A boat moves forward, drifting in the gentle current. A single candle lights its way, the journey revealed from light in the darkness. Looking back, a wake gradually fades behind the boat, into the distance.
Time is an expanding sequence of memories and artifacts, anchored by the relentless flow of “now” moments. Human reality is data processed into information which in turn becomes shared knowledge. As time passes, new information enters and builds upon itself in a growing system of shared intelligence. Conscious human beings refer to this moment of data entry as “the present” or “now”. Consciousness is an entry point for new information and humans can be thought of as data sensing beings with localised information storage capability.
The human species is a self replicating, biological, processing network of mutually exclusive sensors that process data into a cumulative knowledge base. Human are conscious sensors that move around, collecting data from the physical world and processing it into information and knowledge of the past. Humans do more than just process data from the physical world. They also create new ideas and information, which they contribute to shared knowledge.
Humans self replicate, combining DNA and genetic lineage to form new sensing beings with unique information processing filters. Humans are mutually exclusive, data sorting beings that are conscious and self aware, collecting and storing historical memories for the purpose of shared intelligence, survival, and technological advancement.
This human processed data is used to turn information into knowledge in the physical world, to share between human beings. Humans form information sharing networks in real time or transcribe their knowledge into artifacts to be stored in the physical world such as books or in the digital realm as email, documents and databases for example. In this way, knowledge is then repurposed back into the physical world to be re-processed as new data in a continuous information cleansing loop.
We all experience reality in the timeless flow of the present. Our conscious minds jump around but the illusion of a future and its past, betray us. It’s comforting to think of “moments that are yet to be” as the future. It’s romantic to think of moments that have gone as the past. Yet in each case, it is only thought that makes it so. They are no more real than the idea of time itself.
