Chapter 15: Time Time Time...

 Some decades back the poet Paul Simon, of the fine folk music duo Simon and Garfunkle, crafted a tune that gave the world a bit of deep wisdom from whence the title of this chapter is drawn.  "Time time time… look what's become of me… of all my possibilities… I was so hard to please…" goes the lyric.  Indeed.  We were and we are so hard to please, and as history shows our habitual dissatisfaction with the what is has propelled mankind headlong into the realms of the what might be, and consequences… like torpedoes… be damned.

Time considered outside the context of sentience is one of the slipperiest concepts possible.   There are relationships of change seen in nature, but time is the enumeration of those cycles, not the cycles themselves.  There are no naturally occurring units of time, time is a count and account of something changing.  E=MC2 does not work without a sentience to create compatible units of time and displacement to acquire the speed of light to be squared, the chances the universe uses standard earth based metric values is negligible… exactly how large is your planet?  What percentage of a solar orbit does your planet make in one rotation of your planet?  I've argued this makes a workable proof of God, but that's another argument for some other day.

 I will assert that where there is naturally occurring time there is sentience in one form or another.  In the search for a sentience dwelling within mankind's digital realms this assertion can become a proof of life:  can it be shown that a, any, structure within the digital realms knows time in and of its' own perception?  Or is the candidate structure limited to time as it is perceived by the humans?

Chapter 14: Logging In...

 Once upon a simpler time if you were in possession of a password you were a trusted member of someone's organization.   Perhaps the organization itself was a secret, or perhaps it was very public, that really wasn't a factor. Knowing which one word out of all of the words assured the knower a permission denied to others made you the keeper of a secret, in some manner special…  they gave you a password.  Hold that thought for a moment.  

When you  approach passwords from the modern perspective a quite different picture appears. In these days of digital connection knowing multiple passwords is mandatory, ubiquitous, nothing special at all, even though each one is still a permission of sorts. 

A permission, yes it is. But of more importance in this context possession of a password recognized by some digital system is absolute proof positive of involvement with some form of collective entity.  Perhaps it is your bank, perhaps it is where you go to gossip and share family photos, mux nix, the finite list of humans who avail themselves of any such system is a census of a  common element within many human minds and therefore a census of the host base of some one collective entity.  

And of course you should say "so what?  The app my bank gave me so I can do the teller's job from my phone is hardly an identity defining component of my psyche and soul."  True indeed, from your perspective as a user of such a system.  But, we as human's are only half of any such an equation.