The Big Bang and the Plufutural

The idea of a Time before Time, of a set of initial natural conditions which preceded the advent of Time is a complicated monster of conception. For, in speaking of the "before", the "preceded", we speak of Time in an etiolated, abstracted sense. We mean to use Time like a splinter, to pick out a splinter.

There is one way we can think of Time even now which does not run into such contradictions, but which requires us to consider instead the natural limits of our knowledge and understanding. The term, "plufutural", is my own coin, and grammatically based upon the pluperfect, the "past past". When we think of the initial conditions, we must consider a Time which is pure futurity, devoid even of presence. This is possible if we think of this plufutural time as a kind of pure potentiality, a reservoir, as it were, of power which has yet to form any structures of concrete existence. It would by necessity be non-extended, because any structure would imply a concrete form, a kind of existence, which fails the test of the plufutural nature of the initial conditions. A singularity is as close as we have today come to thinking imagistically of this "state", but the plufutural gives us something conceptual which is not necessarily self-evident in the concept of the singularity.

In the plufutural, which remains at the limits of our thinking today, we have a kind of Time which is not even yet intelligible. The future which we apprehend—and to a limited degree, comprehend—such as the one which promises to bring about the technological singularity, is not identical to the plufutural in all of its detail, and yet, the plufutural, the unknown future, the future which as yet even to be conceived or considered, to be imagined or reckoned, has its impact upon all of that future which we can and do anticipate with some degree of rational rigor. The future-future, the "future that will be the future" comes to mind, perhaps most readily, in the sense of those concerns which our descendents will need to confront in their own Time to come. These would include children not yet born, not yet conceived, but even moreso, their children, and their children's children, so that in thinking of the plufutural, we are confronted with questions we cannot be expected even to ask, for those questions do not belong to us, but to them.

In this sort of thinking, in which we thematically highlight the possibility of questions that we will never get to pose, we also sight a kind of future which never comes to the light of our individual awareness. Inasmuch as we are us and not them, we consider the future in different terms, in terms of the predictable and the unpredictable. This unpredictable remains even in the spare few moments before an event arises in its concrete presence. As the last vestiges of the plufutural unfurls and gives way to concrete presence, the event horizon at last exposes what had remained hidden, and thereby continually conceals the plufutural, as something amorphous, as something too new to even be called "new" for it has yet even to be conceived.

This sort of thinking is necessary if we are to understand what is being said when we speak of initial conditions, when we speak of a Time without Presence, of a Future without a Past. This odd idea is like that of infinite youth, a fathomless wellspring from which all being arises, and yet, in the face of which no being has yet to arise. It is perhaps in the conception of this source as an infinite one that we can retain the intelligibility of the "beginning of Time". Time is only placed in contrast with this infinite source by virtue of its finitude. Time as a "beginning of all beginnings", save what began It Itself.

What is so very odd then, is that in trying to conceive the beginning of all beginnings, we are indeed led to contemplate the end of all ends.