Javier Nieto

Everyone knows what time it is. Most coordination in our everyday lives relies on it. Whether in our deadlines, schedules, or even cooking timers, we can take for granted that we share a common sense of time.

In this series, I want to investigate how we've come to agree on time and connect it to my summer research with Category Labs.

Wikipedia defines the clock as "a device that measures and displays time." As we will see, time itself is defined by clocks, so this definition is rather circular. So we will go the other way and start with the clock.

We will find more use in the physics definition of a clock (from The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I, Chapter 5-2):

What really matters anyway is not how we define time, but how we measure it. One way of measuring time is to utilize something which happens over and over again in a regular fashion—something which is periodic.

Let's start with the day as something periodic. Count the days from one noon to the next. We then have the clock as a sequence of ticks (the passing of days), and a count of them.

$$C = (t_0, t_1, t_2, ...)$$

Machines already outcompete us physically, and they're beginning to outcompete us cognitively too.

The Industrial Revolution made urban workers much less active through more sedentary jobs. Consequently, we started to see the rise in "gyms". The word was derived from the ancient Greek term "gymnasion," which was a public place in Ancient Greece used for both physical and intellectual pursuits. As work became more sedentary, people began deliberately seeking physical activity in gyms.

We now need to do the same for our minds. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we risk cognitive atrophy and intellectual inactivity. I think the equivalent gym for the mind is having your thinking challenged by someone. That's hard to get on your own.

Today, we hope this site serves as a starting ground for us to challenge each other intellectually through public and private discourse. We invite the friction in communication as an opportunity to grow.

Tell me where I'm wrong (about this, or about what the site should be) below this thread.