Template:M intro design time

Temporality
/ˌtɛmpəˈralɪti/ (n.)
The unavoidable, but easy to forget, nature of existence through time. Continuity.

The importance of continuing existence through time is much overlooked in our tenseless age of data, symbol processing and difference engines. It is an underestimated fourth dimension along which our wicked game of life plays out.

In the same way computer intelligence is an ingenious card trick: a clever simulacrum of consciousness yielded from still frames, even though consciousness — a continuing “self” that extends backwards and forwards in time — evolved to solve the single problem of continuity. The computer is like a cine-film, conjuring a vibrant ostensible motion from countless still frames.

Computer code has no tense. It does not understand past, present or future.

For a thing’s temporality of things is not apparent on an infinitesimal snapshot represented by any presentation of data. Things which are immutable and things which are liable to change look the same. We assign rights based upon the nature of things, and it matters how permanent those things happen to be. A human’s count of arms and legs us the same — barring catastrophe, and it can hardly grow — but ones tastes and opinions, however devoutly held, can change. In a fully functioning adult, indeed, they should.

(The seventy year old man who cleaves to the same politics he did when he was fifteen hasn’t learned anything.)