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The old billiards science is dissolving  

An evolution into process thinking, timing, and organic science

Three analytic perspectives; three time types add up to timing

  • Materialism: time is a linear sequence of cause-effects, the arrow of time moving in one direction only, past-present-future. This sort of time can be measured because one line can be compared with another for ‘length’. This is the limited assumption of scientific materialism. All else unmeasurable is deemed to be ‘subjective time’.
  • Informationism: time is a timeframe with a beginning, middle and end in which a certain amount of change from one state to another must happen. It is ‘story time’, a narrative with comparative meaning within its own timeframe, or perhaps by comparing one measurable timeframe with another. Within that timeframe, however, information can flow in any transitioning pattern, not necessarily starting at ‘the beginning of the story’. This cannot be ‘measured’ by comparison against anything else, so it is full instead of subjective meaningful connections for the people telling and hearing these stories of life. Timeframes are the context for consciousness, which is itself a comparative process by internal systemic feedback reflection. This is however a different type of ‘comparison’ to external measurement against a scientific standard. Informationism is thus halfway between an objective and a subjective view of time, both require comparisons of some sort.
  • Vitalism: time is the eternal now. A life force courses through space and our embodiment, with which our eternal soul needs to harmonise in order to purify and progress along its journey. Eternity is the wholeness in which the soul will find rest. In this worldview, eternity is not the endless string of ‘present moments’ that a materialist imagines. The now is an ever-present doorway to step into that eternity, like a view to the distant horizon of our local landscape. This is ‘African time’, where ‘things’ come into their time for their duration, and collective relationship quality is all important – ubuntu. In this sense, the eternal now is not even the subjective time decried by scientific materialism as valueless. The eternal now is simply unmeasurable existence. That is because my now cannot be meaningfully compared with anyone else’s, other than by an apparent obedience and submission to social norms of behaviour.

The Zen paradox of the archer, and timing