No Outside: A Continuum Model of the Cosmos

Abstract

Over the last sixty years computational modeling of dynamical systems has increasingly come to rival theory and experiment as a legitimate contributor to the ever growing body of scientific knowledge.  In particular, the ability to model systems’ future and past states—to speed up or slowdown their inter/intra-relationships—has revealed once hidden spatial and temporal patterns that complicate taxonomic conventions, e.g., those separating living from non-living levels of organization.  The fixed position of the viewing subject is, itself, destabilized in this modeling process as temporal frames become relativized.  What follows are some thoughts on what it might mean were the human to be willing to untether itself from its imagined privileged position within a spatiotemporal hierarchy and explore instead the proposition of an open-ended spatiotemporal continuum.