Since that time, I have learned a little more about that concept. "Mindfulness" is a translation of the Sanskrit word smrti, which is also translated as "remembrance". In the latter sense, we have an immediate connection to data, since data is what we write down in order to be able to later remember what we originally had in mind.
For the last two years, however, my attention has been focused specifically on bi-temporal data, especially in the extended sense in which Asserted Versioning goes beyond the standard interpretation of the two temporal dimensions within which data exists. One of those dimensions, as I explain in the book Managing Time in Relational Databases: How to Design, Update and Query Temporal Data (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2010; co-authored with Randy Weis), is the ontological dimension we call effective time, and computer scientists call valid time. The other of those dimensions is the epistemological dimension we call assertion time, a proper subset of which is the transaction time defined by computer scientists.
And I now find that extended bi-temporality (as I will call the bi-temporality defined and described in our book) is relevant to mindfulness in the deeper sense in which I have come to understand that Buddhist concept. I now find that the name of my company, Mindful Data, is more appropriate to my work than I could ever have foreseen.
Mindfulness is an awareness in which the distinctions of past, present and future seem to fade into the background. An example illustrating this was provided by the anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, co-creator of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that our linguistic and conceptual background deeply influences our most basic experiences of the world around us and within us. And I can say, with some authority, that later work in both Anglo-American analytic philosophy from Quine, Sellars and the later Wittgenstein, through to Davidson, Rorty, McDowell and Brandom, and also later work in European continental philosophy from phenomenology, through hermeneutics and deconstructionism, to contemporary meta-psychology and philosophy in the works of Lacan, Zizec, Badiou and Johnston (my son, in fact), seems to both deepen and confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The example I am referring to is Whorf's interpretation of the stories told to him by the Hopi Native Americans he worked with, about their religious rituals and their reverence for their ancestors. The ancestors were consulted for their advice on important decisions, and much of the remembrance of ancestors took place in what the Hopi would describe as conversations with them. In contrast, the closest the Anglo Christian tradition comes is the practice of remembering our deceased family and friends in our prayers - although Hispanic Christian traditions, especially in such practices as El Dia de Los Muertos, are perhaps closer to a Hopi than an Anglo relationship with the dead.
Whorf concluded that, for the Hopi, their understanding of time was fundamentally different from ours. For us, what is past is over and done with. Agency is restricted to the present, and the future is the temporal realm of anticipation. For the Hopi, Whorf concluded, time divides reality into two categories - the real, and the not yet real. For them, past and present are both real, and the difference between them is less important than that similarity. And agency is a property of the real, i.e. of the past as well as the present.
Later anthropological work, especially on how different languages split up the color spectrum, lends partial support to the hypothesis. An excellent discussion and analysis of that work can be found in Peter Gardenfors' book Conceptual Spaces: the Geometry of Thought. And although modern philosophers do not refer to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I view their work as an extended clarification and confirmation of it.
So mindfulness is an awareness of the world in which, although the distinction of past, present and future (or the Hopi distinction of past/present and future) can indeed be made, the distinctions seem to recede into the background, and one's awareness is of a seamless woven fabric of reality from the moment of the Big Bang (or before it) into a far future with a limitless capacity to absorb the oncoming wave of what is. In fact, I think this is a description of reality not inconsistent with current work by physicists on string theory, the multiverse and, in particular, the development of an interpretation of reality which reconciles classical relativism with quantum mechanics.
As T. S. Eliot wrote (in Burnt Norton)
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
That seems to be a comment on the ontological time of bi-temporality. But there is epistemological time, as well. In a restricted form, it is the temporal dimension computer scientists call transaction time. In it, data can exist only in past or present epistemological time. But Asserted Versioning recognizes that data can also exist in future epistemological time. We can write down, i.e. create data about, what we may eventually be willing to claim is true about how things used to be, currently are, or may become in the future. And since we can do this, and since we find it useful to do so, we should be able to write down such data in our databases, and we should be able to manage that data, and retrieve it on demand.
So mindfulness is not just an awareness of the world. It is an awareness in which the distinctions of past, present and future fade into the background of epistemological time as well as into the background of ontological time. Our difference with the computer scientists is that our assertion time recognizes (and manages) future epistemological time as well as past and present epistemological time.
In the former fading away (within ontological time), reality seems to become a temporally seamless garment. In the latter fading away (within epistemological time), our experience of that reality also seems to become a temporally seamless garment in which the distinction between myself then and myself now goes almost unnoticed, and the distinction between my-self and other-self attains the status of insignificance. In this way, the quotation from Eliot, above, seems to apply to epistemological time as well as it does to ontological time.
This fading away of boundaries leaves us with an awareness in which these lines from Tennyson's poem Ulysses seem to be more literally true than merely metaphorically true:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
In our everyday awareness of things, poetry is read as beautiful metaphor. In mindfulness, there is a reversal of foreground and background in which those metaphors we are able to grok (see Robert Heinlein's SF classic Stranger in a Strange Land) seem to be our very best statements of what is most fundamentally and literally true, and our quotidian experience of ordinary life seems to be something more like a grainy movie than an engagement with reality.
And so we reach extended bi-temporality, the management of data about the seamless weaving of the past, present and future of our beliefs about the seamless weaving of the past, present and future of ourselves and the world we are a part of. And in writing our book, as we hope your reading of it will confirm, mindful data - extended bi-temporal data - reveals itself as the management of the physical artifacts which embody our mindfulness, and as being pre-eminently practical in a business bottom-line sense. It is the immediate availability of data about what the things of importance and interest to us were like, are like and may become like, as well as of what we once believed about those things, of what we currently believe about them, and also of what we may eventually come to believe about them.
