I

The Wiener Process structures time like a 24 hour clock.

It divides the day into 24 equal sized portions, it tells time to the granularity of the hour. The Wiener Process is 24 moments that are 1 hour apart.

The hour itself has no time.

Statistically, every subset of each hour is identical to any other subset in its hour. All 24 hours are subsets of a uniform random distribution.

Each hour is a “stretched out” moment.

We usually perceive only moment after moment, but the moment in and by itself has no time, much like the mathematical point knows no dimension.

Each moment is so short that within it we do not perceive a “before” or “after”. Our threshold of perception is the moment and we are unable distinguish events within it. They happened "now" or "at the same time".

We are only capable of perceiving time as the space or difference between moments. Even if each moment appears identical to the next, since there are no absolutely identical moments as moments are atomistic in the sense of a  Leibnizian monad, there is space or difference between them (to make 2 moments, a binary pair, instead of one).

Each hour of the Wiener Process opens up the previously imperceptible world pictures of the moment, it breaks open these former atoms of time perception.

What we have here is rescaled and restructured time. Similar to a magnification under a microscope that lets us “see” all the way to subatomic levels. The world of subatomic particles is described with quantum mechanics, a subset of physics. The laws of physics have no time, but mostly describe the properties of space through differentiation. Time has an arrow but the gravitational laws of Newton do not. Our current laws of everything do not have an arrow of time. They work forward in time the same as they work backwards.

The world of quantum mechanics is not made up of laws in the classical sense of certain causality, but of randomness. Right now we live in 2 worlds simultaneously: The world of the cosmos, that is of everything, and the world beyond everything, which is the world of the super small, the world of subatomic particles and black holes.

There are 2 world picture features in the 24 hour Wiener Process: Each hour shows no signs of development from state A to state B - it remains in 1 state - and the transitions between each hour are abrupt - they appear instantaneous. So the only change in state is the one from one hour to the next and this change is not a transition with cause and effect, but an instantaneous shift from one state to the next.

The hour is a quantum state.

II

“The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers?” [David Hume]

Secret powers are at the core of Hume's ‘Inquiry into the Human Understanding’. For causality is only a figment of the understanding, a connection we make between things that happen after another in time and not attributable to the things themselves.

In his sceptical criticism of all the things that we hold true and self-evident Hume deliberately chooses to name a hidden connection, at least hidden to us, a secret power. It is something that acts at a distance, an imperceptible force that makes it so.

Understanding the inquiry formally: Hume postulates that if we look at the world of continuous motion at a lowest possible frame rate, if we were to slow down the world of experience to a single moment, if we were to stop the continuous world of sense perception, we end up with a picture, the world picture. Hume plays this mind experiment by fabricating an instant of time, the world picture, the atom of time/experience and reduces all human experience to a basic binary pair: the world picture of the past (0) and the world picture of the present (1) .

It is clear that this series can be repeated indefinitely (much like a Turing machine), as soon as we make a world picture of the present it becomes a world picture of the past, by the mere fact that time never stands still. So in simple terms this would be n = n+1, the series that defines natural numbers.

But Hume's aim with this sequence was to demonstrate that if we look at each world picture all by itself, there is nothing in it that suggests that one will turn into the other. There are many deductions we can make by working out the relations between elements, but because all motion is removed, no other world picture exists.

Things in and by themselves, without human perception and understanding have no time or space.

This cardinal argument would later wake up Kant, as he put this: "I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction."[5]

Without time there would be no causality, or causality is not knowable without time.

If we look at the world as a series of moments in time, and we certainly can understand this, nothing in the world picture implies that there is motion at all. There are only relations between immovable things. It is the atomisation of time, the reduction of experience to a world picture. The smallest possible frame for experience is the moment everything stands still, the world picture. Within this we can clearly deduce many relationships, but not the existence of another world picture.

What could this possible atomization of time be?

It is clear that Hume strives for the smallest possible change because he has to make his argument stick. Causality can only be attacked if it is indeed made out of moments in time. Otherwise, his argument serves no purpose and may even sound absurd: How can there be no cause and effect if this is clearly observable?

The reduction of continuous motion into discrete entities, numbers if you will, is at the core of the argument.

Without this dichotomy there would be nothing to observe at all. So Hume can only make his suspicion count if he demonstrates that indeed time is not continuous, but discrete, that there is some kind of indestructible unit, the atom of time, without which nothing can be enumerated, counted or timed.

The underlying “reason d’etre” for us is here the smallest unit of time we can measure. Indeed, in Hume’s future this was discovered, by none other than Planck and then of course named after him, as Planck time. Max Planck’s aim was of course not philosophical. He was a strict adherent to materialism as it was prevalent in the late 19th century, so he would have no idea that Planck time endorses Hume’s skepticism on causality, no, make it possible at all.

Let us think this through one more time: Hume’s disappearance of causality in the World Picture is a unit of Planck time.

Hume warned us: “Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye;”, but now we see very clearly with:

W-C=P

World Picture minus Causality equals Planck time.

The world picture, once established, has no time and therefore can not cause or be the cause of anything. Hume states: "I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori, but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly coinjoined with each other."[2]

What happens to this relation if the experience has nothing in it that is constantly conjoined?

How do we experience the absence of cause and effect, of any kind of conjointment?

Hume clearly shows that cause and effect arise from experience which is made up of a series of world pictures who in and by themselves have no time. Yet, the understanding of this does require time, but a time which is not necessarily sequential. This “time” has only relationships that are within its own moment, it does not refer back to a past or anticipates a future.

The time of the world picture is unknown or mathematically random.

It is still a series of countable numbers but in no particular order.

III

The Wiener Process as a computational artifact implements the Entscheidungsproblem[8] as it applies to human experience and understanding. It formalizes the proposition that entropy, the endgame of all possible combinations within a finite set, can be experienced as a stochastic process.

IV

The threshold of hearing is very relative to the environment we find ourselves in. The quieter it is the more sensitive hearing becomes. Therefore, if there is no sound environment at all, we start to hear the sound of our own body. As such, we always hear these sounds, but are usually never aware of them. Unlike the eye, the ears are never closed, so the only mechanism of shutting out sounds is not to pay any attention to them.

“Music” is usually used to cover the sound environment, to replace the existing multitude of intentional and unintentional acoustic phenomena with an uninterrupted series of evenly spaced periodic tones and aperiodic pulses that blanket everything. The loudness of the uninterrupted series in relation to the environment determines the aspect of its power. Amplified “music” is now pervasive. Consumed “music” is better the louder it is. The loudest sounds get our attention.

As we can only follow one task at a time, we round-robin attention, splice it up into time slots that pay attention to one task. Just the speed of changing from one task to the next gives it the appearance of multi-tasking, of paying attention to different tasks at the same time.

“Music” asserts always the loudest part of the environment and therefore commands our attention.

Yet, the multitude of nerve perceptions still exists, the sounds of everything is still present and, if not masked, still perceptible. Because the ear, like the brain and the heart, never shuts off, everything is still processed, all the time.

To deal with the information density the brain is capable of processing 300kb/s. Everything else is beyond our resolution of understanding, all perception is throttled through this gate. There may be a world in higher resolution out there but we will never know it as the understanding is conditioned by 300kb/s.

The world that is real to us is always only conditioned through our perception and always limited by our understanding, our ability to process information at a certain rate.

The heart beats at an average rate of 80 times a minute. All of our perception underlies this inner perception of our pulse, a clock.

V

“Time is a child moving counters in a game; the royal power is a child's.” [Heraclitus]

VI

1. Sound, speech, music only exists within the human mind; they are not functions of the external world.

2. Sound and it’s meaning is a basic faculty of the mind such as the understanding, reason and perception.

3. Sound exists as a function of the brain, as an ordered set of external random stimuli.

4. Frequency is the understanding of a repeated perception of periodic waveforms.

5. The act of brain functioning, the act of thinking, makes sound we attach meaning to, music.

VI

We ask the question of what is sound, what is music?

Here we have our ordered set of frequencies, ordered only because we connected the incoming stimuli in time. So to have any kind of sound, we do not only need external stimuli, but we need sequential stimuli. Therefore:

 m = s(n1, n2, n3, …)

This set of stimuli is only a set because we recognize it as such, because we attach a series of natural numbers to it.

The ability to generate ordered sets is a function of our brain, but is not present in the random external stimuli.

Following Kant, time and space are the conditions for experience, but not experience itself. So time and space are functions of the brain, operations of the human mind, and not attributable to the things in and by themselves.

Things in and by themselves are random, in a state of total entropy.

There is no signal but only noise.

We generate signals, both time and space, and both are a functions of our brain.

Ordered sets are essentially human. The world is not ordered, but we are.

In order to make the world appear as it does, we group, arrange and connect it. As we do so persistently we can not think of the world in any other way, or we can think of other worlds but none of them make up what we call reality.

Reality is self-consistent and comprehended with what we call the laws of nature. Therefore reality is a fixed convention, the only ordered set humans make of random stimuli, at any given moment in time.

The basic proposition of predicate logic a=a, b<>a, etc.. are true for any given moment in time, however eternal we think them to be, as our construct of eternity is something of indefinite time, as we can not think outside of time and space. Even if we do we can not attach any reality to this, it would be meaningless.

The laws of nature are only true for any given moment in time and space and they are regenerated by us at any given moment.

It is easy to lose sight of this fact, that what we hold true as a sequentially ordered set of stimuli, the world (picture), is only true for any given instant of time and space and we, as humans, as a function of the brain, as a mind, regenerate this constantly. They are not only relative, as Einstein showed that all spacetime is local, but are made for each instant of time and for each locality of space.

This is easy to comprehend if we look at the way humans perceived of the world a few hundred years ago. Well, they thought the earth at the center of the universe. Bloodletting was considered a medical treatment. Needless to say, our contemporary conception of the laws of nature and mind have changed, they have been regenerated at each instant of time, but random mutations occurred and here we are with the sun in the center of our solar system and it is obvious what happened to bloodletting, it vanished from the book of medical treatments.

This also means that our current conception is undergoing regeneration and random mutation at any moment.

 
[2]David Hume - Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

[3]Leibniz - Monadology

[4]Wiener Process

[5]Immanuel Kant - Prolegomena

[6]Psychoacoustics

[7](Bosse Lincoln)

[8] David Hilbert - Entscheidungsproblem

VII

Genealogy of the Wiener Process:

1. Tinnitus 2 Heraclitus 3 Zeno 4 Plato 5 al-Khwārizmī 6 Bernoulli 7 Leibniz 8 Isaac Newton (reversibility) 9 David Hume 10 Immanuel Kant (Free Will) 11 Max Planck 12 Sadi Carnot (2nd law of thermodynamics) 13 Gustav Fechner (psychophysics) 14 Heinrich Boltzmann 15 Albert Einstein 16 Werner Heisenberg 17 Heschl's gyri (Auditory cortex) 18 Norbert Wiener 19 Donald Knuth 20 Max Matthews 21 Chuck Moore 22 Karlheinz Stockhausen (long time) 23 Luc Ferrari (field rec) 24 Iannis Xenakis 25 John Cage (subtractive organisation) 24 Jastreboff