© 2025, Angela Madsen All rights reserved.

For Violet.

This book was written by a human mind with no AI assistance at any point in the process.

All confabulation is my own. All research gaps are my own. All interpretive thinking is my own. Annotations are the best I could manage with the timescapes involved, and will be continued to be worked for a while.

Three Buckminster Fuller structures are used in the Systems flow page; Manoogian & Benson's Cognitive Bias Codex is used on the Cognitive bias page; otherwise all images are created myself using either Affinity Design or sketching in Concept. This book has been through multiple versions, multiple software, and multiple structures through the five years I worked on articulating it. Tools have included Ulysses, Powerpoint, and Affinity Publisher.

People have a complex relationship with time

This moment is rarely only this moment

As we move in this moment — even if it’s as ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ as taking a step, grasping an object, or saying a simple word — we are leveraging a mix of memory (past/orientation), environment (present/findability), and goal (future/navigation).

• **Taking a step: **remembering the mechanics and physical interplay, noting the rough surface here, understanding that the

Non-memory history: tools

People leveraging objects from outside the snap

We don’t have to dig that far into our histories to find when the only information we have are things left by those who came before: paths (which could also be non-human fauna), buildings, furniture, pots, clothing. As time continued it’s trudge forward, we added writing: our first information technology.

These are all tools. Tool are embedded with implici

Managing our cognitive load

Keep on keeping on

When we figure out something that works, we keep it and play it over and over again – process, behavior, reaction, a good tool, anything that seems to get the results we want. Many of us don’t even reconsider the results.

We keep on keeping on. Do it often enough, and it becomes habit. Do it long enough, and it can become a stability point — something that, if touched and attempted (or actually!) moved by another, can cause an u

Ideation

People outside the snap

We play in the future all the time

Part of living in the now is that things continue to happen around us. Putin goes to war, ten ads try to take your mental space, someone falls down, someone ge

Building towards the future

People outside the snap

We are in the constant and irrevocable process of stepping into the future, and we are always making bets on it and building towards it.

Anything we build is intended to shift something in the future.

The ouruborus of perception

Sense making is filtered through a perceiving mind

This process impacts all understanding.

People are individually complex — we are beings of networked, stratified, and variable processing. That processing affects the data we see, the filters we apply, the patterns and processes we develop, and the outcomes of our cogitation.

When we are moving through the world, our reference point is in multiple dimensions: the physical environment, our physical and emotional state, and time are the most prevalent. To get to from point A to point B, you have to navigate the physical interchanges. To navigate those points, you are experiencing time — which, depending on the context and the points in question, could shift the points as you are moving between them. And during all this, you could be focused and attentive, you could be distracted, you could be daydreaming about a potential happening, or crying over something that already happened. These are aspects of our environm

We function into the future every day

Our relationship with time

Think about any person attending to their work. Assume this entailed, at least this one day, a commute. Maybe it was a standard commute, maybe they had a meeting in New York and they live in LA.

They got to work, probably on time. They ate at some point in the past few days (probably even this morning) so they aren’t distracted from the problem solving of their work. They already have plans in play about what they need to pick up on the way home, what chores have to be done sooner than later, and the various bits that they know they need to do to maintain their specific health. That health could be physical, emotional, social — this person is juggling the full environmental factors we discussed in the previous movement.

We know this because they are here, now, meeting at least the expectation of attendance. That means that they’ve already thought about the future well enough to survive to this moment in time. They are doing this

We live through time physically

Our relationship with time

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Physically, we cannot shift in time. We are tethered to this moment, even as this moment is an everchanging progress point being logged into the universe and rippling out to affect the potentials-states of an ever-expanding group of living beings.

Squash a roach, and maybe the next person (cohabitor, neighbor, future-occupant) won’t be startled. Or maybe that roach is part of a larger whole working to create a new civilization/infestation and you thwarte

We live in time mentally

Our doing is anchored to now, but our mind is not constrained to it

We be.

Existentially, we live in all time.

We leverage memories — the past — to inform the present and the future. We live in the present, inundated with countless data points that we are constantly sifting through to try to make sense of our reality. We sense the future — signaled by fear and desire — and try to avoid what alarms us, and grab what intrigues us.

Creating novel future states

Thinking and talking about a thing is not the same as materializing it

Movements is a book in six parts

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Information

Part 3: Who-ness

Part 4: People and time

Part 5: Fractal implications

Part 6: Appendix

Anyone interested in defraying costs, buying me a coffee for my expertise/time, or otherwise supporting me are welcome to do so via a pay-what-you-want model.

An email drop has been set up at movements. I have no idea what my cadence for checking it will be, or how done I'll get how fast with the inevitable spam and trolls. It's still the best way to potentially get in touch with