Showing posts with label Werner Heisenberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Werner Heisenberg. Show all posts

Sunday, December 23, 2018

timothy leary in the 1990s &/or how to talk nineteen to the dozen like a digital maniac even if you aren't



















Raffaello Santi's Angelo (1500-1501), Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902);
Katja Kolm and Maria Dragus in Barbara Albert's Mademoiselle Paradis &/or Mesmer against Society of the Ugly Wigs (Austria/Germany, 2017), Tiziano Vecellio's Amor Sacro e Amor Profano (1514) (potlatch invitations, collages & photography);
Gilbert Simondon Interview (1965/Youtube); 
Fractals: The Color of Infinity (Arthur Clarke/Youtube) [this video was removed from Youtube]; 
Cyberpunk: The Documentary (1990) [this video was removed from Youtube]; 
John C. Lilly interviewed by Jeffrey Mishlove (from Youtube); 
Documentary about John C. Lilly's Dolphin House (from Youtube);  
Jack Parsons: Sex Magic, Drugs and Rocket Science (Biographics/Youtube, 2018);
Did Jack Parsons Blow Himself Up? (Tom Explores Los Angeles/Youtube); 
Éric Sadin: l'asservissement par l'Intelligence Artificiele (Thinkerview/Nov 2018) [the video is not available anymore at Youtube]; 
Survivre au système éducatif, Hackers et Crapauds fous (Thanh Nghiem, Thinkerview, 2018) [the video is not available anymore at Youtube]; 
Cédric Villani: Intelligence artificielle perspectives futures (Thinkerview, 2017) [mon commentaire sur cette interview, sur la page Youtube (this evil has now been sufficiently fenced against, they must have fretted and fumed inwardly): "c'est une connerie presque complète qui vous avez lá, et pourtant vous avez été bien plus gentil avec lui que avec beaucoup de vos autres invités... je me demande si au fond ce qui vous intimide est la mystification: c'est ça le secret qui vous maintient tous; juste un example: la finance internationale n'a rien fait qui s'effondrer dans le moment ou des algorithms et les modeles d'intelligence artificiel ont été introduits... quant à ce que Villani a dit sur la science, et bien! elle n'a pas quand même seulement contribué a nous faire comprendre le fonctionnement de la matière pour pouvoir developper la technologie atomique et l'appliquer à de fins qui pourraient être ou pas justifiées: des scientistes et des ingénieurs ont activement contribué à ce que nous ayons sur terre un tel nombre des bombes avec qui il serait possible de la faire exploser avec nous-mêmes et toutes les autres espèces des centaines de fois! a qui cela a-t-il vraiment profité?! croyez-vous que cela fait du progrès?! ah, oui! en prouvant que nous sommes tous de cons... la tradition culturelle de la France était réflexive et surtout critique, très sophistiquée, de Descartes à Deleuze, en passant par de gens comme Baudelaire; en abandonnant cela, vous êtes devenus des pseudo-pragmatistes et tombés bien au-dessous des Britanniques et des Américains qui au moins ne sont pas si prétentieux et ne rationalisent pas des choses qui n'ont jamais eu de justification" (to be published as part of a rhapsodical work "fit forms of swearing suitable to all occasions", after being totally abolished as altogether unnecessary)] [the video is not available anymore at Youtube];
Category Theory for Beginners: Yoneda Lemma (Richard Southwell, Youtube); 
How I Turned My 4-Year-Old's Art into an NFT (Wall Street Journal, Youtube); 
DeepSeek vs. Silicon Valley: In Shock to Big Tech, Chinese Startup Overtakes U.S. AI (Democracy Now/Youtube, 2025);
IA: la Chine devant les États-Unis? (FRANCE 24/Youtube, 2025); 
Full interview: "Godfather of AI" shares prediction for future of AI, issues warnings (CBS Mornings/Youtube, 2025);
"Godfather of AI" has new warning about artificial intelligence: "You should worry" (CBS News/Youtube, 2025);
Ilya: the AI scientist shaping the world (The Guardian/Youtube, 2024); 
Can We Predict the Unpredictable? With J. Doyne Farmer (The University of Chicago/Youtube, 2025);
Pourquoi la Silicon Valley détruit-elle la démocratie et la planète? (Olivier Alexander, Greenletter Club/Youtube 2025); 
Análise da Aula de Alexandre de Moraes (Paulo Ghiraldelli/Youtube 2025);
The great abyss inframince [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];
Crows in Berg (Inter) View & Pillage [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];
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From the cyclopedia of arts and sciences, to cut not a contemptible figure in a metaphysic circle: 


"Leibniz saw in his binary arithmetic the image of Creation... He imagined that Unity represented God, and Zero the void... [And] alas! What was once hailed as a monument to monotheism ended in the bowels of a robot."
Laplace vs. Tobias Dantzig
"The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity."
Leibniz on imaginary numbers as quoted by Morris Kline (who has no understanding whatsoever of Leibniz's nature)

"... il est illusoire de chercher à retrouver des modes directement artisanaux de production... C’est dans l’accentuation même de la production industrielle, dans l’approfondissement de ses caractères qu’un dépassement de l’antithèse entre artisanat et industrie peut être recherché avec les plus sérieuses chances de succès... L’industrie isole l’homme de la nature parce qu’elle se charge du rapport homme-nature: elle est, en fait, par rapport à l’homme, ce qui remplace le réel d’ordre cosmique (le vent, la pluie, le débordement du fleuve, l’épizootie) en diminuant en une certaine mesure de son indépendance par rapport à l’homme mais conservant la transcendance de dimension et le caractère de discontinuité, d’irréversibilité."

"... En particulier, le mariage de la logique mathématique avec la technologie des ordinateurs vient d’implanter de manière spectaculaire la strate spirituelle dans la couche physique de la réalité. C’est ce feed-back ontologique de la puissance mentale avec son incorporation physique qui produit la résonance culturelle inouïe, dont nous sommes les témoins."
Guerino Mazzola (La vérité du beau dans la musique) 

"... [nous assistons à] la FRACTALISATION de l'étendue se doublant de celle des durées relatives à ce continuum d'une Histoire générale, en voie d'abolition instantanée..."
"... avec l'effraction de l'instant, la fractalisation du tempo historique, les nanochronologies de l'effet de réel entrouvrent la possibilité inouïe d'un dépassement de l'économique à l'avantage de l'astronomique..." 
Paul Virilio

"... le moment où la conscience opérant ce retour sur soi-même se révèle elle-même à elle-même et voit la production vouée à sa consumation est précisément celui où le monde de la production ne sait plus que faire de ses produit."
"Dans les limites de l'activité proprement économique, la rigueur a un objet clair: la consécration des ressources excédantes à l'aplanissement des difficultés matérielles de la vie et la réduction du temps de travail. C'est le seul usage des richesses qui coïncide avec une adéquation de l'homme à la chose et réserve le caractère négatif de l'action, dont le but pour l'homme demeure la possibilité de disposer entièrement de lui-même."
Georges Bataille (La Part maudite)

"Once again we are entering a phase of scientific development when pioneering investigations can be done by non-professionals... there are computers in millions of homes. There are more people with leisure than ever before."
Rupert Sheldrake 
"There are two experiences: One is movement in relation to other things; the other is the sense of flow. The movement of meaning is the sense of flow. But even in moving through space, there is a movement of meaning. In a moving picture, with twenty-four frames per second, one frame follows another, moving from the eye through the optic nerve, into the brain. The experience of several frames together gives you the sense of flow. This is a direct experience of the implicate order."
David Bohm as Gilles Deleuze's (interview)
"What's great about this country is that... President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke... A Coke is a Coke and no money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking... when Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I'm sure he felt confident that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham Palace a better hot dog than that one he bought her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark... Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows... All this is really American."
Andy Warhol

"Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997) made amazingly precise music using mechanically driven instruments. Operating a custom-built hole-punching machine, he produced piano rolls that drove two synchronized player pianos. Nancarrow was obsessed with the simultaneous layering of multiple tempo strands, where the tempi were related by a mathematical ratio. For example, in his Study for Player Piano 41a (1965), the tempi are related by an irrational factor, and cascades of notes sweep up and down the keyboard at superhuman speed."
"The technology of the magnetic tape recorder effectively liberated time. By simply varying the recording or playback controls, one could slow down, speed up, or reverse the flow of audio time. Tape cutting and splicing enable time segmentation and the free arrangement of tape segments on the timeline... The synthesis of sound by digital computer opened the doors to dramatically expanded control over the time domain. The most obvious extrapolation was the pursuit of superhuman precision and speed..." 
"Complex contrapulsations can lead to chaotic cloud textures whose internal rhythm can only be perceived statistically. A classic example is Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique (1962) for 100 metronomes, where each metronome is set to a different tempo."
"Some digital audio mixing applications let the user set the grid or time signature on a per-track or even per-clip basis. These temporal grids need not be rigid. Rather, their tempi can be elastic, deforming in the presence of pivotal sound events, analogous to the way that spacetime is warped by the presence of matter (Einstein 1916). In the extreme, the grids may evaporate, leading to free and open temporal spaces."
Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music
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Commentary scholium, illustration and key, by his ashes & with the officious humility of heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive:


"Let me quote the wise old drug experimenter, Thomas de Quincey: 'the machinery for dreaming and the imagination was not implanted for nothing'" (xii);
"It turns out that the brain is a galactic network of a hundred billion neurons" (xiv);
"Around 1900, physicists (Einstein, Heisenberg, etc.) demonstrated that the elements of all energy matter in the universe, out there or down here, consist of quanta of information. Light. During the Roaring 20th Century, the equations of quantum physics led to the development of quantum appliances that allowed humans to receive, process, and transmit electronic images. Telephone, cinema, radio, television, computers, compact discs, fax machines; suddenly humans were creating digital realities that were accessed on living-room screens. This universe of electronica signals, in which we now spend so much time, has been called Cyberia" (3);
"The advent of personal and interpersonal computers, digital editors, and audio-video gear (1976-90) turned the average American home into an electronic information center..." (7);
"Just before yesterday, around 1984, a combination of American creativity and Japanese precision suddenly mass-produced inexpensive, do-it-yourself home appliances for individuals to electronify, digitize, and transmit personal realities. Digital communication translates the recording of any sound or photograph of any image into clusters of quanta or fuzzy clouds of off/on information. Any image digitized by an individual human can then be flashed on telephone lines around the world inexpensively at light speed... The basic elements of the youniverse, according to quantum-digital physics, can be understood as consisting of quanta of information, bits of compressed digital programs. These elements of pure (0/1) information contain incredibly detailed algorithms to program potential sequences for fifteen billion years—and still running. These information-jammed units have only one hardware-external function. All they do is flash off/on when the immediate environment triggers a complex array of 'if-if-if-if... THEN!' algorithms" (14);
"In the cybernetic age now dawning, 'Digital Power to the People' provides everyone the inexpensive option to cast, script, direct, produce, and distribute his or her own movie. Custom-made, tallorized, in the convenient sizes—mammoth, giant, regular, and byte-sized mini" (16);
"The equipment used by this family costs less than a standard 1990 television set, that pathetic junk-food spud-box with no power to store or process electronic information" (19);
"Nothing from our rich, glorious past will be eliminated... we will drive cars, as we now ride horses, for pleasure" (20);
"The film industry's never been able to do anything with Gravity's Rainbow" (27);
"Hesse was hanging out in Basel, home of Paracelsus" (30);
"Computers will not replace real people. They will replace middle and low-level bureaucrats" (33);
"The human brain has a hundred billion neurons, and each neuron has the knowledge-processing capacity of a powerful computer. The human brain has more connections than there are atoms in the universe" (35);
"Much of Steve Job's astounding success in developing the Apple and the Mac was explicitly motivated by his crusade against IBM, seen as the archenemy of the 1960s counterculture" (40); 
"Physicists are traditionally assigned the task of sorting out the nature of reality. So it was Eistein, Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr, et. al, who figured out that the units of energy/matter were subatomic particles that zoom around in clouds of ever-changing, off-on, 0-1, yin-yang probabilities" (45);
"Next time you boot up your Mac, breathe a word of gratitude to Emerson, Stein, Yeats, Pound, Huxley, Beckett, Orwell, Burroughs, Gysin—all of whom succeeded in loosening social, political, religious linearities, and encouraging subjectivity an innovative reprogramming of chaotic realities... Imagine what James Joyce could have done with MS Word or a CD-ROM graphic system or a modern data base! Well, we don't have to imagine—he actually managed to do it using his own brainware" (47);
"People spend more time gazing at electrons than they do gazing into the eyes of their loved ones, looking into books, scanning other aspects of material reality. Talk about applied metaphysics! Electronic reality is more real than the physical world. This is a profound evolutionary leap. It can be compared to the jump from ocean to the shoreline..." (48);
"Perceptive observers realized that Orwell's nightmare of a Big-Brothers society was too optimistic. In 1984 the authoritarian state used television to spy on citizen. The actuality is much worse: citizens docilely, voluntarily lining themselves up in front of the authority box, enjoying the lethal, neurological fast food dished out in technicolour by Newspeak. Visionary prophets like Marshall McLuhan understood what was happening. He said, 'The medium is the message.' Never mind about the junk on the screen" (49);
"'Cyberpunk is, admittedly, a risky term. Like all linguistic innovations, it must be used with a tolerant sense of high-tech humor. It's a stopgap, transitional meaning-grenade thrown over the language barricades to describe the resourceful, skillful individual who accesses and steers knowledge-communication technology towards his/her own private goals, for personal pleasure, profit, principle, or growth" (67);
"The cyberpunk code: Think for yourself, question authority (TFYQA)" (69);
"This global youth movement cannot be discussed in the terms of politics or sociology or psychology. We are dealing with a new, post-Darwinian, genetic science" (71).
"Psychedelic concepts like glasnost and perestroika are based on the common-sense principles of quantum physics—relativity, flexibility, singularity" (73).
"Countercultures go back at least as far as Hermes Trimegistus, and include Socrates, Dada, Gurdjief, and Crowley" (74).
"The stated purpose of the student in Tien Men Saquare in June 1989 was to brig the 1960s to China"(76).
"The Chinese students want something that is not mentioned by Marx or Margaret Thatcher... Gorbachev was dismayed to find that many Soviet youth, given freedom of the press, were more interested in UFOs, punk rock, astrology, and hashish than in political issues" (76).
"Just as the USSR and the U.S. controlled the world for forty years by distributing weapons to every compliant dictatorship, now Japanese and Silicon Valley companies are liberating the world with an endless flood of electronic devices designed for individuals" (77).
"But 'think for yourself' (TFYQA) does not mean 'think selfishly. It means 'think independently' (90).
"I don't care what people think as long as they have thought for themselves. So if you end up a Republican, right wing, it's okay with me, as long you have done it having had a gourmet, a connoisseur's selection of all the options. As long as you haven't done it out of fear or laziness" (90). 
"Two people communicating through their fast-feedback computers can access a range of brain circuits arguably wider than can be reached by bodily contact. This is because the brain and the computer work the same way—in the language of electric impulses, of light" (148).  
"The elements of the universe are digital, electronic, linguistic. Matter and energy are transitory hardware constructions. (Plato and Buddha, it turns out, were early cyberpunks.) The human brain is hereby and henceforth owned and operated by an individual. It is equipped with a hundred billion micro-info-centers called neurons, and is a miniaturized digital representation of the galaxy, which is equipped with a hundred billion mini-info-centers called stars. The universe is equipped with (naturally) a hundred billion mega-info-centers called gallaxies" (174).
***Everything from Timothy Leary's Chaos & Cyber Culture (Berkeley: Ronin, 1994/2014);

See also:
- 5G?! get real...
- Facebook community, nudity;
- The Doors of Perception & the learned foolery of research;
- Desubicarse (Lucrecia Martel);
- Godard's Sympathy for the Devil;
- Cinema Novo's Judgment Day;
And also:
- The House that Jack's Built's simple equation;
- Nature's Horror and Grand Style in Lars von Trier's Antichrist;
- ERRATA list for "Narrative Outbreak in Contemporary Conflict Cinema: A Case Study of Steve McQueen’s Hunger";

Friday, April 10, 2015

L'affirmation de l'âne + non-locality (into the very regions where clouds and thick darkness encompass & as far as the tenuity of our understanding would hold out)














Anselm Kiefer's Für Ossip Mandelstam: Das Rauschen der Zeit [Gracious Heaven!] (1996), Image from Daniel Arasse's Anselm Kiefer;
Pierre Laurent Aimard/Karlhein Stockhausen's Klavierstück IX [Angels & ministers of grace, defend us!];
A documentaire sur Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [this was taken out of Youtube by the father of confusion];
Intervista a Paul Feyerabend, per Vittorio Hösle;
Paul Feyerabend interviewed by Rüdiger Safranski; 
Necessity of Complex Numbers (Barton Zwiebach, MIT/Youtube, Spring 2016) [an open minded, honest & serious nutshell explanation of a fundamental question in physics & mathematics many scientists would rather not talk about];
International Womxn’s Day Lecture: Dr. Vandana Shiva (Harvard GSD, 05/03/2020); 
The String Theory Wars and What Happened Next (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube);
The 2nd Quantum Revolution - Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube); 
Physics are Afraid of Eric Weinstein: and they should be (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube); 
Gregory Chaitin: No Scientific Innovation since 1920... (Curt Jaimungal, Youtube); 
German top research institution 'Max Planck Society' accused of abuse and institutional silence (DW, Youtube)
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Curious conclusions to fancy, in this night of our obscurity:


"Man schweigt, man behandelt mich in Deutschland mit einer düstern Vorsicht: ich habe seit Jahren von einer unbedingten Redefreiheit Gebrauch gemacht, zu der Niemand heute, am wenigsten im 'Reich', die Hand frei genug hat. Mein Paradies ist 'unter dem Schatten meines Schwertes'... Im Grunde hatte ich eine Maxime Stendhal's prakticirt: er räth an, seinen Eintritt in die Gesellschaft mit einem Duell zu machen. Und wie ich mir meinen Gegner gewählt hatte! den ersten deutschen Freigeist!"
Nietzsche

''Zarathoutra, dès lors qu'il a voulu l'éternel retour de toutes choses, a d'avance choisi de voir tourner en dérision sa propre doctrine... Quel autre sens, si ce n'est celui-là, attribuerait-on à l'extraordinaire parodie de la Cène où le meurtrier de Dieu est aussi celui qui offre le calice à l'âne — figure sacrilège du Dieu chrétien du temps de la réaction païenne, mais plus spécifiquement animal sacré des mystères antiques, l'âne d'or de l'initiation isiaque, animal digne par son infatigable Ia (ita est!) — son infatigable oui donné au retour de toutes choses — digne de représenter la longanimité divine, digne donc aussi d'incarner une antique divinité, Dionysos, le dieu de la vigne, ressuscité dans l'ivresse générale. Et en effet, comme Voyageur le déclare à Zarathoustra: la mort, chez les dieux, n'est jamais qu'un préjugé."
Pierre Klossowski (Un si funeste désir) 
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Accounts to reconcile, stories to wave in: 


"On aurait pu croire que l'âne, l'animal qui dit I-A, était l'animal dionysiaque par excellence. En fait, il n'en est rien; son apparence est dionysiaque, mais toute sa réalité chrétienne."
"La complicité fondamentale entre la volonté de néant [la volonté du prêtre] et les forces réactives [le Christianisme laïc soit-disant éclairé] consiste en ceci: c'est la volonté de néant qui fait triompher les forces réactives..." 
(Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie)
"But with an ass, I can commune for ever."
Tristram Shandy
"... c'estoient ceulx qui estoient peritz au deluge urinal de la jument."
M. Alcofribas
"(...) We doctors know a hopeless case if—listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go."
(e. e. cummings)
"... nous ne sommes plus qu'au bord du monde..."
(Paul Virilio, L'Université du désastre)
"... et ce qu'ils érigent en beauté qui est moins que le vent, et leur régime estupide des distances et des perspectives..."
(Hervé Guibert)
"... ce vieux réflexe atavique de la tourbe... qui fait de toute homme de science une sorte d'ennemi-né et inné de tout génie."
(A. Artaud)
"Acreditamos na teoria da evolução até a página três."
(Rita Lee)
"... if particle physics was solved then there was nothing left for high energy physics theorists to do. Unwilling to pack their bags and leave the field... [they] began to look around for a new far-out cult to believe in... many made their offerings at the shrine of grand unification..."
(Andrew Pickering)

"El Universo es una esfera cuyo centro está en todas partes y la periferia en ninguna [Nicolas de Cusa]: ¿podría extenderse al tiempo está concepción tradicional del infinito? ¡Qué mejor símbolo del fin de la confusión entre irreversibilidad y degradación! Reencontraríamos aqui la flecha del tiempo asociada a la inestabilidad y a la probabilidad, y ella no significaría ya evolución hacia la muerte térmica, hacia el fin de toda historia, sino posibilidad de un eterno volver a comenzar. El Universo sería creación continua, sucesión infinita de Universos que nacen por doquier y van hacia el infinito... No podemos pensar en un nacimiento absoluto del tiempo... la cuestión de saber «cuándo empezó el tiempo» escapa más que nunca a la física, como sin duda escapa también a las posibilidades de nuestro lenguaje y nuestra imaginación... El tiempo «absoluto» que precede a toda existencia y todo pensamiento nos sitúa así en ese enigmático lugar que reaparece una y otra vez en la tradición filosófica, entre el tiempo y la eternidad."
Spanish translation (by Javier García Sanz) from the end of chapter 7 of Prigogine & Stengers' Entre le temps et l'eternité [it is an ill-fated instance of the malignancy of this world that it happens I don't have the French original of this book, & shall therefore by my ashes stand forever indebted to the heroine soul (chaste star!) who peradventure send me, with all her fraternity, the French original of just this choicest morsel so I could definitely pen it down here as a seasonable kindness to our whole parish!]
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Commentary scholium for the amusement and instruction of the world: 


A criticism of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin's The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy (now the oddest book in the universe!) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015):
1. First, la affirmation de l'author de la critique: these people are all wrong!
But I mean string theorists as well as Smolin and Mangabeira Unger.
The problem lies in a presupposition: "unification of science" (relativity and the standard model of particle physics). Unification of science is l'affirmation de l'âne. It echoes not only in many worlds, but in many books, including the most pedestrian.
2. The book's more central idea that laws and states of affairs can both evolve in cosmology is a very good one. But it leads to the same dead end of string theory, given Unger and Smolin's strict (I mean narrow) understanding of time and mathematics (under the imperative of the unification of science) [perhaps here also lies the difference between their perspective and the perspective of Prigogine or of Sheldrake].
2.2 One can find the idea that history is prior to structure in deconstruction, but in deconstruction dichotomies (laws/states of affairs, history/structure, ideal/material) are handle much more consistently, in a way that shows that it is actually impossible simply to cancel out one category for another (and deconstruction demands a profound revision of phenomenology, that is, of occidental conceptions of consciousness, intentionality, and perception—Smolin's qualia, for that matter; this profound revision is perhaps equivalent to just accepting the paradoxes implicit in both quantum mechanics and relativity).
2.3.1 Unger and Smolin’s understanding of time (and becoming) is poor, one-dimensional, and linear (that is, chronological). Even l'âne might not pass. Contrast their view with the views of Bergson or Heidegger. For Bergson, past coexists permanently with the present (the past in its entirety had never really ceased to exist) (see Matière et Memoire). For Heidegger's view, see "Die transzendentale Einbildungskraft und ihr Bezug zur Zeit", section 32 of his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik.
Unger and Smolin’s conception of history is not compatible with Vico (as Unger sometimes seems to suggest). Vico don't say only that we are able to understand history because history is something we do (it results from our own action). He says that history is the only thing we are able to fully understand. He didn't claim we could understand nature as history, much on the contrary. To him nature is not fully understandable. 
2.3.2 Unger and Smolin’s understanding of mathematics is also poor. For instance, as much as string theorists, with a slight-of-hand, they merely invert and mask some fundamental issues: the problem is not simply to recognize that mathematics and logic must have limits when applied to temporal phenomena. The problem is rather how can one make sense of the "timeless quality" (p. 16) of mathematics and logic by subsuming them to a one-dimensional and linear (chronological) understanding of time (as change). L'âne crashes or freak out.
It is understandable that the idea of infinite is problematic for them. It is not convincing that they can really make sense of it (kick it out), neither of the idea of a continuum. Smolin at least recognizes that it is going to be difficult to eliminate from physical theory the continuum of complex numbers (in case it were possible to eliminate the continuum of real numbers) (p. 517).
Their understanding of probability is merely epistemological, as for instance when Unger suggests that one cannot use the metaphor of a dice to explain probabilistically "the most general framework" (that is, the cosmos) (p. 159). Even if that we call cosmos were a chaosmos? Mallarmé was not a scientist neither a philosopher and had a much bolder understanding of what is at issue here. (L'âne don't run, but if it were a horse...!)
I wonder if Unger's criticism of marginalism is fair. His understanding of economics, on the other hand, might go along (and not just once) with the conceptions of politicians in Brazil, with whom he associated. They seem all to believe in linear pretty cumulative conceptions such as "growth," which turned out as a sure recipe for social, environmental disaster and political backlash. 
3. Unger and Smolin share with string theorists an obsession: the unification of science, l'affirmation de l'âne. Differently, scientists of the first half of the 20th century (Heisenberg, Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, but not Einstein) had a much healthier (if stealthy) attitude. They were able to straightforwardly face paradoxes and inherent limits in scientific knowledge and practices (in relation to other areas of culture). They were all much more at ease with ideas such as non-local entanglement (Bell inequalities) and "ontological" indeterminacy (which don't have to be "solved" by a complete and coherent, ultimate understanding of either time or space). John von Newman is another case that instead of remaining in a defensive attitude, proposed (notwithstanding l'âne) even a revision of logic making room for the paradoxes in the foundations of both mathematics and quantum physics (people with different agendas all refer positively to von Newman in relation to this point: see Friedman, Dynamics of Reason, p. 122; Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 156; Susan Haak, Philosophy of Logic, p. 228). One should add Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck to the list of people who were able to stand, to bear the most paradoxical aspects of science, freeing l'âne from its spell. 
4. All that was said above should be read as an advise that Unger and Smolin (as much as Brian Greene's) direction (and I don't mean merely their arrow-of-time) is wrong-headed. Outside both well-paid mainstream &/or exceptional academia, l'âne actually do nothing but chew. And that beyond eternity, don't having to put up heroically with our unimaginable natural rationalistic indigestions. We are just in the beginning of the century, and the situation has approached again the limit once described by Heisenberg in what matters the whole 19th century: 
"The nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people. This frame was supported by the fundamental concepts of classical physics, space, time, matter and causality; the concept of reality applied to the things or events that we could perceive by our senses or that could be observed by means of the refined tools that technical science had provided. Matter was the primary reality. The progress of science was pictured as a crusade of conquest into the material world. Utility was the watchword of the time... This frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, of the human soul... It was specially difficult to find in this framework room to those parts of reality that had been the object of the traditional religion and seemed now more or less only imaginary" (Heisenberg, "The Role of Modern Physics in Human Thinking," Physics and Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1959, p. 169).
Heisenberg thought that one of "the most important changes brought about by modern physics [read quantum mechanics] results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century" (Phisics and Philosophy: 170). But alas, l'âne is tougher, and our ambitions bolder. I mean, strengthened with the most advanced techniques in pharmacology and biomedicine, l'âne now stands in the middle of the world, on the verge of social and ecological collapse, and whinnies infuriately against any approaching asteroid. It is indeed better to have it at least all alone (and for a very brief moment) than with infinite others.
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***My view is somewhat warped, and a fair, accessible statement of Smolin's position can be found here,  written by himself: What should be worried about (Edge.org).
The comments written by him (3/26/2018, 3/23/2018) in the following blog of Peter Woit are also interesting: Not Even Wrong.
And this is a video of a talk in which he explains his views very clearly, and point to political implications of it, in particularly concerning our present situation and global warming: A New Theory of Time (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts);
***NEW (Nov/2018):
"If this particle really exists, then it is not just outside the standard model but outside it in a way that nobody anticipated. Just as Newtonian gravity gave way to Einstein's general relativity, the standard model will be superseded. But the replacement will not be any of the favoured candidates that has already been proposed to extend standard model: including supersymmetry, extra dimensions and grand unification theories," Roger Barlow, LHC is hitting a tantalising new particle (The Conversation);

Non-locality:


"For D'Espagnat, it is exactly if we consider seriously and realistically certain results of physics that we have to open the two complementary perspectives. D'Espagnat welcomed these complementary perspectives grounding himself on the many violations of CHSH-Bell inequalities obtained experimentally since the 1980s," Alessandro Zir, Luso-Brazilian Encounters of the Sixteenth-Century: A Styles of Thinking Approach (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2011, p. 66).
"Since the 1960s... the rigid determinism of old-style physics has given way to a recognition of an inherent spontaneity in nature—through indeterminism at the quantum level, through non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and through the insights of chaos and complexity theories. In cosmology, there has been the recognition of a kind of cosmic unconscious through the discovery of 'dark matter,'the nature of which is utterly obscure, but which nonetheless seems to constitute some 90-99 percent of the matter in the universe. Meanwhile, quantum theory has revealed strange and paradoxical aspects of nature, including the phenomenon of non-locality..." Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World (Riverhead books, 1995).
"... locality comes when we try to force it into a particular framework. And, that’s the explicate order. So, what I’m saying is, what traditionally science has felt is essential, is only an outward manifestation. And I, I don’t think many scientists would agree. I don’t think they have grasped, are willing to grasp that, or willing to think about this idea," Basil Hiley, interview.

"The distance between two particles [in microphysics] is determined by the minimal number of particles necessary to form a chain of coincidences between the given particles" (Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, 1993, 188).
"A profound epistemological analysis of certain quantum-mechanical principles seems to suggest that the traditional conceptions of space and time are perhaps not the most suitable frame for the description of microphysical processes... In his discussion of electron transitions between stationary states within the atom, Niels Bohr already called such processes 'transcending the frame of space and time'" (Jammer, 189).
"Les données de nos perceptions nous conduisent à construire un cadre de l'espace et du temps où toutes nos observations peuvent se localiser. Mais le progrès de la Physique quantique nous amènent à penser que notre cadre de l'espace et du temps [as classically or ordinarily understood] n'est pas adéquat à la véritable description des réalités de l'échelle microscopique" [Louis de Broglie] (Jammer 189).
"[concepts of space and time] arise from, but do not have analogs in, the properties of microscopic particles, in the same way that thermodynamic properties arise as a result of interactions among the many actually existing particles of the universe" [E. J. Zimmerman] (Jammer 238).
"... it has been suspected that the perplexities of quantum phenomena may arise from the tacit assumption that the notions of length and duration, acquired primarily from experiences in which the average effects of large numbers of quanta are involved, are applicable in the study of individual quanta" [Arthur Stanley Eddington] (Jammer 238).
"A detailed prescription for constructing space according to purely combinatorial principles associated with the spin of particles was put forward in 1971 by Roger Penrose. His point of departure was the awareness that the two basic space-time manifolds of modern physics, the real four-dimensional space-time continuum of relativity and the fictitious infinite-dimensional complex Hilbert-space continuum of quantum mechanics, are unrelated to each other" (Jammer 238-39).
"Geometry in the small would seem to have to be considered as having a foam-like [stochastic] character" [John Archibald Wheeler] (Jammer 240).
"... the idea of using noninteger dimensionalities had been used in statistical physics in the early Seventies... After Benoit B. Mandelbrot had shown that the study of physical phenomena in noninteger-dimensional spaces, or 'fractal dimensions,' is a logically consistent possibility, such investigations gained wider attention" (Jammer, 248).
"That galgaxy-galaxy and cluster-cluster correlations as well as other cosmologically large structures can be studied, preferably in a framework of fractal dimensionalities, has recently been show by Siaochun Luo and David N. Schramm" (Jammer 250).

Now, here lies the WRONG path:
"During the classical period of work on unified field theories in the Thirties and Forties, [theories that unify fundamental forces by postulating space-times of more than four dimensions and incorporate quantum mechanics] became the subject of considerable interest... In some cases, as in the case of Einstein, this work was motivated by the hope that the unobserved fifth dimension could provide hidden variables to eliminate the indeterminacies from quantum mechanics" (Jammer 245).

On entanglement, see also:
- The quest to test quantum entanglement (Symmetry);
- Entangled photons make a picture from paradox (Nature);
- Classical Imaging with Undetected Light (Physical Review A);
Other issues:
And also: