Time Cube Debate

Wednesday, January 30th, 2002 was the date of MIT's Time Cube debate. A few friends and I planned a drive up to Boston, despite the naying of a certain naysayer.

staniel: Things I have to do tomorrow:
Call MIT about Time Cube
TEDA: plz do
staniel: I will advise them that I am a member of the online press.
TEDA: THEYLL LAUGH LIKE THE GUY WHO TRIED GETTING INTO E3 AS PRESS BECAUSE HE HAS AN E/N SITE
staniel: I WILL SNEAK UNDER THE FENCE
TEDA: PUT ON A HANDLEBAR MOUSTACHE
staniel: no, a twisty villain one
TEDA: ITS THE SAME THING YOU DUMB DAGO

I emailed one Rhett Creighton, who was to be the ringmaster of the event in question, and he said if there was room it should be no problem. In fact MIT was incredibly easy to sneak into, and I would go to lectures there all the time if I wanted to learn how to build Beowulf clusters, but let's hope I never sink that low. I found Boston and MIT to both be very clean and full of nice architecture, so my friends and I wandered about for a bit and killed some time, suspecting every grey-haired man of being Gene Ray.

We were wrong about every single one of them, for after we had taken seats in the auditorium and about twenty minutes before the debate started, I saw Gene Ray onstage. He was easily identified due to his Time Cube hat and shirt, which he later told me had cost him $50 since he only had one made of each (a larger order of them is planned for sale on the website) and a globe in a clear plastic cube, which he wore as a pendant. We had all expected a character more in line with the website - someone visibly upset and not entirely coherent, possibly wearing a lab coat or wizard's hat - but all the shouting and idiocy was to come from the MIT students.

The debate panel consisted of students from Johns Hopkins, MIT, and one who was supposedly from Harvard. I think the Harvard guy was actually an MIT student or alumnus dressed clownishly (safari hat) and acting like a jackass to poke fun at the frat boys down the street from them. The Johns Hopkins representative, Chris Said, and the two MIT guys, Eric Downes and Victor Brar, all tried to ask good questions and treat Mr. Ray decently, and the the jolly, bearded, small, and entirely hobbit-like Creighton did his best to keep the crowd in line. Downes actually carried the Harvard kid offstage during an outburst and told him to behave.

The problem with Time Cube is that it's a fairly simple principle and our hero Gene gets bogged down in his explanation of it. The principle is essentially that between any two polar opposites, there are two midpoints. Use an (incorrect and evil) clock face as an example. If 9 and 3 are polar opposites, then 12 is halfway between them coming from 3 to 9, and 6 is halfway between coming from 9 to 3. This explanation is not much less awkward than those Gene uses, involving the four "primary races" or the Clintons, Socrates, Einstein, and Jesus, but hopefully it will assist somewhat in understanding. Gene would seem to believe in reincarnation. His talk of the importance of the village and his insistence that self is one corner is a demonstration of how people naturally live in a cubic manner, but when civilizations are built, things go haywire. Essentially, if you divide people into four groups - baby, child, parent, grandparent - and let me state that these terms describe each's relationship to the others, and is not a statement that you can't be a great-grandparent or whatever - then put them together in a village, you have a group consisting of selves at each of the four stages of human life, as they progress toward and then from nonexistence, or at least death and a disincarnate state. The self can only occupy one corner at a time, but if people live as villages, the village can occupy all four. Simple village life does tend to function more smoothly, with better defined roles for everyone. Babies are everyone's responsibility, children care for the babies and are responsible to their parents and grandparents, parents care for children and babies, and are responsible to grandparents, who are tribal elders and leaders of families, and who in many capacities care for their abovementioned descendants.

Time Cube is like Lawsonomy or logic (as in the mathematical logic you'd take as an early college or AP high school class, with Venn diagrams and such). It functions according to an internal set of rules, but is difficult to explain to people who are used to living according to another set of rules, like those of modern science or creationism. It explains a few things other systems of thought can't explain, and it can't explain a few things other systems of thought can. It's been suggested that mankind return to a village-like social structure, and whether that can be accomplished without a technological backslide remains to be seen. But I like Time Cube better than logic or Lawsonomy (and I like Lawsonomy pretty well) because its creator is a genial man with a sense of humor (his jokes were much better than the wisecracks veiled as questions and the stupid innuendos the students in the audience launched at him) and he really does mean well.

A few choice quotes:
"I'm fourth generation and I'm on my last corner."
"Well, I'm not human." (when asked how he could understand Time Cube, but he states that no human can on his webpage)
"If you cross a North American and a North American, you get a North American. South American and South American doesn't equal a North American." (when asked why -1 x -1 does not = +1. When asked what it should equal, he exclaimed "A South American!")

Further trivia: Gene Ray used to be an electrician and has patented 10 inventions.

Anyone who's wanted a Time Cube book, as I have, will be glad to know that it's pretty much finished and has only been put on hold so the debate could be included in it.