Time and Again, the Curse of the Linearizing Amulets

A few days ago I did a post on clave playing, Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 1, Loosen Up. At the end I promised a follow-up, How to Construct a Spirit. I’m still working on it and this post is part of that effort. Just when I’ll get there, I cannot predict.

Note: I've edited this post at 6:30 PM 1 October 2011. 

One of the few things I still remember from having read Marshall McLuhan years ago is a remark on time, something about living in a culture—I forget which—where time is marked by burning sticks of incense. How different that must be from our culture.

And how strange we are, wearing, as most of us do, electromechanical amulets that mark the passage of time down to the second, if not less. The time we so mark is, in some contexts, known as clock time. Certainly, in this context that is how we call it.

These amulets are conceptually linked to a scheme that conceives of time as linear, and the line extends back into the past to the beginning of the universe and forward until . . . . whenever. Time is a line, moment after moment after moment, etc.

At the same time, there are these myths and stories of time as circular, not to mention Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return. But what if time really were circular? Or, at least, not linear? How could that be? Could the presence of those linearizing amulets make us insensitive to temporal circularity.

Brain States

That question became very real to me when I was working on Beethoven’s Anvil. There I had to think about the brain and its states. And THAT’s very tricky.

I had decided to follow Walter Freeman’s approach to neurodynamics. Freeman thinks about brain states like a physicist thinks about the state of, say, a volume of gas. In this way of thinking the state of a physical system is a function of the state of each component of that system. So, the state of some volume of gas can be specified by noting the position and velocity of each molecule. If there are 100 trillion molecules in some volume, then you need the position and velocity for each of those molecules. Well, actually you don’t; as a practical matter you can’t get that information. But the underlying math is about that kind of object, position and velocity for each particle.

Now, let’s do that for a brain. What will serve as our molecular component? The individual neuron usually plays this role, but one might choose, instead, the synapse. For our purposes it makes no difference. Either way, there are lots of them. The Wikipedia puts the number at 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. That’s a lot.

To specify the brain’s state at a given moment in clock time we need to know the state of each molecular component, say of each neuron. One convenient way to do this is to say that a neuron is either firing or it is not. So it can have two states. But neurons are complicated things; each is a living cell with the full complement of machinery that that requires. There’s a lot more to a neuron that whether or not it’s firing.

But, for a moment, let’s pretend that the brain has only two neurons, and each can have only two states. So, our little brain can be in only one of four states:

OO OX XO XX

Now let’s track it through time:

1 OO
2 OO
3 OX
4 XX
5 OO
6 XO
7 XO
8 XX

And so forth. We’ve got eight moments of clock time, but this little brain’s only been flipping around among the four states available to it. So, it’s been in OO state for three of those clock moments, OX for one, XO for two, and XX for two.

But, if that were your brain, and you were thus living those states, and you didn’t have a clock-time amulet on your wrist, how would you experience time? I doubt you’d find time to be linear.

The point is that, if the mind is what a brain does, and the brain only has four available states, then that’s all the states that mind can have. You can, from outside, clock it through state after state, but that’s meaningless to that itty bitty mind. All that itty bitty mind is doing is flipping from one of its four states to another. That’s ALL it can do; physically, that’s all there is.

Well, that’s the game I want to play with a real brain, because that’s a sensible way to think about real brains. That means we’re dealing with trillions and trillions of possible states. Physical states, everyone of them. One after the other, in clock time. But what if some of those states repeat, one after the other, and do so regularly? In a sense, the brain would be looping through time, real physical looping through time.

So, we’ve got two moments of clock time, moment 26,104,638 and moment 26,197,753. And our brain is at the same state in each of those moments, say 7J63Ω∂, but is doesn’t visit that state in between. We might say, then, that when the brain reaches moment 26,197,753, that it loops back in time to 26,104,638:

Clock Time Brain State
26,104,638 7J63Ω∂
. . .
26,136,188 QJ83ΩN
. . .
26,172,987 33ßK3å
. . .
26,197,753 7J63Ω∂

As far as our brain is concerned, moments 26,104,638 and 26,197,753 are one and the same. Is it as though no time has passed between them? Of course not. But . . .

You might ask: What happens if, at moment 26,197,753 with state 7J63Ω∂ our brain remembers something that happened at moment 26,172,987? Well, then it would no longer be in state 7J63Ω∂, would it?

This is a tricky game, I’m playing, very tricky. And needs to be played by tighter rules, rules I don’t know how to specify, but then I’m not sure anyone does. But let’s go with it a bit.

Wayne Booth as Beethoven

Let’s push the game a step further into the uncanny. Let us imagine that, when you are fully absorbed by a piece of music, whether listening to it, performing it, or composing it, that that piece of music fully specifies your brain state. That implies two things: 1) that if you become absorbed by that music on two different days, that those two moments of absorption are effectively one and the same. You have looped in time. 2) if that piece of music was written by Beethoven, and you are not Beethoven, well, for the duration of your absorption there is no effective difference between you and Beethoven .

With that in mind, here’s a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 165-166):

Whatever the case may be, there is no doubt that music affords us deep and powerful experiences, experiences that challenge our ordinary sense of reality. Thus musicking has moved Wayne Booth, a distinguished professor of English recently retired from the University of Chicago, to write about his experiences as an amateur cellist, an avocation he shares with his wife Phyllis. In November of 1969 Booth was grieving the death of his son four months earlier. In the process of “trying, sometimes successfully, to regain his lost affirmation of life” Booth began drafting a book about life, death, and music. Concerning a performance of Beethoven’s string quartet in C-sharp minor, he said:

Leaving the rest of the audience aside for a moment, there were three of us there: Beethoven... the quartet members counting as one....Phyllis and me, also counting only as one whenever we really listened ...Now then: there that “one” was, but where was “there”? The C-sharp minor part of each of us was fusing in a mysterious way....[contrasting] so sharply with what many people think of as “reality.” A part of each of the “three” ... becomes identical.

There is Beethoven, one hundred and forty-three years ago ... writing away at the marvelous theme and variations in the fourth movement. ... Here is the four-players doing the best it can to make the revolutionary welding possible. And here we am, doing the best we can to turn our “self” totally into it: all of us impersonally slogging away (these tears about my son’s death? ignore them, irrelevant) to turn ourselves into that deathless quartet.

Each aspect of this account—the merging of selves, the separation from everyday time and space—has a physical interpretation in the theory I’ve been elaborating. If, contra Heraclitus, we can dip into the same stream time after time, it makes little difference whether our dips are separated by two days of mundane time, or a century and a half. If distinctions between one self and another are lost in this stream, then it makes little difference that it was Beethoven then and Phyllis and Wayne Booth now.

So, imagine an idealized group of, say, 35 people. Every so often they get together to sing and dance together, all of them, children adults and infants. Each time they sing same songs, dance the same steps. Between those sessions each goes about his or her business, in twos and threes, and sixes and, yes, alone as well.

Could we not say that the life of this group loops through time such that, when they’re singing and dancing together, it’s always the same time? Can we think of that moment as a psycho-cultural home base?

* * * * * 

Addendum: This is from a note I wrote about the Ken Burns jazz documentary some years ago:

Now, there is a gem in that final episode.  We see Armstrong casually dressed and comfortably seated, talking about his theme song "When It's Sleepy Time Down South." He then goes into a marvelous a capella rendition of it.  That bit of film is as interesting a document as anything in this whole series, but Burns doesn't give you a clue about what's going on other than the evident fact of Armstrong's pleasure and warmth.

However, if he'd juxtaposed that segment with some early footage of Armstrong singing that song you'd see that the facial expressions are the same and you'd hear that the vocal is the same.  Given that, a voiceover or a talking head could make the point that, when Armstrong sings that song, no matter when or where he is in historical time and space, he returns to the same place in psychological space. So -- to get a bit intellectual touristy about it -- we have the virtues of both Plato's ideal world and Nietzsche's eternal recurrance all rolled into one grinning blackman who is very physical, very much of this world, and, in this clip, very frail and close to death.  And we're set up for a nice little lesson on the nature and importance of ritual.