The Mathematics of Novelty

“The Timewave was a mathematical model of time's qualitative structure. McKenna derived it from the I Ching. The mathematics was criticized by professional mathematicians. The underlying philosophical claim, that time is textured, remains interesting.”

The Timewave Zero theory began as an attempt to make a specific phenomenological observation mathematically rigorous: that some periods of time feel more 'novel', more full of unexpected connections, more generative of new forms, than others.

McKenna's starting point was the I Ching, the Chinese system of sixty-four hexagrams used for divination since antiquity. He observed that the sequence of hexagrams, when treated as a numerical series, had a structure that could be interpreted as a wave function. He mapped this wave function onto historical time, aligning it so that its predicted 'singularity', the point of maximum novelty, coincided with December 21, 2012.

Professional mathematicians who examined the theory raised multiple objections. The derivation from the I Ching was arbitrary, McKenna had chosen a particular mapping of hexagrams to numbers that produced the desired wave, but other mappings were equally justifiable and produced different results. The theory was not derived from empirical data about historical events but was fitted to historical data post hoc, which violates basic principles of predictive modeling.

McKenna acknowledged some of these criticisms and adjusted his mapping of the I Ching values at least once in response. He never fully resolved the mathematical objections, and the 2012 endpoint was falsified without drama when nothing of particular significance occurred.

What remains from the Timewave is the philosophical claim McKenna derived from the I Ching insight: that time has qualitative structure, that novelty is not uniformly distributed, that history has what he called 'attractor basins', periods toward which events seem to converge. This claim, stripped of the specific mathematical apparatus and the 2012 prediction, is a genuine philosophical proposition. Whether it is true is a question that the available evidence neither confirms nor refutes. It is the kind of question that the Timewave was supposed to answer and instead preserved as a question.

Sources

• McKenna & McKenna, The Invisible Landscape (1975)
• Wikipedia, Novelty Theory (McKenna)
• Various mathematical critiques of the Timewave, 1990s [Source not found; under review]