Structure

The one central idea which has dominated my thinking recently, concerns the relationship between time and structure. In posher academese, it's "diachronic" (time) and "synchronic" (structure). But even that is problematic. There are really no words, because words themselves exist in time, and there's little one can do to express timelessness in time. Except perhaps in music, we might get a passing glimpse. Even when one wishes for something or expects something to happen, one knows that the anticipated event lies latent in the origin of things. That ought to give us hope - which itself is a surrender to the unity of things. 

First there were bacteria, now there's Manchester... In what way was Manchester in the bacteria? In some way it was, alongside all the other places, events, minds, and lives. Just as the ending of Beethoven 9 is in the first note. Why do we have to wait an hour and a bit to get to the end? Because the music must unfold and enfold. Why does it have to unfold and enfold if it's all one? Because we cannot perceive the higher order of  structure within which everything is one. We have to invent the unfolding of time to apprehend oneness. 

History is unfolding in the same way. Events are strategies invented by thought for dealing with the imbalance between thought and nature. All our unfolding is about the next strategy - the next move in an unfolded field. The journey of unfolding - the dynamics - is about resolving the unfolding process to nothing. At the end of an hour, we get the final chord. 

Perhaps I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't think there was a practical and empirical way of demonstrating it. But I suspect there now is. It's not that the AI nonsense is going to revolutionise the world in the ways the zealots claim (it will probably make things worse), but its structural principles are a mystery, and may well provide an alternative glimpse on the oneness of everything. After all,  Manchester may be in the bacterium, but War and Peace is in an AI model. We haven't got there yet, but we may be moving towards a correction to our perceptual apparatus which helps us to see the deeper order in the structure of nature.