Maturana on Zero Time, Tolle's Now and the Derivative

I've looked at the stars at night and in the mornings a few times now. Orion's familiar belt. Fomalhaut is back.

Humberto Maturana is one of the people I am slowly reading my way toward. A biologist from Chile, he gave cybernetics some of its deepest ideas, about the observer and about how living things make and keep themselves. Late in his life he wrote a short letter about time, and it has stayed with me for days. I don't understand all of it yet, and I'm not sure I'm meant to agree with all of it on a first meeting. These are my first notes on it, set beside Eckhart Tolle and the calculus I am learning, written down so I can come back and see how they changed.

Reading Larry Richards on the history of cybernetics led me to his conversation with Jude Lombardi about Maturana and time. I skimmed and then reread Maturana's letter, and the reflections Larry Richards and Jude Lombardi wrote around it, about Maturana and his later thinking. I find myself leaning toward Richards' view. And something in me keeps reaching for the mathematics, which may say more about me than about the letter.

What Maturana wrote

When the American Society for Cybernetics gave Humberto Maturana the Norbert Wiener Medal, he could not come to receive it, so he sent a letter instead, and in it he proposed a zero-time cybernetics. Years later Jude Lombardi and Larry Richards printed the letter in Cybernetics & Human Knowing, with a long conversation of their own about it. Both knew Humberto. Jude, a videographer, social worker and self-described artivist in Baltimore, had Humberto and the composer Herbert Brün on her doctoral committee and first met them both at a society conference. Larry, who calls himself a dialectician, organization designer and conversationalist, was president of the society in the 1980s and saw Humberto present many times. Larry writes that at first he struggled with the ideas and could not see what they had to do with anything he cared about. I trusted the paper more for that. It is where I am now. For me the paper is also a piece of history: their own memories of Humberto, a look at the society he wrote to, at its thinkers and how they are connected to one another, and at how they think out loud together. It goes into the ledger of the history of cybernetics, a story running parallel to the ideas themselves. I come into a field through its history and its people first, so those parallel stories matter to me as much as the ideas.

I am still sitting with what he offers. We exist only in a continuously changing present. The past and the future, he writes, "are manners of being now." Living itself, for anything alive, "occurs in no time, in zero time."

Time, in his telling, is something our ancestors invented: an imaginary dimension that lets memory connect events that happened in different presents and never touched each other. Lombardi and Richards point out that the cybernetic ideas of goal and regulation depend on time.

Where Richards takes it

Larry goes further. We cannot simply stop living in the world of time, he says. Perhaps we go back and forth between the two domains, stepping back into the dynamics of being, and of our conversations, when the purpose-driven way of meeting the world stops working. And if I am living in the moment, with no past and no future, "there are no objects, no problems, no solutions, only dynamics."

Beside Tolle

I like to mix things as I study. It helps my mind to set a book from one shelf beside a paper from another and see what each shows me about the other. This week it started in the sauna, listening to Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Then I came back to the desk, printed the chapter, and read it alongside Maturana's letter and the response from Lombardi and Richards. What Tolle says is like Maturana's letter, but different, and so is what others have said in the same spirit. In the third chapter he separates clock time from psychological time. Clock time is the kind you use to plan, to keep an appointment, to learn from what went wrong; you pick it up and put it down. Psychological time is living for a future or out of a past, and that is the one he says we lose ourselves in. The present, he says, is all anyone ever actually has.

Maturana and Tolle arrive at nearly the same place from opposite ends, a biologist and a spiritual teacher. Tolle calls time an illusion; Maturana calls it an invention, which keeps it as a tool you can choose to use. And Tolle's way into the present is a silent watcher beneath thought, where Maturana insists that anything said is said by an observer, in language, who can be observed in turn. I don't know yet whether Tolle's watcher sits outside the system or is one more observer inside it, and I'd like to find out.

I tend to agree more with the Tolle perspective. It makes sense to me.

The derivative

And if I could formulate it to fit with the mathematics, it seems to align with the derivative, the present moment and zero being similar. It is real while also a paradox.

Here is what I mean, as far as I understand it so far. A speed is a distance divided by a time. Shrink the time and you get the speed over a shorter stretch. The derivative is the speed at a single instant, and an instant has no length: divide by zero and there is nothing left to compute. So calculus never gets there directly. It takes smaller and smaller stretches and asks what number they close in on. The instant is defined by a limit that is approached and never reached, and it is still one of the most useful numbers we have. Grant Sanderson's chapter on it is called The paradox of the derivative.

The present moment has the same shape. Every measurement takes an interval, however small. We seek to measure a moment in time, but a moment that is measured, that has existed, would not truly be that moment. Or something like that.

The same idea sits quietly in the models I have been building to learn this math: whether a loop settles on what it gives back depends on its slope at a single point.

Where I find myself

This is how I feel, and you can't agree with everything. Maturana spent a lifetime on these questions, and I have spent a few evenings. In my gut I feel more aligned with, and more curious about, the mathematics of things: digging deeper into the controller and the governor, into systems and what it is to be inside one, and into real experiments where an idea has to show what it does.

At some point it does also feel like mind games. As a builder or an architect you want something concrete to result from ideas like love and conversation. Maybe that is my side of the two domains Richards describes.

It is a good time for this, for me and for this field. AI helps with complexity, and it lets us be expansive in our thinking and boundless in our interdisciplinary research, in a way that was hard to imagine when these letters were written.

So I need another read through, and then more experiments, and to chew on this for a while longer.

Graham Wallas had a name for that part almost a hundred years ago: incubation, the stretch when you stop working a problem on purpose and let it work in you. He warned that reaching for an idea before it is ready helps about as much as a child "digging up a sprouting bean."

Reading

Jude Lombardi and Larry Richards, "Humberto Maturana on Time: Zero-Time Cybernetics," Cybernetics & Human Knowing 29(3-4), 2022. Includes Maturana's 2008 letter.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (1997), chapter 3.
Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), ch. 4, p. 99.
3Blue1Brown, Essence of Calculus, chapter 2, "The paradox of the derivative."

Observe the Observer: a week earlier in the notebook, holding the contradiction of no time much like the derivative.
Where I Learned to Look: how writing history down changes the history.
Learning as a First-Class System: "only if recorded and told would you know that some expanse of time has passed."
Cybernetics: a reading path, and the freewriting the notebooks keep.