Fractal Synchronicity and the Future of Time

Thanks Michael Garfield for having me on his podcast “Future Fossils,” for a wide ranging conversation about the nature of time!

You can download the interview here.

“This week’s guest is philosopher Kerri Welch, whose doctoral thesis from CIIS (and current book-in-progress) explore a fractal model of time. If you have ever wondered about time, this episode is for you. Instant classic.

We take a wild tour through the layers of the human brain and mind, examining the correlations between different brain waves and their correspondent states of consciousness – and speculate on our experience of time as an evolved response to a far more complex and awesome world than we can possibly conceive!

Twenty minutes in and we’ve already covered the fractal nature of time and we’re on to explaining what happens to the modern self and its boundaries in the torrent of novelty that awaits un in a digital age. Then we go deep for another hour and a half…

DISCUSSED:

• Fate vs Free Will in light of Chaos Theory

• The relationship between technology and our experience of time, overstimulated, interrupted

• How Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness overlay on EEG data

• The nature of synchronicity & time vs. timelessness

• The effects of ayahuasca, illness, aging, and other time-warping events on the passage of time

• Singularities and our asymptotic approach to transcendence

• Narrative collapse, fake news, and the end of history

• Relativity, scaling laws, and city time vs. country time

• What was before TIME?

• Pet telepathy as a matter of referential framing

• The “future” causing the “past”…

• …and the physics (and psychology!) of how to feel the future.

• Schizophrenia as possibly a disorder of time perception

• Dopamine levels and the experience of duration

• Human chronobiology adapted to other planet’s days

• Integrating the rational mind with transpersonal experience

QUOTES:

“We actually can’t get precise enough to bring the level of predictability that physics once thought it could.”

“Children have to be indoctrinated into time, right? They’re not born into linear time. They’re born in a timeless space, and that’s where they live, and then they live in this hypnagogic dream time, which is all present moment. You’ll hear kids say, like, ‘I remember when you were little’ to their parents.”

“When we restrict ourselves to linear causal thinking, we are coarse-graining the present moment. We are glossing over the infinite depth of richness available within the present moment. And of course it’s paradoxical: we coarse-grain it by dividing it more finely.”

“What we’re experiencing in our culture right now is the entrainment to the fast frequencies. We’re not letting the long slow frequencies have the greatest amplitude. What does that look like? It looks like hanging out with rocks and trees and elders. And that’s the integration that we need in order to nest our super-fast frequencies within, in order to give them direction…if we can nest within the natural structures of the long, slow frequencies that surround us, it will guide these fast frequencies in healthier directions.”

“We REALLY just have to get better at holding multiple realities. AND recognizing what’s important about them.”

“The dog comes and sits by the door half an hour before the owner comes home because to the dog, the owner’s already home. Their moment is big enough that it’s happening already. But we’re so finely dividing things that we’re like, ‘It’s half an hour away! It’s an eternity!’ But for the dog that’s been sitting bored at home all day…”

“Free will comes from a future influence we can’t see. That’s one way I would interpret it.”

“The definition of human experience is, to me, the limitation of infinity, in order to have experience.””