Parallel Goals

I am writing this book for two reasons: because I want to share a beautiful experience that I have had, one that has changed my understanding of Physics and the physical world from a cold machine to a warm, living thing, an intelligent companion that walks with me: and because natural rights are under severe attack from people who want to force their brand of utopia upon us.

But that is only the beginning. As the years have gone by and I have wrestled with the Temporal Rights point of view on the nature of nature, my objectives have changed radically from the narrower ones above to a more general goal of shedding light on that nature. For example, it is only within the last year that I have discovered the insights available from the perspective of entropy. The profound revelations of the workings of nature seen there have forced me to imagine that Temporal Rights has the potential to enlarge our understanding of things far beyond the scope ordinarily encompassed by natural rights. While this seems an unjustified expansion of the scope of Temporal Rights, the fact that it is founded on objective observation of the laws of nature delivers at least a tentative confidence that it can be expected to do just that.

For example, because the dependency stack (described in the chapter by that name) is built of abstract descriptions of the capabilities of a generic operator with attention to the raw nature of nature, it has at least the potential capability of its own to be an operator that reveals more than it conceals. Whether this is true, remains, at this stage, to be determined. It is your author’s hope and vision that enough experts will see this potential for the Temporal Rights paradigm in general and the dependency stack in particular to press it to its limits and perfect its errors and omissions.

The unification of dichotomies, silos of thought and research together with its ability to bridge philosophical dilemmas such as Hume’s “is/ought”, seems to justify this otherwise hopelessly optimistic expectation.

It has taken me fifty years to finally see what has been staring back at me the entire time. In a few minutes, you can see what I now see. A change of perspective is all it takes, and I don’t mean just a different way of looking at things, like going down the street and looking back, but looking at the universe from the inside instead of from the outside, where you are an integral part of the whole picture and its details are alive and intelligent and very, very busy. You will see that the reason our sense of rights, those feelings of justice, fairness, and freedom, run so deep in our hearts, is because they are the symptoms of how we are put together and how the universe even functions. If you persist sufficiently to see the world around you through this new lens, you will find a unity and peace in knowing that there is profound unity, purpose, and joy in all things.

Parallel Audiences

I am also writing for two audiences: because I want to share this newfound insight with the so-called common man, the housewife, the worker; and also with the academic physicist, political philosopher, anthropologist, judge, geneticist, and the students of the same.

That I can even consider writing one book for two reasons and for two audiences is an indication of the simplicity and yet the far-reaching implications of the Temporal Rights perspective.

It is my hope that both armchair and sophisticated philosophers will find this book friendly and lucid. I have striven to write in a popular vocabulary that gives easy access to the principles outlined here while also adhering to the strict and rigorous logic required for precise communication.

A book, in my view, should be a companion that walks with you, not one that marches over you. At times it should take your hand and guide you carefully across unfamiliar ground. At other times it should throw open the curtain and reveal grand vistas of beauty, grandeur, and discovery, inviting you to rejoice in them. And when prose alone cannot carry the meaning, a touch of poetry may succeed where plain explanation fails. I will also indulge, now and then, in my own forms of pedantic expression and homely illustration, hoping perhaps to encourage future authors to express their thoughts openly and honestly as they present their findings with the emotions their subjects deserve. Consequently, as you read ahead you will find rigid explications of logic intermingled with abstract observations of their implications treated on the fly when and where they are most easily ingested. There is a time to plant and a time to harvest, and in the transfer of understanding, they occur simultaneously.

Beauty and poetry have the power to assist comprehension in a way unattainable by any other means.

My favorite MBA professor, Dr. Oaks, once handed me a 3 x 5 card after my classmates had left the room. It read, “At your best you can be extremely good – you have insight that is unusual and an ability to verbalize your gropings for ever greater understanding. At your worst, you tend to be superficial to the point of frivolity.” 

You may find evidence of both tendencies in this book—though I trust the former will appear rather more often than the latter.

It all began with a search for natural rights in the natural world, where I thought they must live. Although I found them soon enough to meet my needs at the time (I was writing about the Declaration of Independence for our Bicentennial), I didn’t recognize the implications that come with a new, existential perspective until five years ago, when I thought I should take a deeper look.

Why Natural Rights?

Good men remain silent when they have no answers.

The foundation of the republic, known as the United States of America, rests on the recognition of natural rights claimed in our Declaration of Independence. There are many theories about the basis of our fifty-one Constitutions, but human nature is the de facto basis – a recognition that natural rights are ever threatened by ambitious people. Without clearly anchored and irrefutable natural rights, our republic is being set adrift, pulled up by the roots and burned on the altar of atheism because good men don’t know how to respond coherently to those who deny a Creator.

To the question, “What is a natural right?” we must answer that it is the authority of its owner to act for itself. That begs the fundamental question, “Where does that authority come from?” I answer that question with the ontology of Temporal Rights in the chapter by that name.

While studying Physics at Washington State University, I had asked my favorite professor how I could learn that science without being steeped in its artificial constructs: things like lines of force and vector fields. My concern was that these might condition my perception, so I might miss an insight that was staring me in the face. There was no solution for that dilemma, but I did continually warn myself to keep such props in a category of artificial gimmickry.

As I began my thorough analysis of Temporal Rights, I deliberately avoided studying the works of other natural rights thinkers for fear their theories might blind me to a deeper truth. It seems that was a good decision, for having once delineated the authority of Temporal Rights and laying out its implications, I turned to the historic masters and found that Locke would have found Temporal Rights had he not constrained his search to humans. Cicero apparently intuited the Temporal Rights paradigm, but he called their rights holders gods, and lacked the technology to find the parallels that today’s physics affords.

When ambitious men seek power, they first attack the source of authority that limits them. They decry, discredit, and deny the Creator – and the natural rights with which his universe endowed mankind. To them, the traditional defense of natural rights seems weak and easily dismissed. Too often, good men have struggled to answer them with equal force and then have fallen silent.

Until now.

Temporal Rights finally puts the defenders of liberty on the offense.

Jackson Pemberton