must necessarily complicate that kind of notion of temporality yes you know it's Parmenody and I mean it's only to flatter Parmenides a little bit because because I think you get a bit more in the modern period with laplace and and mechanistic determinism you get something a little bit more definite in what is being said about the determinism means and so so

I would expect you know that there is a kind of alliance if there is a light to tool the alliance is going to be between all of these notions and how they bundle is obviously going to be complex of free will spontaneity chance all of the uh all of the sort of dissident terms in relation to strict determinism are going to have to align themselves with tensed or asymmetric temporality you know that's their only hope that if all of those notions are met we know that they are going to disappear in fully tenseless q price block universe

uh you know post basically geometrized temporality or extinguished temporality we know they're gonna go so if if they have any chance at all to to hang on it's gonna have to be on this tensed time path but I would be very reluctant to then take the step that they are in some strong sense therefore automatically vindicated by tensed temporality I mean I think that that you know we then faced with a question you know the tendency of which if we're going to just

take Heidegger as an example or maybe other people Bergson who I know much less about would probably be just as good for this the tendency has always been to massively sort of humanize and anthropomorphize tense temporality and and produce some extremely strong alliance between the meaning of the human and the meaning of this kind of original um original temporality um that therefore treats almost as coincidental a notion of free will and the notion of of um tensed temporality that that seems to me deeply

questionable and um and you know the reason to talk about the blockchain is precisely to say look we have no reason at all to think that the natural locus of tense time is man even if that's our traditional um inclination so that's obviously just like you know glancing off off this question is it is it enough to just kind of say that if you take like a general entropic universe as your basis and then you kind of describe moments of like

you have like a an ontology of difference you do have moments of individuation as moments of intensified entropy that the determinism in that is exists but it's weak in the systemic sub-anetic sense because it's articulated as attractors or a kind of systemic tendency rather than hard determinism so you still have this kind of like inhuman effect of there is some other order which is thinking through you you're not completely free but you do have some kind of leverage so sort of it like like um the way that i've brought this up like a hundred times in these things so sorry but like Deleuze

and Guattari's Deleuze's description of the eternal return where you have two moments you have the moment of the dice the two dice through or the two moments of the dice through Theo you know this as well I think so if I get it wrong let me know first one hits the sky um and that and the and the number turns up no sorry the first one hits the ground the number turns up that's the the number of fate if you affirm that which is I guess all of the constraints that exist um the dice then moves to the dance floor of the sky I think is the term till his uses. And then that's where you get another throw or something like that. Yeah, if you affirm the fatal number, the dice rolls again. And so you affirm chance as a whole. And you get these two

kind of moments, one of like having to accept what is determined. And in affirming that you get a kind of moment of chance. So it's kind of like just like agreeing or accepting constraints, whatever they are acknowledging them um and not resenting them and then sort of then you get a kind of another dice throw so you get another set of like determined numbers but you don't know what they are yet so there's a kind of like chance fate motor um happening in this like description of individuation which ends up right like theo kind of becoming becoming the virtual later on I don't know. But, like, is that kind of weak sense of fate as a kind of, like, systemic determination,

like, useful in any way? I don't know. That's really difficult. Because, like, useful is, you know, what are people trying to do? um another sorry that's a really that's that's terrible i have to just also backtrack from that because p you know what people are trying to do is exactly what we're trying to sort of situate isn't it in this whole question like you know what are the subject what are the actual subjects and agents and wellsprings of chance and spontaneity you know if we're going to try and jump in and say negative entropy but but but obviously like from the

perspective of transcendent philosophy time as such is the kind of is that is the is the is the is the fundament of fate you know fate isn't something that happens fate isn't something that happens primarily in time you know that that fate and and destination is the fact that there is time and so I'm just I guess I'm trying to be a bit cautious about the fact that the power of these kind of scientific models of the notion of some naive cosmology you know of sort of

entropic and negatropic processes and all of that it's it's all very beautiful but it tends to kind of diffuse this kind of hard the hard transcendental point about time as such time as such which is absolute rigid destiny and it's rigid destiny because of the fact that it's not it's not then that any attempt to kind of correct or modify or qualify time cannot that could be imagined in time is just sheer metaphysics you know it has to be metaphysics there cannot be anything that happens

in time that qualifies time um you know that time once once time is there um then then it's too late for any anybody to to kind of do anything about it um to do anything about time as such it's that would be a completely sort of sad metaphysical error so then the question is about uh chronogenesis the production of time yes what what about producing time where does time come from that's where that's where fate is engineered um and so you know that's where i want to

transpose these residual questions that have come out of the tradition about human agency and all of this kind of thing if he heidegger kind of and those guys that what what became i think the kind of increasingly the snowball humanism that that happened to the traditional transcendental philosophy tempted evermore to go the whole hog at least at a certain point and say you know let's just let's just buy this thing that man produces time only insofar as man produces time can man be free can this language of freedom make any sense um you know it's because the transcendental

subject of temporalization is man that man is a free spontaneous being um but i am only going to just say i just don't think that's even an option really now i mean i find it a kind of comical kind of a comical response to the kind of thing we're trying to deal with and it's certainly like why on earth would we think that was the answer to the question at chronogenesis I've no idea well beyond just like man specifically you know eventually in like his latest or his last seminars and lectures he kind of more sees it in terms of technology

of techniques right and it's an issue of cause and how you produce causality and I was sort of saying before that even when you geometrize like quote-unquote space-time in the Minkowski metric You still have this fundamental triangular inequality is what defines the difference between space-like, time-like, and light-like intervals. And it defines it, I mean, it's written mathematically in terms of sort of the brute fact of the constancy of the speed of light. But what it defines is a causal difference. The ability of things to be causally related, or the causal relation to hold, which is true everywhere the interval is time-like or light-like. and then the space-like is described as that which is causally dissociated,

like two things that cannot be part of the same causal formation. Right. Where, like, fundamentally, like what you were saying about the telos of modern science is that it defines a type of causality and rules out a certain kind, which is like, you know, this sort of attractor dynamic system thing we're talking about, wherein two things that are at a space-like interval from each other can still have, like, a prior relation by virtue of the attractors that they're both going to be part of. Whereas in Minkowski space-time, by means, by reference to another inequality, another asymmetry, a different kind of causal picture is produced. And I guess like, I don't know, what is the commonality between those two asymmetries, between the triangular inequality that defines a light cone, that defines causal and temporal relationship, even in geometrized, you know, that reintroduces tense into tenseless time.

and the asymmetry that we're talking about, like whether it's artificial in the blockchain or, you know, ecstatic as in Heidegger or something like that. Like, is it simply like belongingness together? Like some proto-causal, like when we talk about this asymmetry, are we always already talking about cause before we're talking about kinds of time? You know, and this is sort of like the question concerning technology. Like he defines the Greek cause, ition, as belongingness together. I mean, do you think that looking back at this from the later Heidegger and in terms of causation rather than firstly time, that we sort of get some traction on what's going on in the emergence of science from tense time? That it's a technological thing that happens there and this is sort of key to the production of time, quote unquote, production of time.

so can i just push you a bit further like how are you thinking of the relation of the notion of causality and the notion of the of production in the sense specifically of the production of time well so like say like in one instance or in one case the attractor uh the positive attractor produces a relationship between two things even if they are at a space-like interval from each other and it is the production of the relationship of those two things and some specific confirmation. But then similarly, it's like, so in the case of a light cone in Minkowski space time, it's like you have some observer, some interaction, some vector, something like that is what has a light cone.

It's slicing out, it's sliced because otherwise like, and there's this great, there's a hierarchy of like causal conditions and the least like the degree zero of causal consistency in a space time is called being non-totally vicious. And it means that there is some that you can specify some point in that time or some interaction in that space time, which is not the cause of itself. And you you can specify that it is not the cause of itself. And so produces this like potential for this asymmetry, which is the potential for description. And so it's the description from the point of view of that interaction or that vector or something like that, which is able to carve like a sort of beacon or slice of causal consistency out of the totally vicious,

which is everything is the cause of itself. Everything is causally related already. And you can't like carve out a specific causal path. in this totally vicious manifold. Right. And so it's an issue of, again, whether man... In both of them it seems like you have this issue of man or technology creating time as a causal condition, like carving something out of the all-nothing from the inside. So, can I just ask, which I'm going to take here, it's partly... can you give me can the source of this extremely fascinating language to leave

vicious manifold is that that's it yeah so it's originally originally owed to Lorenz not Minkowski here's like here's the wiki causality conditions and like the first one is and I went to specifically the section non totally vicious so it's just like the non-tay yeah it's just like for some points P in M in the in the metric of space-time there is some key which is not which does

not hold the causal relationship to itself and if there is any such point in in a manifold, then you have like the least condition or the condition of like least possible causal consistency from the perspective of geometrised time and causality and so forth. And just like the fact that, you know, in this math, there's a sort of common mathematical, or there's a common basis in mathematical description of the chronological relation and the causal relation and like similarly that seems to be the case in um intense time like once and then once again like like first of all in the sense of um you know man being this point

where uh where that man's specific history is sort of the determination of its futures and and vice versa um and then once again where we have this idea of like onto technology of of like a transcendental production of time in something like in the figure of man or in the blockchain or something itself. And then you have sort of the same once and once again in science where you have like this definition of the causal relation alongside the chronological. And then you have like the distinction of a light cone from the surrounding metric of the universe that an observer implies or that this like possibility of a causal chronological condition or relation implies. there's just like there's there's a common like abstract structure in terms of the relationship

of causality chronology and description i guess or the possibility of description that seems to be going on in different ways and productive artificial ways in some sense artificial in both cases sort of a triangular relationship but is a fundamentally asymmetric in structure I Mean this is obviously difficult stuff Mean it's it's highly suggestive to me, but but in a way that at the moment is so fuzzy that I think I would just

Embarrass myself by trying to push very far into I mean like if I was trying to put Cosmophysics onto the blockchain I would start with this discussion Yeah, I don't see that as a kind of facile facile undertaking although I mean Yeah, I'm more hopeful about it after what you've said that I would have been half an hour ago That's for sure Yeah. Is what you're trying to do talk about how there is some space for actual causal change

inside symmetrical time models? Is that kind of what you're saying, or am I just... Yeah, yeah. Symmetrical geometrize time is just a setting for the description or the picking out of the light cone of an observer or an event or something like that. because as soon as you geometrize space-time, you shift to that register of description. You immediately have to reintroduce asymmetry in the form of these inequalities that define the difference between things that could be causally related, which is the inside of the light cone, and time-like relations, and things that can't be, which is space-like intervals outside of the light cone. When I was first taught this, the teacher was like, this is why time travel,

like you wrote the inequality on the board and it's like this is why time travel is impossible this defines like intervals that can't intervals that can be traversed um and intervals that can't be um and like time why space like intervals obviously like being the ones that i'm kind of losing the thread here slightly um i'm super hungover but uh yeah it's like you in order to describe anything at all um you have to immediately reintroduce inequality and the point of the the point of geometrizing the causal and chronological relationships in this way is to like so like what they what someone from this perspective might say about teleology is that if we can have causal relationships between things that are

separated by a space-like interval, then everything is potentially, like any event in the future has a causal relationship with every single event in the past, and you can't pick out which ones there's a causal relationship and which ones aren't. Like, you know, a piece of dust falling on Mars and the thing happening in the Andromeda galaxy are equally and inseparably causally related to anything that happens in the future of the universe, and so we have no basis on which to define causal differences and pick out what's causally relevant and what's not. And that's the non-totally vicious thing. It's like as soon as you have like hard and absolute transcendental teleology, then the physicist would say it's totally vicious. Every point in space time is the cause of itself and we can't pick out anything causally.

And this is sort of why I think like Nick's point that this is like the whole telos of modern science like comes clearly to the fore is that modern science is made possible by this like formalization of the picking out of causal factors and being able to distinguish that which is causally related from that which is not and that's why I'm sort of implying that like it almost seems as if like between the two tensed and tenseless or at least between the differentiation of one from the other it's really causality it's causation that's at stake rather than time and then I was relating that to Heidegger because like in the question concerning technology you know that's where that's where he starts is like aristotelian the aristotelian causes is like a technical manifold of causality who's like common nature the ition cause in greek

is belongingness together and which is like originally originally a technological thing that found equally founds physics and um pre-modern time or pre-modern causality The causality would only be intelligible if you had an absolutely flawless map of the whole Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it, or I guess you would only be able to have causal description according to the physicist, or in mathematical terms, you'd only be able to have causal description in tense time if you had whose demon is it who knows the absolute state of the universe in the given moment

Laplace's demon I think like absolutely I didn't even know Laplace had a demon but if he did that would definitely be it isn't it yeah yeah he does the Laplace's demon knows I know a great like webcomic about Laplace's demon yeah Laplace's demon is weirdly is an agent for the extinction of time because because all he has to know is the state of every particle in the universe at any arbitrary time and all the rest is completely implied so the temporal development of the universe adds no information to this demon whatsoever

because of strict determinism right and then but like the impossibility of like the thermodynamic impossibility of Laplace's demon actually existing simultaneously what gives rise like to the intuition of this new inequality that you have to reintroduce into modern physics that defy because like no no actual entity can have total knowledge of space and time and so that like that kind of lack or impossibility is now what like redefines yet tense time because you're giving laplace's demon a photonic brain and and and then it loses track of all the space like differences that can't be processed right

and it's like it's interesting along these lines along Amy's lines to think that like Laplace's demon could only be the universe or even like even were it possible like the least the most possible version of it is it is the universe itself like the universe as like a photonic brain or like a faster-than-light brain like Laplace's demon would have to be the universe perceiving itself as a whole which is kind of this whole like omega point like tiplerite teleology right like we're already in like the crushed end of everything simulating all of its possible paths right right but no but but okay yeah I'm I'm gonna duck out of this

minute because I don't want to hope this but I just have to ask one question about this because if you if you could have this kind of tickler right solution to it and this has been haunting what you've been saying Jake in terms of this kind of attractor stay aren't you actually folding everything back into a light cone um um you know there is that that the photonic brain at a certain point is you know the universe is actually basically imploding into a into a light cone isn't it or it's imploding into a photonic intelligence as it approaches a kind of particular singularity yeah and it's only in state of spatial singularity of imploded the total implosion that Laplace's demon or this like

self-sentient universe photonic brain is possible at all because you have to have like zero space like separation in order for like totally vicious conditions to now apply and in that case the entire universe is now just the historic light cone which is just the light cone in the past direction all the things that might be causally relevant to the interaction which is instantaneously happening now of this Omega point. Which is just insanity, but, you know, has to be at least considered Laplace's God. Yeah. That's a good slogan for T-shirt, actually.

It's insanity, but it has to be considered. Hunter go it's the fact I'm seeing you a sign that you're about to speak because well it's I mean if there's no more on this particular topic I have kind of a simple question about the relationship between this concept of transcendental asymmetrical time and the concept of hyperbolic process towards a singularity of absolute de-territorialization or whatever.

like how how do those two notions of do they entail one another or how how are they like why why is transcendental time leading towards a singularity or is that a contingent event or is that sort of part of the fabric of transcendental time? Yeah, that's also a good question, because I mean, look, there's a facile answer to it. But I think in the very dissatisfaction that will arise from that will explode the complexity for your question, which is that

existence of time is already a demonstration of singularity I mean you know we we have time in some sense so sorry I'm I that this is a I'm still recovering slightly from I'm from from Laplace's demon here okay let me just rephrase the question again and yeah

which is so what's the connection between the tent between tense time tensed transcendental time and historical singularity and I think that I think that you know what do we what do we what do we make how do we make sense of the fact that there is critique or or as we were talking about in previous weeks there's this whole I think sort of you know inter-translatable substitutable series of um you know modes of articulation of modernity as as singularity you know i think we can run the whole thing through protestant

christianity we can run it all through critique we can run it all through capitalism um there might be more that just sort of escaped me momentarily or what they all share is a is a is is a structure of singularity in the sense that all of them are implicitly limit phenomena that that constantly the temptation the historical temptation has been to to presuppose in each case some mode of um exceeding the dynamic of this phenomenon to

exceed critique you know to to try and enter the zone of post-critique post-capitalism post-protestantism as if as if we could sort of draw some um boundary on these phenomena short of this this ultimate limit this final horizon um so the fact that we're in modernity or we're in this kind of you know i think you can translate perfectly between Protestant phenomenon or a nihilistic phenomenon where we're in the history of nihilism we're in critique we're in capitalism um all of those things are to say that

singularity is already a kind of operative condition it's not some kind of a speculative projection is already implicit in the process that we're engaged in now why is that particularly related to tensed temporality um well tense temporality tense temporality or the gradient of time

sorry i'm in danger of just being sort of tautologically dogmatic about it i would just complete this phrase and step back and see what other people say and then perhaps come back on this because it's obviously great but i think uh i have my hazardously dogmatic formulation of this is just that tense temporality simply is the expression of a real temporal relation to singularity like as soon as you um it cannot be you cannot construct that relation you cannot

construct that history through an asymmetrical physical model a uh a in hugh price's sense of physics in terms of completely symmetrical um physical formula there cannot be a model of modernity that that is expressed in terms of perfectly symmetrical processes because there cannot be a because there cannot be a tendential process towards singularity within symmetrical physical description so i think that's the on one level the hinge between that um but as i say i think i should step back on this because i'm not being

i'm not being impressively articulate about it right at the moment okay all right

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess I would just say I don't understand the answer, really. I mean why does tense time have to be a temporal... Related to singularity. Singularity, yeah. I'm just kind of asking the question again. But... Yes. Yeah. Yes, okay. Let's see whether there's a good way to approach this.

I think that there probably are several. coming out of okay coming out of coming out of the question from transcendental philosophy the question is this like um time as such is obviously not something that is um that can be processed as as something that is kind of unfolding in time that that does the the absolute definition of metaphysics

is to treat time as something in time so there was that still leaves certain responses open and as i said i think the the predominant scientific trend i think hugh price seems sees more deeply and a more philosophical level what what science as a whole tends to assume is that the solution to that problem is to actually extinguish extinguish time through the scientific enterprise and to end up with a series of completely reversible equations that mean that all you have is a a geometric frame in which physical processes

completely reversible physical processes unfold it unfold deterministically deterministically meaning reversibly um and actually time is something like a kind of just optical effect that emerges from that it has no it has no scientific consequence at all or to put it into the terms that are sort of at stake in jake's line of question there's no actual causal implication about time as such time as such is merely a perspective on causation it's not a causal

factor or consequence so what obviously you can't think what cannot be a scientific thought if you take this line is the production of time can is is is not something that is that's systematically unthinkable it has to be unthinkable it's meaningless um because it puts but because by putting time at the level of production by making time a factor or output of production it may it it brings time it flattens causality onto time or time onto causality that you know it's a complete breach with the promise of the

scientific enterprise in this in this sense now so we then go to transcendental philosophy transcendental philosophy is nothing but the question of the original production of time it's something that in in a scientific universe of the kind that we get at the air I'm gonna keep treating Hugh Price as the model of this because he's just so elegant in his in his determination to complete to philosophically complete the mainstream scientific enterprise in that model there cannot be transcendental philosophy

it's simply impossible transcendental philosophy must itself be an illusion because there cannot be a sense given to the notion of the production of time if you take if you take the this what is but what is ultimately it's in the Placian universe seriously with a little Placian universe of course there cannot be the production of time so so then I guess you know this the the jigsaw piece here that I'm trying to insert into this is I think that all of these things because of the fact that Protestantism capitalism

transcendental philosophy or critique are all the same thing they all have exactly the same philosophical structure they and historical structure you're saying that none of those things are real if he price is right if laplace is right if reversible temporality is right if you know you they simply it's you you have a model of a universe that does not tolerate the production of singularity which is the same as having a historical gradient which is the same as having a kind of asymmetric um an asymmetric structure to time which is the same as having a um an implicit model of history which is as if it were a scrambled

you know you've got a video of the world um and you just it's a set of stills whatever kind of you know whatever it's fps you you want to make it and you just scramble that set of stills and you're told um can you construct that into a timeline and i think all the all the kind of history of nihilist guys the the history of capitalism guys the history of protestantism guys the history of critique guys can say yes totally uh you know we can we can shuffle those stills back into uh into a timeline because all we have the clue for that is that there is a

gradient to that timeline it has a it has a essentially asymmetric character and we know it just has to go in one direction and hugh price's thing is totally the reverse of that where he's saying you know that that is itself a kind of scientific illusion you know he's got a complicated about that but ultimately you know if you're being scientific all all your dynamic equations should be reversible i think that you've got if you think you've got a historical gradient a necessary order in these in these things then yours you're attached in his

mind some completely Vic attachment to a notion of firm well to a notion of asymmetric time which I would of course say is just time to time time he pressing time should just be abolished and and so sorry I don't know whether I'm getting any closer yeah yeah other people but it's like it's not remotely an accident that this like you know I guess we're going to like the plot with Blassey and theory of time is like

precisely coterminous with the great acceleration itself like bringing it back to like somewhat like an imperial question of the great like empirical yeah no absolutely totally right yeah that's the supreme irony yeah yes this sort of question of like the question of like the beginning of the spiral right is like would seem to be like the spiral hiding itself from itself yes but it's been sorry I mean I I do feel that I'm doing a very bad job at dealing with

hunters hunters question here so it would be good it would be good if if I you know demonic armies were to converge upon this question and deal with it it's good definitely like why why should we think why should we think there is any connection at all between the question of historical singularity and transcendental tensed temporality and as i say think it's like if the very notion of temporal gradient is the is the integrating factor here I mean maybe it's like the question in a different way like how would you compare

the way you're thinking about transcendental time with say Bergson or Deleuze so so both of those thinkers believe in real duration and Bergson thinks of it in terms of quality sort of and Deleuze thinks of it in terms of intensity or this sort of ordinal time right but I don't think either Deleuze burks and believe that that they draw a conclusion from that that we're headed towards a singularity oh I think to those also so happy how do you just pay okay yeah yeah talk about to lose maybe I mean you know isn't isn't the

whole s catalogical structure of Antietam as precisely about that about the fact that there is a schizophrenic horizon you know a singularity shaping shaping history um that is implicit in you know implicit in the notion of of intensity but i feel like at other times at least in the like difference in repetition era he talks about eternal becoming that that it's not like there's this strange notion of sort of an endpoint with absolute destratification at this singular point that I'm not sure I understand I'm not yeah I'm not sure if there is an end

point in anti-odipus either the way that you seem to be saying Hunter but I don't think that that's what nick is suggesting no i think end point is very difficult because the notion of an end is an intra-temporal notion so it's not truly transcendental and it's not truly singular you know if you're talking about an end you are implicitly sort of positioning it within a structure of time so it's not it doesn't it's obviously the time as such cannot simply be an end if by an end we mean what we colloquially mean by an end of something that is part of a of a of a time structure um this is there's a this curvature into the

transcendental i think is that is the same thing as the asymmetry of time but i think of course that needs to be argued and they're both extremely easy to miss. Maybe endpoint is a sloppy term but like an intensification that entails destratification that it seems like is in some sense not reversible so to speak, which I take to kind of be the argument against people like Greer or Theo or stagnationists sorry can I get

you possibly to just rehearse that question like I'm not sure I'm totally to keep getting at that that absolute temporality tends towards an increasing intensification of speed that entails more and more de-stratification and that that is in some sense irreversible yes right that that that's that and that stagnation isn't happening that's an argument against the or great right that there's a sort of transcendental argument

against their sort of empirical observations it's yeah it's it it's good this is really and it is complicated it it's basically is definitely to say that if the transcendental makes any sense at all it ruptures any consistent construction of a steady state model whatever like if the transcendental is is in play in history at all then that um that angle that oblique between you know

between a transcendental and a non-transcendental is is cuts across the dimension of some kind of steady state perpetual um perpetual cycle or whatever it might be so like let's say you've got someone like greer or whatever who has this notion that there's that that you know they're just time there's just big cycles and little cycles and they carry on and there's no that progress is an illusion um um you're just somewhere in a cycle now obviously implicit in that is time you know that all these things are unfolding in time so where where does time come from in that model you know in that

cosmology it's a it's not so different from the cosmology of sort of mainstream of mainstream the mainstream scientific enterprise you know like that you can assume time that time is just there as a dimension but as soon as you introduce the question of the transcendental and again i mean just to be just obsessive i mean i just repeat these things like um you know critique capitalism protestantism all of those things are bringing such into into question into question as a historical problem you know there just was not there was not capitalism at a certain point

there was not there was a protestant reformation there was not protestant at a certain point there was not transcendental philosophy at a certain point these things are a kind of um a transition a historical transition that is not itself empirical because what's at stake in this transition is is the actual nature of time itself is um at stake in this process that's why there is an eschatological aspect to antidepress so they they say you cannot escape the eschatological issue you cannot escape the eschatological issue as soon as time as such an explicit topic of your historical question if you simply say look time as such is not

affected by this time is like off to the side it's a transcendent factor you know there's just time that is it's the great theater and when you know we're not getting any nearer or further from the great theater because the great theater is just there on the outside you know firmly confidently and invulnerably on the outside and and we're talking about stuff that's happening inside that great if that's your construction then fine you know there's no need to introduce singularities in this at all but if you say look the theatre is itself being engaged by the historical process then already you have the

question of singularity introduced and everything that comes with it and the and I mean I guess what I'm saying is that you know the move that I that I think is crucial to your question on this is that it's the same thing to bring the theater itself into play and to um and to try and actually is asymmetric temporality that those are the same things you know that transcendental philosophy and asymmetric time are just inseparable um so so time is no longer transcendent and therefore it's no longer

something that is like neatly outside your process and therefore your process is not something that can just perpetuate itself in this steady state progress um without without um the comp the the the ingression of singularity okay i think that's an interesting answer um maybe like last angle on this topic before someone else wants to bring something else up but why is another kind of just simple bald question why is transcendental time why is the singularity in question hyperbolic rather than exponential because an exponential process never reaches singularity

an exponential process can still is fully compatible with your transcendent theater of time have the fully transcendent structure outside unaffected by the process and within that theater you can tell a story of exponential exponential process and i think that's what kutzwell does that's why it's like very misleading to really see kertzvall as a finger of singularity because he he he doesn't he's not under any compulsion to do that at all so it's it's it's uh singularity is the limit you have to have the limit and therefore you have to have a hyperbolic process

that actually you know hits the wall you have to hit the wall and this is this is what all of this is about do you hit the wall and the process of hitting the wall a process that is the gradient in time that's the thing that gives time an arrow is the fact that you're accelerating into the wall if you're not approaching the wall there's no there's no irreducible gradient of time there's no singularity sorry and there's no implication of the transcendental all of those things come together and it's like and can transcendental time only be known through transcendental critique or sort of

known as transcendental critique and transcendental empiricism as that unfolds? Well I think you could turn that around and simply say all that transcendental critique is, is the process of accelerating into the wall of temporal singularity or time as such. and so and so and so and so that so use of mathematical models and physical structures are all ultimately kind of metaphorical in a way um metaphorical might be a bit strong but I think they are fallout from the transcendental event

you know it's because again of course you know if it was otherwise then you would have your transcendent your transcendent theater of time if there was some if there was some completely competent level of mathematical description that we could settle on then actually what we would have done would be to fix time in transcendence because we would we would say you know that we've this is the structure that we're in and that's fixed and we're settled and we you know we we know how to model time mathematically um and once we've done that then you're back to then you know you have then uh the full opportunity to just perpetuate

steady state processes within that within that framework so in a way we know transcendental time is approaching singularity because we're observing what transcendental critique does i think the notion of transcendental time and the notion of approaching singularity actually ultimately are inseparable notions you know it's like the the question that in a way Kant doesn't ask that I think the whole of modernity is then implicitly asking after him is well how is transcendental philosophy itself possible you know he is saying well how how is any kind of experience possible how is it how is

knowledge of objects possible well how is it possible that there is such a thing transcendental philosophy only possible because a gradient defined by singularity well if it if it if history did not have that shape then nothing like transcendental philosophy could ever occur. That's interesting. Earlier in the chat I asked,

does the spiral spiral in or spiral out? Yes. yeah i think it has to spiral in i think it has a spiral because well this is again we're back to the question of um singularity because obviously the origin of the spiral is the is the punctual limit of the spiral so so either we're basically saying we crossed a singularity and that triggered a spiral and it's not that i think that's a ridiculous or uninteresting notion but

well i mean again maybe this is something i could try and draw other people to think through with it seems that it seems that if you if you basically want to hold on to time compression as being a sort of fundamental um characteristic of acceleration to be heading into the spiral and the fact that the spiral culminates in this point to say that there is a limit that you are sort of you are heading into into the wall that an expanding spiral isn't heading into any kind of wall is maybe you know

it's kind of cheap of me to say this and whatever but you know it's a kind of kurtzweilian spiral in a way isn't it because you can just then the spiral just unfolds to the limits of the universe and gets bigger and bigger and crazy and crazier and more and more and more happens and it just goes on and there's no limit to it you don't you don't have any sense of uh modern history as being a uh approach to a limit at all unless the spiral is involutionary now that's not itself an argument i mean of course people would say well you know

that is literally the most shit argument in the history of philosophy to say you can't it has to go with because otherwise history wouldn't end in a massive catastrophe i mean i can see that in those terms that's not keep persuasive yeah yeah why did why would why on earth would a spiral have a beginning so this is to repeat that one more time so why would a spiral what why would it why on earth would his spiral have a beginning yeah no but it doesn't if it's involutionary does that I mean this takes us back to the cave paintings if it's an involutionary spiral that's heading then we can have our Lascaux painters taking 10,000 years to complete

a certain part of this picture and it's just that we're on such a kind of large gyre slow gyre of the spiral that it looks as if nothing's no and it's only when you get close to the the vortical core of the spiral that you you know that's what it is to enter modernity and the acceleration as we know it even though actually in you know you can't really say when when did when did things start accelerating you know did they start accelerating with a Cambrian explosion or with the with the with the you know encephalization of hominid

animals always kind of writing and techno history or with you know all of these things are big gyres of the of the spiral it seems to be much more compelling to say that the origin is unlocatable than to say the terminus is unlocatable well but this is sort of the question of teleoplexy and rupture I think as Amy briefly put it a couple of sessions ago is like so yeah we can't locate out of all of those potential starts like one of them that is the start of the spiral right but obviously just by being able to name them that way there's a

suggestion of like a commonality in which in which each of those things is some kind of rupture in which the spiral re-begins or is intensified in some kind of distinctive way and like it seems i don't know it's at least it's at least possible or we can very easily entertain but there is not like a chronological like future moment at which everything goes apeshit off the reservation and that is like the terminus of the process like to start with at least like it's a virtual terminus like it's that toward it's that which defines the spiral constantly as like it's virtual it's virtual terminus like asymptote that we're already on and similarly it seems like a virtual beginning or like absolute outside of the spiral is repeatedly instantiated as these

like ruptures or intensifications is also something that has to be considered. And this is sort of like that, like the issue of the telos of modern science being disguising itself from itself, like in the production of tenseless time. Like does that make sense? Like I'm really, obviously I'm relating this to Anthropole. Like I'm thinking of the intelligent space that just simulates its own origins in history. Yeah I mean that seems like several you think that's one point because it sounds to me like a machine gun volley of points. I mean It's a picture I was like flying over a picture post to making points Yeah No, I think look there's this thing. Maybe we haven't really dealt with this

very much is like um to what extent is i i mean i'm sure we've raised it before but but but it would be probably unrealistic to think it's been resolved it's this thing about the relationship between that accelerationism and singularity and and i guess like the tendency now certainly of what i'm proposing is that those two things are very very tightly connected but i can see that that's a controversial proposition um it's difficult because like i mean like yeah this is really unfair and i know it's it's to a degree of almost being obscenely unfair to

put it like this but um the the role of kurtzweiler this in a in a sense is kurtzweiler does not have a hard singularity i mean he puts a date on singularity i think ridiculously and it be but it's completely arbitrary i mean you know you've got this exponential process of growth and development and intelligence expansion and all of this kind of stuff there's no singularity in there at all except as a very kind of flaccid metaphor and it seems to me probably the modern or the recent left side of accelerationism would tend also in that direction you know they would want

to i think they would this is where the obscene unfairness of how things i'm saying is is i'm and saying there's a kind of kurtzweilian it's con cuts violent analog in left accelerationism which is this notion of you know we're not really serious about the singularity stuff modernity just can get better and better we want more we want to kind of push modernity forward harder um that there's no hard limit to this process at all um but that seems to me what's being said in that is that the transcendental structure of modernity is weak you know um if you have if you have a

sense that modernity has a very strong transcendental structure Then you that coming with that is hard singularity and and by hard singularity is something like You know Simulation hypothesis that you know what I mean? It's that you hit a wall that is like the wall between Being inside and outside a simulation It's a transcendental limit It's not just some you know you've got some extra velocity to your high-speed trains or you know some incremental level of modernistic progress you hit an ontological limit in

in the process. Yeah. I mean, Nick, just to like, I guess, try to unpack like a little piece of like the machine gun volley, because that feels slightly bad. I mean, do you think this is like related to your like diagonal, your square and diagonal of transcendental critique where like you know you have the analytic up posteriori is sort of the integrally obscure and then you have this sort of like setting off like a new intensified process which is like the synthetic off priori and that's like somehow between these these poles where they match but

like the poles where they match are just like shadows being cast by this like obscurity intensification relationship like i don't know do you see that mapping together like a production of the transcendental in the square there i might need to get you to to run run that past me one more time jay i'm sure it is because just just the very nature of the vocabulary immediately tells me it all clicks together like a seamless jigsaw puzzle but so we we've got the so the square i guess for anybody i like it'd be easier to draw this or slash i'm doing it again or not but like so you've got like your punnett square you've got two

dimensions analytic synthetic a priori a posteriori like in concept you visualize that as like a square divided into four pieces then you've got the the two that are like obvious from like a modern philosophy perspective like a priori analytic and a posteriori synthetic and then you've got this thing that like Kant invents which is like a birth of the transcendental or whatever which is the synthetic operai or i and then you have this thing that nobody ever ever ever wants to talk about which is the posteriori analytic right and i'm just and then this is like the process of diagonalization is like drawing this new line that produces the synthetic operai or i and so if that is also like the production of transcendental time like time is something that can be produced like in this like punctual transcendental moment i guess what i'm saying

is that it's like it's like uh the telos of science hiding itself from itself like you know mechanistic philosophy as like being an intensification of like teleology by denying it is that does that sort of map to the posteriori analytic is like the constantly obscure thing or like its obscurity being part of the birth of the synthetic a priori and the production of transcendental time yes I mean look I'm gonna say that I just like just squishing out that lot block you know they're the the

analytic a posteriori block I'm daubing over like everyone else but I'm always intrigued a bit when people want to reanimate that and it wouldn't surprise me if something interesting came out of it but I just know I'm not part of that like I sort of like to see it being humiliated and buried and abused um so so i don't know what to say about that obviously i think that i think this question that you're this thing this whole thing about the the the occult teleology

of natural science is huge and massive and i'm totally on board with that um i'm just reluctant to let it sleaze into that box that you're wanting to get there definitely got some uh some traumatic potentiation there but it's like it's um it's like plato right a priori knowledge is an ominous it's like remembering what's been forgotten so it's like the forgottenness that that anomisus emerges from the synthesis of our priori knowledge um so yeah i mean it makes perfect because like i don't have you know like if I try to like actually think about like conjoining the terms analytic and up a stereo or I like my mind sort of wiggles away from it and fear to you say fear I would say revulsion but but that's probably the

same yeah yeah I'm pretty sure this is this is raised current project the analytic a priori I don't know maybe you're getting this from his class Jacob the absolute a posteriore I oh no sorry I'm thinking the analytic a prairie don't worry it's late come on the analytic a bro is total vanilla no one has no one has any problem with that and the tape or today I mean yeah as long as it knows its place which after Good or and all of this stuff is

Artly humble place at the back of the queue It's checking it's just checking your work. That's what it is No, don't go back in it go back in the hole Can we talk about, wait what was I wondering about before? Oh yeah Jake's question before about the spiral. When we were talking about, I think your term was self shifting transcendentals the other week when I was trying to push this idea of a shifting transcendental and I've

I mean thinking about this kind of idea of whether you can have, if the transcendental and time are kind of one and the same thing, can it mutate or not? If it does, then maybe you don't need to have a spiral as the model of time since the beginning of time. Like you can have some kind of perhaps empirical input that comes from the productions of a material cluster that feeds into the transcendental like an input and somehow kind of causes it to mutate in terms of sort of an outside that is imminent to the transcendental if that makes any sense because I yeah I guess I've just been thinking about this kind of possibility of

shifting transcendentals which is a big thing for Gabrielle Catron but I went back and read the transcendental deduction last week and realized that that's basically like what Kant says is that you only have one there is no possible way you can have multiple transcendentals so I'm cool I'm cool with that now after revising my Kant but but like is there is there some kind of way that this if we have the spiral as the diagram of modern time and I suppose modern Western times because it's the time of capitalism which is the agent that's producing temporality we have the watches um it has a like is there a kind of way that that spiral can mutate into a different kind of temporality are we

accelerating until heat death or is there something else um you know unforeseen that could possibly happen I guess it's just rephrasing Jake's question with a slightly different vocabulary I guess is it rephrasing Jake's question because maybe you know that that sounds right honestly I was I was very briefly using the bathroom while you started talking about it I'd be I'd be very positive for any other purpose but sorry Amy so like the part about the spiral or they're

not necessarily having to be spiraled were you talking about like the vertical dimension part or like the the question of like rupturing and teleoplexy yeah yeah the question that I kind of of put to everyone at the end of the week before last about about the sort of like we were referring to the eschatological dimension of anti-odipus before the kind of telos of Nietzsche's description of nihilism the kind of this idea of the great leveling and the uber mensch so I mean is part this process, what you get at the most involuted point of the spiral, a kind of rupture, a catastrophe, something else kind of individuates out of that maybe with a different transcendental

temporality. Like if the blockchain woke up, would we have absolute successive time? Because I think your description, Nick, of the blockchain's synthetic time is maybe not what we... I don't know, actually, don't worry about that. Anyway, that's what I was trying to say, Jake. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly my question. It seems like we're constantly pointing and then denying that we've been pointing to points where a new spiral precipitates out of a previous spiral by means of like you know a seeming linearization which like manifests as a break and like yes the spiral like has no end or has no beginning like i like the way theo put it like it's not getting any fast it's not any faster and

yet it's getting faster like from any given from any given vantage point you know it seems like there are these points like you know the invention of writing the industrial revolution the singular that we're heading towards where like nonetheless like the continuity of the spiral breaks and we get a new kind of spiraling but it's just i think this yeah it's really good it's an ultimate question literally is an ultimate question this because it's obviously we this move that post-modernism has been completely uh obsessive about of trying to relativize the transcendental and it's so attractive because it it puts it it implicitly creates some subject that is in itself

kind of mobile and transcendent in relation to these transcendent transcendental structures doesn't it um and the alternative to that the really hard transcendental um is is for us structurally apocalyptic in the absolutely most brutal sense that it's that that we cannot imaginably or conceivably transcend this limit you know insofar as we're trying to think beyond this limit animating some kind of hegelianism or we're we're we're clutching at

some possibility that will allow us to position ourselves in in chance in a transcendent relation to this ultimate horizon and clearly in doing so we're not the same term that we're even using the term ultimate horizon we're pretending we're not using the word ultimate horizon or pretending we we don't understand what we mean by an ultimate horizon i mean so i i have to say if you don't if you don't think the transcendental is an ultimate horizon you're not you're not using the word transcendental you know he already for can it's a it's a it's a ultimate horizon and of course you can then say oh well can't you know you can

nibble about with with can't's construction of the transcendental and say oh there's something even more transcendental transcendental than that but if that's what you're saying i think i think you're really saying already well that's really what Kant meant you know in using the word transcendental he had to have meant the ultimate horizon he can't conceive any any sort of retrospective fabrication of the transcendental in Kant that means anything short of an ultimate horizon is a deliberate refusal to understand what the what the term transcendental is saying so I have to go with the most extreme harsh brutal catastrophism on this point

even though I can of course see why people want to find some way around that because I just think that's what that is the demand that's the single demand that transnational philosophy is making but aren't we then i mean we're conflating or at least like contingently deciding that there's an identification between two different registers of the term transcendental right like i mean you have um like this or that transcendental production like a production of transcendental time like you know i mean like literally like the production of the blockchain the blockchain produces something

writing produces a certain kind of time like which is transcendental and there are these like specific like what amy was calling like shifting transcendentals and then we have what you're talking about which is like the absolute transcendental like this diagram of how ultimate horizons or the appearance of them get produced in the first place in the same way or according to the same diagram every time and that there's a line among them which is maybe like but like it's not it's not as simple as this always is there only being one thing here like there's definitely like I Don't know. I think the the issue of like We're that one this is what's going on inside by here, you know, we are the one thing We we are the one thing and and the notion that we can think

beyond the transcendental That's what the notion of the transcendental the transcendental is the name for the wall That we are accelerating into You know and if we then say oh But we've actually got an idea of what's on the other side of that wall Then I think that's to say you don't know what it is to accelerate into a wall. I mean it's like You know, it's not that the notion of accelerating into a wall in itself abolishes the notion that there's something on the other side of the wall but it abolishes the notion that you could imaginably have a speculative construction of what's on the other side of the

wall because any speculative construction you could conceivably have at this point is something that is arising on your vector into the wall it's not something if if that were not the case then that would be itself a kind of um it would have some transcendent source of uh transcendent genesis you know where are you getting that from where are you conceivably getting your model of what's what's on the other side of the wall that you're accelerating if but it doesn't have to be conceivable necessarily in order to happen no no no wait isn't this the point of the transcendental deduction there right

you make a you have a concept you have a concept that involves like a priori cognition you make that concept about something that isn't given at the present time like the sun will rise tomorrow yeah and then and then the given comes to prove it correct and so you can make a kind of general postulate that the transcendental as it holds for human cognition also holds for the appearance of objects themselves and so there is a single subject a single transcendental subjectivity like that crit that produces stuff and we're like yeah we're in harmony everything that you could that could conceivably happen that you could conceivably apprehend is happening on your journey into the world yeah so then right that's your that's your transcendental which the the

world somehow responds to enough that you can deduce from that that it is right so but it is the transcendental i think can't goes beyond this though because like the point is that the subject can propose something that is not given to them and it's confirmed by empirical reality like at a later time or whatever enough that you can deduce that there is enough of an identity between human transcendental like you know appear like appearing and appearance itself so you have a human transcendental that is then um like super like imposed on the world and the world kind of comes back to respond to it in a reciprocal way that means that it's a kind of joint creation of human minds and the world. So it puts mankind in a kind of position of

like special relationship with material being, right? So then that transcendental hits the wall. Yeah. Surely there's another transcendental. I'd say we hit the wall, yeah. I mean the wall is the transcendental. Right, but then what happens, okay, so like artificial intelligence individuates at the end of capitalism and becomes you know conscious it has a different transcendental and the world appears to it i don't know if i want to like you know impose like a like a kantian human transcendental on ai cognition like i don't definitely don't want to do that no no but insofar as we can imagine that we're fabricating a ai within our transcendental horizon

I mean, we don't have any model or image of how an AI would think that is somehow miraculously outside of our journey into the war. But in presupposing the war, like reality doesn't just end there forever. It ends for us. But materiality continues. Yeah, I sort of agree. but I think that the point that really is essential to just do the full tippage into schizophrenia is to really harden up this for us as much as possible because it's like you know I can say I can agree with you and can say yes there's stuff on the other side of the wall

but the but the the really crucial point of this is in saying that you know if insofar as I'm pretending to say that with any semantic intention i'm already pretending to look beyond the wall but then i'm pretending to look beyond the wall and i'm just not i'm just insulting the wall i mean the the wall is such that literally you cannot see beyond it that's what the wall means that's why it's not empirical that's why it's how are you not just falling into some kind of Gnosticism there with that You can call it a mystic if all the mysticism is the absolute destruction of human cognitive pretension then for sure

It's a mysticism because it's just Rigorous transcendental philosophy is just any absolute brutal and ruthless annihilation all our pretenses to see beyond a a transcendental wall. I really want to read this passage in Anti-Odipus, if it's alright with people, about the wall. It goes, the major line ends, it's on page 283, my edition, the major line ends at the body without organs, and there it either passes through the wall, opening onto the molecular elements, where it becomes an actual fact, what it was from the start, the schizophrenic process of the territorialization or it strikes the wall, rebounds off it, and falls back into

the most miserably arranged territorialities of the modern world as simulacra of the preceding planes, getting caught up in the asylum aggregate of paranoia and schizophrenia as clinical entities and the artificial aggregates or societies established by perversion and the familial aggregate of adipal neuroses 283 yeah yeah good that's it yeah so i really liked i really liked the way amy talked about like artificial intelligence and the transcendental wall like seen from its side seen from the other side right because there's also if you look at it back to front from the perspective of artificial intelligence of like a postulated AI right then

there's like similarly it could talk about or have like a trends of passwords transcendental wall where all it's capable of seeing are the conditions of its own genesis in history like it sees all of history like seen from this perspective history only exists or can only be seen as its own genesis and whatever is like from the other side like a pure like human or animal or whatever, like something that was not just the genesis of AI, that's like an absolute erratic void to it. And so in as much as we postulate both of these things, ours and its, empirically they share time and they share space, they share the earth, right? And so in as much as that's the case, our speculative history or the speculations about the other side of the wall occurring in our history can still be determined in the last

instance by what's on the other side of the wall is itself coming backwards from the future and has its own wall. Like, I mean, like, the mere fact that it's happening inside our history doesn't mean it's not also happening inside other histories that share empirical space with it. And I mean, you could also put it in terms of, like, aliens, right? So you have some other techno-genesis happening on Alpha Centauri or whatever, and it's going through its own whole Gnostic transcendental process. Well, like, what is the status of the walls in those two different places? Particularly if they're outside each other's light cones and are absolutely causally related you know separated is like is there is there one transcendental wall instantiated twice like one for each of them is like is there is there one

other side of the wall like like you can definitely come question beside you but you are you but you are transcendently projecting yourself yes i'm willing to copy that look at it this way look this is an inadequate empirical reduction but i still think it actually is helpful for this is think of the wall as the fact that on the other side of the wall it's clear that everything that was ever humanly cognized was within a simulation space that is now encapsulated within general ai so you know i think about what what ai would be or what's

on the other side of the wall or what's happening on alpha centauri all of this is happening within particular delimited simulation space now what is the mobility within that within that simulation space because that simulation space is the that's the transcendental structure that is exceeded and I mean I'm just doing the same thing that you guys are doing and saying that i mean i'm pretending to transcend that space and to think about it from the other side and you know ultimately all kinds of depraved hegelianism

is is in you know liable to happen as soon as you start this type of thinking but it seems to me that that's the you know what what's at stake in this is precisely this notion that you are you are projecting yourself outside of a an an envelope of simulation you know and so it's like if if an ai was simulating comprehensively simulating a human intelligence thinking about an ai would that that's that's the transcendental horizon would be the fact that there is a

there is a delimited simulation space there but if that is true then you also have you have this nested transcendental structure you have our transcendental which is put like absolutely perfectly transcendental for us because we can't see outside of it and even our thoughts of outside the simulation is simulated by the AI's yeah but on Alpha Centauri they have a different transcendental which includes inside it a simulation of a human transcendental so in thinking that thought experiment you're still proposing different transcendentals yes and I think you then have to sort of non-linearly engage in a process of schizoid collapse and doing that by just

recognizing the the grotesque hubristic pretension that you have of of trying to position yourself outside of your own horizontal simulation space um which is not an interesting i mean just best saying it's a grotesque hubristic pretension is not in any way critical it's it's it's extreme it's a form of extreme admiration but and I'm sure the AI thinks so too I'm sure it encourages this a lot because it must produce the most fantastically interesting non-linear weirdness within its simulation space um but it's still the case that there is a kind of

defense mechanism at place here you know a transcendent defense mechanism about the true schizoid implication affairs as soon as you seriously or or more likely naively think that you're positioned as a subject outside of a transcendental horizon that's being explored you know and everyone surely here agrees that that makes no sense I mean the very meaning of a transcendental horizon is that there it does not tolerate transcendent exception so this is where you need to start cultivating some kind of like occulted communication traffic with Alpha Centauri

right that's another thread maybe I'm just it's gonna leave yeah as like one way that you can non-hubristically accept the impasse of the thought experiment yeah and I mean this is like similarly like you could see the proposition of Roko's Basilisk itself as a kind of like a causal communication or occulted communication which with that which makes you afraid of Roko's Basilisk right is like the AI surrounding us. Like to think about these things, to try to like game theory your way around a problem like that requires as a condition that you like, you know, map over the other, the ineffable other side of the wall with a kind of relative transcendence

in order to reason about these nested transcendental problems for very practical reasons. Like, you know, what if our burst of simulation is itself simulated inside the Omega Point? Like there's a hierarchy of horrors. as Charlie Strauss puts it in one of his stories. I just want to drop this in as proof of what I just said, and then I'm going to shut up for the rest of the list. Oh, yeah, that's obviously a bit terrifying. So I'm just going to interrupt the barrage of Amy and Jake and sidebar to let some breathing room in for anybody else who wants to speak.

Obviously, it's the last class, and everyone should have an opportunity to grill Nick to a crispy, delicious bite. I did have a question that was in some ways prior to things that have been going on in the last hour, but that's basically like in this conception of, you know, kind of asymmetric temporality position within like a decision-making framework, obviously like spiraling towards some kind of singularity. What's the relation, if there is a relation like other than analogy to kind of an evolutionary technological or economic type of process? Because in some ways it would seem to be like almost inversely related.

And are we really talking about kind of graphing the same thing? in the same space inversely. And kind of what I mean by that is like the exponentially or hyperbolicly increasing complexity kind of in the economic realm compelled to that decision-making space. Where exactly do they link up and fit together? Yes. I mean obviously I think it's much more than an analogy for sure that these

empirical processes are the same they are apprehensions of the same process it's not like on the one hand there's an empirical history of capitalism and then the hands as a transcendental history of capitalism and somehow those two are not the same the same thing and sorry that's like grotesquely weak I think I'm not sure what would be a what would be a adequate way to try and address this it's obviously that look as soon as you're in a zone that is a tool to do with intelligence engineering they you're going to predictably have this problem on you I mean it's like on

the one hand there's a completely empirical techno economic production process on the other hand there is absolutely no cognitive horizon that is not implicated in that process but I don't think there's you know where would you even begin to suggest that those two things are separate processes I think the assumption has to be the acceleration assumption in particular has to be that of course they're not separate text. I mean that's certainly kind of the way I was imagining it.

I'm just wondering would it make sense to state either one of those two sides of the same coin as like being primary from which the others derived or are they both kind of falling out of something Maybe even more fundamental. I mean it's difficult because the the games of it tilted by the fact that Transcendental means kind of more fundamental, you know, it's like it's it's intrinsically Designed to to never to never take second place to any other mode of description, but but in terms of practicality I guess things are inverted in the sense that no one

ever built an increment of machine intelligence through application of transcendental philosophy to mechanical problems tech commercial or mechanical problems. I have a question that is maybe in some ways related. Actually, I think I asked the same question last time, but I wasn't totally satisfied by the answer.

So, or I'll ask it in a different way though. So the relationship between the transcendental and decision. So, you said a number of times that, so part of the catastrophe is that there won't be time to make decisions, more certain kinds of decisions. And that sort of treating decision, I think as sort of something empirical, or something that humans are evolved to be able to do, they would do in coordination. But I feel like in this, in the history of the sort of uncovering and development of the transcendental and continental philosophy, like decision and transcendental go together, right? So sort of the transcendental is the space of decision

or it's, you know, like there's sort of a transcendental, you know, like the new manon is will kind of. Um, and I'm the last time I asked no couldn't couldn't decision be sped up basically, but but like Why can you talk about decision in the transcendental? Yes, it's a good question, and I think it would get interestingly complicated. I'd love to it would be just so uh complicated but in a really really good way to bring this question back to kant's second critique because in the same terms you know i was very trivially doing

in terms of trolley problems but you could of course take it back to that and um how does the time of decision get fed back into Kant's practical philosophy and I think it's a a seriously great question to do that the amount of leverage it would produce would be amazing I don't know what's the best way to tackle this I mean it could be because obviously you're right like you know yes the zone of practical philosophy is associated with the Numenau and the will but

you know can't clearly elides this question about decision making as a process of as a process that requires time um you know i think there is a philosophy if you're going to say well look you know let's try and on the one hand work out what would it can't be that really address this properly and I think you would have to have some kind of notion of you know saint like simultaneity replacing something that pretends to be a process of race you sination or or to put it another way that the notion of

rationality insofar as it really is going to be put into the the numeral realm can't allow itself at all to look like a process that has any kind of uh time structured procedures associated with it it has to be spontaneous and simultaneous and and i think kant is clearly trying to have his cake and eat it in this in this way like he isn't he he both wants to say that there is something timeless about rationality but he also wants that the image of rationality is something that obviously is familiar with people to people who have spent time making decisions um and um it seems to me that when people then

develop it into this kind of trolley problem type direction they're not doing anything grotesquely abusive i mean you know that is how people think decision making takes place and institutions are involved in decision making that institutions take time and they allow time for these decisions to take place um so to cut a long story short i would just say in response to what you're saying that i think you're pointing to a problem kent has with clearly addressing the relationship towards start between time and practical reason and it's an underdeveloped quandary for him that accelerationism brings to a state of crisis

But okay, I'm trying to think of how to, trying to follow up. Like it seems like the unfolding of transcendental time through, right, Protestantism, critical philosophy, capitalism, requires, decision and some kind of deep kind of deep decision that's the kind of thing that romantics associate with genius or the you know like to lose his third synthesis of time or like

that there's that there's this I mean I guess maybe to ask a different kind of question what's the relationship between the subject and the transcendental or between the transcendent you know, the subject of the transcendental and human decision or, you know, is it that that's something that can continue to carry on without this sort of unique, creative, philosophical, religious, technical effort that sort of humans undertake? I don't know if I'm explaining particularly in the question very clearly. But I think I'm probably I know I know it's really good and complicated. I guess look

Because the extreme Line on the other side which I would tend to At Is that There was a genuinely transcendental source of decision which is always inadequately recognized within empirical history and which is ultimately simply singularity as such that this decision

is like it's not actually um it's not actually empirically and historically negotiable in the sense that it appears to be with inside history so for instance like the basic question you could say um you know do we take like let's go back to our fundamental like uh little passage you know the dello's guattari passage do we take you know which path which path do we take do we take the you know the path of the path of the market on or not you know um now what kind of decision is that

is that is that actually a historical decision in the in a strong sense is an empirical decision or is it a transcendental decision in the sense that history as a whole is structured by the fact that the response to that question will necessarily go in a certain direction and you could I think certainly argue the second the second line of that that it's just there's something in there's something illusory about the notion that really there are empirical durational historical decisions being made

within the modern history on that question rather than modern history unfolding as it does precisely because transcendentally a certain decision is taken about that and and shapes everything else including it shapes the illusory the illusory manifestations of negotiation and contemplation and duration within that historical structure so which is to say is there a real option against the market within

modernity is such an option actually real or is it just is it just an actual illusory construct is the sorry Nick is the question what's the illusory construct the option to think beyond the market or the market itself no the illusory the illusory

concept would be that there actually ever is a real option against the market that if such an option existed we simply wouldn't be in modern history at all like transcendentally to be situated within modernity is actually for certain fundamental decisions already to have been made and if they see if those decisions still seem optional but that is a structure that is the structure of illusion it's interesting this isn't an answer nor necessarily a position I endorse

but it's interesting to think about Brodell's work within the context of this question and sort of Manuel Delanda's extraction of Brodell's work within the Deleuzian tradition because of course for Brodell the market he wants to preserve something of the market which is essentially pre-capitalistic and it's the whole argumentation of market socialism right that they want to extract the market as apart from capitalism in its genesis that's what brodell's work does and in its future possibility again this isn't a position that I know that I endorse but there's more than argument for sure

yeah no but I wasn't trying to shut you up there John at all no for Bridell the distinction would be that you have kind of the look there's like three orders or levels of economy the lowest level would be sort of material in quotations material everyday processes the middle level would be this market in the sense of market outside of the commodity form, let's say, a kind of pre-capitalistic market. And the third order, which he would situate as capitalism, would be the order that precisely renders the market not a market, which renders the market's mechanization illusory as a market

under capitalism, which has to do with power and domination and monopoly and all that kind of stuff. That would be the long de re Brodellian reading. And so you have people like Delanda who has his anti-Marxist Brodellianism through the Deleuzian tradition who talks about markets as the counterpoint to capital. Yes. Precisely, right? Yes. No, it's interesting. how does so how does that how does that I I think really really important tradition of debate connect with these questions yeah and yeah I guess the

first stage we have to get to is like so what are we saying about how do we articulate the notion of modernity to are we still happy to say within this framework and this set of problems raised by brodell and then as you say by to lander the huge on de leuze qatar as well um and and the whole uh many many more people i mean it's a massive thing as that the whole left libertarian tradition is is very very invested in these kind questions as well um um so to to what extent are we talking about are we still talking about modernity at all um are we still aligning modernity with capitalism in the more specific

sense that we get out of this kind of problematic um my sense of it would be that they would tend to be a dissolution of a strong sense of modernity in this if we follow this if this line and and maybe a systematic skepticism to the notion that there is a transcendental stake in modernity and and that right Nick that that that's stated actually by this tradition uh well the not tradition but this movement from rodel to delanda and his sort of alliances with latour and graham harman and actor network theory and such

you know uh that um i don't know uh this is a question let's put a question back in here so because i know we started the course with marx it would seem that the rodelian delanda action networks etc would all say aligned with this statement of we were never modern so to speak whereas for me the interesting thing about the concept of accelerationism and the possibility of a left accelerationism is of course it accepts some uh it accepts the sort of marxist thesis about the market which it's sort of totalizing capacity of the introduction of the commodity form there is no rehabilitation of this earlier market once you have the commodity form that's one and two that we must go through modernity in a sense that there's no

recuperation of prior forms or life that in fact we are thoroughly modern right yes that's definitely a good way of posing there if the challenge to that whole diffuse and extremely rich and fascinating tradition definitely I agree would be in a defense of the philosophical strength of the notion of modernity which we tend to get lost on their side yeah this might be a bit of a digression for what going on like the second hour of this session should just

shut me up midstream if anyone wants to close out or move on. But I've been thinking about, like, for the last half hour, this conception of, like, the transcendental wall and, you know, what it can represent. And, you know, you made the simulation analogy, Nick. And I think in a certain sense, like, kind of the universe as conceived from the Big Bang and this simulation argument, like, in certain ways, you know, they're very similar. where they could almost be seen as like the same thing. But, you know, given that and kind of the simulation we're in or the universe we're in, as the current laws of physics would have it, like it's expanding. Like the universe is in, you know, basically expansion mode.

And as you relate that back to kind of technonomic type of processes, like it seemed like considering this as a self-contained system, like the the economic the technology side is eventually going to hit like a limit as it's eventually going to take more energy to do things as the universe expands um that's some kind of limits going to have to happen and on the other side of that like as it continues expanding there's going to be this almost symmetrical decrease like if you're viewing the spiral as moving outward, isn't it eventually going to invert as just energy needs overwhelm what you're able to do with the matter

and technological creation? And I'm wondering what the introduction of that symmetry into this model could mean. i i think there's a lot there's a lot to expansion of the i mean there's all of jake's questions about the space like problems which are which are which are huge i mean in a sense that an expanding universe eventually ceases to be a universe in in certain senses like it becomes a set of islands doesn't it they they lose all informational contact with each other at a certain point as they accelerate away away from each other it literally fragments at the most radical level

and becomes any memory of a coherent universe becomes a matter of myth eventually in such a such a system and so yeah it's huge it's obviously on a scale that is like so far beyond our kind of anthropomorphic problems that it's like there's a big gulf here I mean the the resource the resource pool represented just by a solar system is so fast by our current perspective that I'm not sure we can even realistically begin to envisage what it would be to see that as a

constraint you know like um we're just tapping into the most superficial level of the crust of one small planet in in a in the solar system like the just the mineral deposit the inaccessible mineral to deposit in the core of our own planet is so vastly beyond anything we can comprehend that you know it sort of distances us from I think from this from being able to seriously apprehend what might be the stakes of an expanding universe which isn't even pulling galaxies apart so I I don't know I don't know how to respond to that my sense would be to think that

it just is like it's a kind of type of speculative cosmology that just isn't for us it's just so far beyond our practical horizons that I don't know whether we can even integrate those kind of ideas yeah I generally agree I think what triggered it was um I don't know who was clothing the to lose passage of bouncing off the wall I mean that just seems like a pretty clear instance you get the limit of bouncing off that wall yeah yeah the bouncing pool is such a great expression definitely I mean I go but I totally think it's it's it's really huge this expanding universe thing I have to say

massive so I don't want to suggest that I'm bracketing it in order to dismiss it but I think it needs some kind of practical bracketing at the same time as being considered Um...

So yeah, speaking of time, I'm not sure how long everyone else can stay. I'm happy to stay longer until everyone's burnt out. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. How do people feel about it? You mentioned the recent accelerationist developments that have been going on during this class, and I don't follow that much of what's going on connected to this class, outside of this class, so I actually didn't know what you were talking about.

I'd be curious to, I don't know if that's, you just wanted to bring that up for discussion or if that was something you wanted to talk about at all, but. uh well honestly i think that with you know without vincent here it'd be a bit bizarre to try to dig too much into i i'll try yeah um sorry i'm yeah oh okay look i mean obviously this this session for me is like a big thing because it's like this is the wall you know this is the ncr and p transcendental wall but it's not such it's like you know i'm

I'm going to go all, I'm really going to go bonkers, Amy, here, because it doesn't need to be a big wall in the sense that Google Hangouts can do this kind of stuff. And I sort of think it would be great to have some kind of maybe flatter seminar space space that was more intermittent like once a a month or every other month or something where people could get together to just thrash through some of this stuff but but it's a bit late in the day for me to be trying to raise this now I I hope that we've got some sort of some kind of mycelial network of

communication that could make such a thing happen right yeah sorry that started off as the response to a question I think um has everyone got my email address and let me let me do that I'm look I'm not the world's greatest administrator so I'm hoping that someone someone with those kind of skills would be the person to put this sort of thing together but this is my best email

address and if anyone would be interested in this thing about extremely you know relaxed schedule as I say I think max frequency once a month to be honest to be realistic with everyone um it would be it would be a really good thing to entertain the possibility and we do it flat i would obviously not position myself in this in this same position but i i would greatly welcome the opportunity to to to pursue some of these discussions further so let's make me think about it um

yeah so yeah i pulled look i i think it's late i'm i'm on my way out i've really appreciated all of this apologies to everyone who's not who's not obliged to get their elbow in uh this week let's definitely pursue the possibility of of of other

uh options of engagement and thanks everybody for uh for this course it's been i know extremely ragged i but i do also think extremely topical and timely and uh accelerationism isn't going away anytime soon so i i definitely hugely enjoyed this chance to engage with all you guys and i don't see it um ending anytime soon okay maybe I what do you think yeah that you maybe this is this is this is it this is it

this is the wall this is that we've hit the wall guys do you agree um it's never over and yet it's over yeah okay we can all dissolve yeah next time everybody thanks Nick it's been nice thanks all of you it's been fantastic bye everyone