Moment

Legacy: This article describes a concept that has been superseded in the course of ongoing development on the Organic Design wiki. Please do not develop this any further or base work on this concept, this is only useful for a historic record of work done. You may find a link to the currently used concept or function in this article, if not you can contact the author to find out what has taken the place of this legacy item.

In the nodal model a moment is an instance of the foundation ontology which exists and undergoes change for a period of time. A moment is a nodally reducible structure which includes associations representing the concepts of the foundation ontology. Time is the entire tree of moments which is maintained by two fundamental nodal organisations called Communications and Identity. Each moment is itself also a moment-tree.

Duality

The moment concept encapsulates the subject/object dichotomy by having two child concepts, one representing the context, subject or container aspect and another for the children, the objects under investigation/manipulation. Note that there doesn't actually need to be an association for the container aspect, but there does need to be one for the children.

In the nodal model a moment is an instance of generic organisation which exists and undergoes change for a period of time. A moment is a nodally reducible structure which includes associations representing the generic organisational concepts. Time is the entire tree of moments which is maintained by two fundamental nodal organisations called Communications and Identity.

Old notes from the Trinity

The concept of a Moment is very important in the nodal network at all levels, from the core principles right up to the way we think in everyday life.

A Moment is like a bubble of Space and Time containing other things. The Moment is the context for the things within it, defining the relationships between them and how they change over the Time span of the Moment (its life time). A Moment is itself a thing within a Moment.

A Moment has a beginning, a middle and an end just like a story or a scene in a movie. In fact, as far as the nodal network is concerned, scenes and stories are Moments. The beginning is about setting up, or restoring the context within which the scene will play out. The middle is the actual interactions between the things involved, the "acting out of the scene". And the end is the "formatting" or presentation of the finished state.

The beginning and end are one-off and more static and concerned with the Whole, whereas the middle is very dynamic and cyclic. The middle will keep playing out until either the finalising conditions are met, or the Energy availability drops off and the Moment is suspended.

The objects changing within larger Moments are smaller Moments. The "size" of a Moment is defined by the how much Space it spans (its volume) and its Time span. It’s like a bubble because the size of the Space and the length of its life Time are closely matched. For example you wouldn’t normally find a Moment which was just a spec in Space, but its Time cycle being very long, or a huge bubble which had a tiny life-cycle.

Moments can be fragmented throughout Time (from our external perspective) continuing only as Energy is available for them. In effect, the Moment can be put "on the shelf" while there is insufficient Energy available for it, and then be restored at a later time. As far as the Moment is concerned, its life carried on smoothly without interruption; there was just not much happening during the low Energy periods.

Systems are composed of many Processes, and changing from one Process to another consumes Resource, this is called context switching. It makes sense to ensure both that contexts are dealt with efficiently, and that Moments are organised such that the need for context switching is minimised.

This is true for both Processes and Humans, so an important consideration when organising a Workplace is to ensure that it is possible to avoid interruptions for sustained and controllable periods of time. An interruption in work flow can cost a lot of energy because it’s not just the time and energy the interruption consumes that’s of concern, but the time and energy of the shelving and restoring of the context.

Moments are not pre-determined because the Decisions made by the things within are made in accord with the Whole which is always undergoing change and exhibits uncertainty.

The Moment itself forms the context for all the things within it, and as such determines the possible courses of action for all within, but the things within are free to decide their own courses of action within these bounds.

This is not a determinate situation any more than its indeterminate. It’s just like us as Humans being able to choose our directions freely while being confined by the laws of physics. The point is, that the Moment as a whole represents a certain situation for all the things within. There exist many paths for them to choose from at any time which changes the situation represented by the Moment.

Moments can be purposely made determinate by disconnecting them from the Whole. A movie or story is a good example of this, when a definite plot has been created, and is then published in that exact form. This way of thinking in Moments allows us to classify different kinds of Moments by how they affect the things within them, and what paths there are leading to other Moments.

These common structures are metaphors. Many of the esoteric disciplines use metaphors in a practical way to point out situations and solutions. The Taoist philosophy makes use of symbols to represent metaphors which are actually derived from the symbols’ structure.