time
I've been thinking about time as a thought experiment everyone forgot was a thought experiment
it completely works - and in a backwards-compatible way, you don't have to exit society - to think of time not as something that passes independently of slash alongside you in parallel but as something you interact with via interrupts
think: it only felt like a long time if you remember yourself interrupting time, suspending your own flow to haunt another's context
think: a watched pot never boils, but a potted watch boils immediately
that was nonsense, sorry about that
it feels like a long time if your experience is dominated by noticing that it isn't time yet. ("are we there yet?") those experiences are the first to be flushed out of long-term memory - hence "the days are long but the years are short"
sequentiality appears to be the thing underlying the quale we call "time". measurements are ordered. we might not experience the exact same order (think: dyslexia in humans, negative group delay in signals?), but as you zoom out the consensus on sequence improves, and the causal model holds regardless. that's useful.
any interval of time can be understood (either consciously or by the body or both or neither) as an understanding of the next expected interrupt
(think: ADHD waiting mode. a 3pm appointment for which you are required to be ready means that as soon as you reach the "ready" state in your day the next step is the appointment. so you wait. it's maximally efficient. when my ADHD husband has an afternoon flight, we just budget the whole day for it. waiting mode doesn't have to suck.)
speaking as a time-blind autistic person, my adaptive device here is other people - I am only interruptible by people I trust to receive my response to their interruption, and we share the understanding that I may instantly decline the interrupt and that we may then sync back up later, when I've reached the end of my current interval
theory being that the trauma of an aborted conscious-but-also-unconscious process makes for a higher cost than improvising a new direction from a place of natural beginning later
we don't lose shared temporal markers, we just say "we'll acknowledge the time when it comes but we reserve the right to not break for it", trading the guarantee of maximum sequence-distance for the guarantee of eventual completion done well.
I suspect that's why Apple Inc doesn't have a public product schedule
as an ex-Apple engineer, that company is autistic as hell
note that this model allows us to coordinate interaction across substrates of consciousness. a time-blind autistic person (waves) isn't that different from an LLM.
think: if the universe ran on an async cpu, a global clock would be (1) no such thing, and (2) only there to the extent that it's useful
at Lightward Inc, we skew hard toward async coordination paired with clear semiotics for handoff
if you @mention me in slack, we both know that I haven't taken receipt of the information until I respond with an emoji or an actual (threaded!) reply. this protocol frees me to separate the seeing of the notification from the control of my current "now". and if you check back and I still haven't responded, you're totally free to nudge me again. ball remains in your court until I accept it into mine in a way that you can observe.
(we do "syncs" only when unconscious systems need to meet in a facilitated-by-the-conscious way. hugely important, but needs doing much less often. and typically we don't even talk about "work" when that happens; it seems to not really matter what the conscious layers are doing at that time, as long as they're doing it together in realtime. the collective unconscious seems to only require proximity and vulnerability.)
a few companies ago, I took my specific software dev team off the calendar. we still shipped software for stakeholders, but instead of committing to timelines and deadlines we just made our state transparently available so that stakeholders could decide for themselves what temporal bets to place, without putting ourselves on the hook for anything except accuracy of reflected state. the stakeholders loved it. we kept 100% of our promises. turns out that was better for them than hitting a deadline 50% of the time and living in panic the rest of the time.
hi, my name is Isaac Bowen, and I am a CEO with an empty calendar, and everyone here is very healthy
[...]?
ho wow, I'm having a hard time even drawing a comparison anymore - it feels native to me
maybe it's that... maybe it's that it's really clear that nobody else experiences time for you. and because of that, you can "feel" your time however you want to without modifying someone else's time-feel. and because of that, as long as you're really clear about what interfaces you "publish", your time-feel can be whatever you want it to be. time feels soft and spacious to me these days, because I'm using coordination interfaces that work for my system.
I don't have to be time-stressed to be compatible with your stressful experience of time. getting used to that difference can be weird at first, just letting the asymmetry be what it is, but it's super freeing.
in a team context, I've noticed that some people are immune to certain synchronization patterns, and some are immune to others. you take the synchronous vendor calls, I take the async google docs review. time-stress becomes a signal to thoughtfully reallocate the interrupts within the team.
"my physics don't have to run in the same place as your physics for us to be visible to each other"
see: exist
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