Where Do Space & Time Come From? // Super UBI
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Where Do Space & Time Come From? // Super UBI
Mind Matters is a newsletter written by Oshan Jarow, exploring post-neoliberal economic possibilities, contemplative philosophy, consciousness, & some bountiful absurdities of being alive. If you’re reading this but aren’t subscribed, you can join here:
Hello, fellow humans.
Nothing new to report - slowly working on longer-term projects (inching towards LEP prototype release 😬).
In we go —
Temporal Archeology: The Earthly Roots of Past, Present, & Future
Another dispatch from David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous. He suggests that the structure of human perception, the structure of our “incorporeal ideas”, are “lifted” from the structures of our environments.
In particular, he’s writing against the modern notions of “space” and “time” as abstract, objective, separate entities that exist as pure concepts apart from the living earth. In a remarkable chapter, he goes searching for the roots that connect our ideas about space and time to the embodied, living world. If our perception is “lifted” from the environment, where in our environments did these strange, slippery notions of space and time come from?
From a close reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty & Martin Heidegger, he uncovers a delightful answer.
Commenting on Heidegger, Abram writes:
In Being and Time, he writes of past, present, and future as the three “ecstasies” of time, suggesting that the past, the present, and the future all draw us outside of ourselves. Time is ecstatic in that it opens us outward. Toward what? The three ecstasies of time, according to Heidegger, “are not simply raptures in which one gets carried away. Rather, there belongs to each ecstasy a ‘whither’ to which one is carried….” Each of time’s ecstasies carries us, Heidegger says, toward a particular “horizon.”
And it’s here that Abram pulls up the first root: the horizon itself! Time and time again, Heidegger uses the term horizon as a metaphor. Abram, with the clear sight of an outside observer, sees the horizon is more than a metaphor. It provides part of the structural basis for time itself:
Just as the power of time seems to ensure that the perceivable present is always open, always already unfolding beyond itself, so the distant horizon seems to hold open the perceivable landscape, binding it always to that which lies beyond it.
The visible horizon, that is, a kind of gateway or threshold, joining the presence of the surrounding terrain to that which exceeds this open presence, to that which is hidden beyond the horizon. The horizon carries the promise of something more, something other.
The way in which we perceive the literal horizon of a landscape is structurally equivalent to the way in which we perceive the horizon of time. Specifically, the horizon is the joint between present and future. It marks the boundary between the now and the yet-to-come. The invisible and yet immanent.
But from where, then, do we derive the connection between past and present? Under-the-ground.
Like the horizon, we’re hardly aware of that which lies beneath our feet. Not the soil we can see, but the invisible worlds beneath. Where the horizon is a trajectory “out toward", the under-the-ground is a “sprouting up from”, a “packed density”. While the horizon can be explored & discovered, moved into, the under-the-ground is a more impermeable separation. Abrams: “…the ground is much more resolute in its concealment of what lies beyond it,” it refuses access, in much the same way that we cannot go back in time and fiddle with the past. The past is held in place, from which the present sprouts.
Abrams concludes:
“The beyond-the-horizon, by withholding its presence, holds open the perceived landscape, while the under-the-ground, by refusing its presence, supports the perceived landscape. The reciprocity and asymmetry between these two realms bear an uncanny resemblance to the reciprocity and contrast between the future (or “what is to come”) and the past (or “what has been”) in Martin Heidegger’s description above—the one withholding presence, the other refusing presence; both of them thus making possible the open presence of the present. Dare we suspect that these two descriptions describe one and the same phenomenon? I believe that we can, for the isomorphism is complete.”
The future is as open as the horizon, the past is closed as the under-ground. Space and time are not separate, conceptual entities, but intertwined phenomenologies “lifted” from the ground and the horizon.
Previously, I shared Abram’s argument that alphabetic literacy cut us off from the more-than-human world, creating a language that recursively locks us inside our own minds. The abstracted, mathematized notions of space & time that have come to dominate our thinking today demonstrate this process at work.
Oral cultures held us in relation with the more-than-human world, whereas alphabetic cultures erode that relation. In oral cultures, language is in direct relation with the more-than-human world. It would be unthinkable, or literally unspeakable, to entertain notions of space & time that were not inextricable with the natural world beyond our minds. But as we’ve gone down the alphabetic road, and grown evermore encapsulated within our own minds, sterilized of their original relation with the more-than-human environment, we’ve developed notions that reflect this sterility. Our ideas of space and time have been scrubbed of the earth that clings to them, like wiping the long stems of a carrot clean of any soil.
Abrams:
It would seem, then, that the conceptual separation of time and space—the literate distinction between a linear, progressive time and a homogeneous, featureless space—functions to eclipse the enveloping earth from human awareness. As long as we structure our lives according to assumed parameters of a static space and a rectilinear time, we will be able to ignore, or overlook, our thorough dependence upon the earth around us. Only when space and time are reconciled into a single, unified field of phenomena does the encompassing earth become evident, once again, in all its power and its depth, as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing.
I’m not sure of the pragmatic implications of reconciling space & time into a “unified field of phenomena”. Phenomenologically, I imagine we’d feel less separate from the more-than-human. One might argue this sort of consciousness would make environmentalism a default, rather than an effort we must push ourselves toward.
But as Heraclitus observed, one can never step in the same river twice. We can’t simply return to the animism of pre-alphabetic cultures. If we rediscover a phenomenology of unity with the more-than-human, it will be significantly different from the enchanted world of our ancestors.
I wonder, then, what new forms a rediscovered animism might take?
Fast Forwarding the Future
This remains one of my favorite videos, especially in the wake of writing about the universe’s impending heat death in the last newsletter. I could imagine new secular churches cropping up around it:
UBI Is Not the End of Work
On Vasant Dhar’s podcast, Erik Brynjolfsson expressed a concern about UBI that I’m hearing often, which is irksome, because I think it’s exactly wrong.
The concern is essentially: UBI is bad because it gives people money without giving them anything to do, no way to participate in society. Just cutting a check to the useless, paid for by the shrinking group of skilled laborers doing useful work. He conflates “UBI” with “paying people enough $$ to drop out of the workforce”.
This concerns Erik, because he (rightly!) believes people want to feel they are a part of something, that they’re contributing. Therefore, he prefers wage subsidies like the earned income tax credit (EITC), because it maintains the incentive to find work.
Just for fun, I’ll paste this paper here:
Here’s what irks me: though Erik is concerned that UBI means mass-unemployment, there isn’t a single UBI proposal that could, or even wants, to accomplish that.
I haven’t seen a single basic income proposal that would give people more than $1,200 per month, which means $14,400 per year. How many people do you know that would be happy living off $14,400 per year? If you pay $800 in monthly rent, that’s $4,800 leftover for everything else.
Contra Erik’s concerns that UBI would detract from productivity, most UBI proposals are pitched as *good* for productivity. The research on basic income confirms this.
One of the most iron-clad, repeated findings in all basic income research is: people who receive unconditional transfers do not work any less*.
In many cases (like Stockton’s recent experiment), basic income recipients find full-time employment *faster* than non-recipients.
There’s also substantial research suggesting that increasing unconditional transfers raises entrepreneurship (exactly the kind of work Erik wants to see more of):
And also:
Anyway. There’s more to say, which I touched on in that Twitter thread. But the main point is this: we should stop conflating “UBI” with “paying people enough money to drop out of the workforce & do nothing.”
There are currently zero serious UBI proposals that could do this. Erik is talking about a real concern, but it’s not UBI as we know it.
Maybe, then, we should come up with a different name for the kind of transfer payment that would make this a valid concern. “Super UBI” (SUBI)? I don’t know. Let me know if you have good names. But I think it’s important that we develop the language to emphasize the distinction between what Erik’s talking about, and what current UBI proposals actually are. Otherwise, we’ll keep making this conflation, and criticize UBI when we’re really concerned about something totally different, SUBI, or whatever we call it.
(note: Erik’s concern with SUBI is real! If we each got an unconditional $75k per year, there are some very real risks!)
Personal Websites
I’m in the process of rebuilding my website, growing out of its adolescence in Squarespace, to something (hopefully) a little cleaner, and more reflective of my taste, in Webflow. It’ll be home to my writing, the podcast,
If you have any favorite personal websites, please send them my way — I’d love to see design references!
The more I get into the build, the more I’m struck by how similar building a personal website feels to decorating your house. It’s a *space*, a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf put it. A few of my references:
https://laurasinisterra.github.io/portfolio-site/
https://aaronzlewis.com
https://szymonkaliski.com
https://andymatuschak.org
https://callumflack.design
https://tobyshorin.com
~ End
If you’re interested in disagreeing, improving, or otherwise discussing any of these themes, you can join the Discord! You’ll get the benefit of hearing from a whole gang of folks who have their own angles on these ideas. If you do join, be sure to introduce yourself & your interests in the #introductions channel!
As always, you can respond directly to this email, or reach out on Twitter. You can find more essays & podcasts on my website. I’m here for conversation & community.
Until next time,
— Oshan