Nonlinearity of Time in the Complex World

Philosophy. 2012. Vol. 21. No. 3. P. 213–228.

Knyazeva H.

The modern theory of complexity is one of the most promising tool to understand uncertain, full of sudden changes, and complex world we live in. Due to rapid development of this theory, considerable changes occur in the concept net with the help of which we comprehend the world and build our own activity. Whereas at the beginning of the 20th century, natural sciences, by picking up the general spirit of Einstein’s theory of relativity, consider geometrization as an ideal, i.e. try to represent time and force interactions through space and the changes of its properties, nowadays, at the beginning of the 21st century, time turns to be in the focus of attention. It turns to be possible to represent space through time, because the theory of complexity shows that historical and evolutionary stages of development of a complex structure can be found now, in its present spatial configuration. A whole series of paradoxical notions, such as “the influence of the future upon the present”, a “possibility of touching of a rather remote future today”, “availability of the past and the future now, in praesenti”, “irreversibility and elements of reversibility in the course of evolutionary processes in time”, “discrete unites, quanta of time”, appear in the theory of complexity.

Keywords: nonlinearity, self-organization, complexity, Futures Studies, coevolution, emergence, alternative futures, irreversibility, space and time, tempo-worlds, topological properties of structure-attractors