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Can we stop time? (mental issues)

#1
C C Offline
Can we stop time?
https://www.livescience.com/can-time-stop.html

EXCERPT: . . . He described a well-known psychological illusion known as "chronostasis," in which a person places a clock at the edge of their vision and then stares at something else for a moment. Glancing back at the timepiece and focusing on the second hand will make it pause. (It can be a quirky way to stay entertained during fifth period math class in high school.)

"The second hand definitely hangs there a little bit," Callender said. "You can make time seem like it freezes."

The illusion has to do with tiny eye movements called saccades, in which your eyeballs rapidly flick back and forth to constantly take in their surroundings. To prevent you from seeing a chaotic blur, your brain actually edits what it sees in real time and creates the impression of a continuous field of view, Callender said.

The question then becomes, what is the relationship between our perceptions of time and the time physicists are talking about? Callender has written a number of books that attempt to explore the connection between the two, and as yet, there isn't much consensus on a final answer.

Regarding the ultimate flow of time, Callender favors a picture "where there's nothing flowing, but the story of yourself is flowing."

And what does he believe regarding the possibility of stopping time? "If we think of our subjective sense of time, then we can stop portions of it with chronostasis," Callender said. "But that's probably the closest we can do." (MORE - details)
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Cinematic stills and frozen consciousness (Jan 15, 2004)
https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/111F04/16882.html

Oliver Sacks: There is a rare but dramatic neurological disturbance that a number of my patients have experienced during attacks of migraine, when they may lose the sense of visual continuity and motion and see instead a flickering series of "stills." The stills may be clear-cut and sharp, and succeed one another without superimposition or overlap, but more commonly they are somewhat blurred, as with a too-long photographic exposure, and they persist for so long that each is still visible when the next "frame" is seen, and three or four frames, the earlier ones progressively fainter, are apt to be superimposed on each other.

[...] Finding no good accounts of the phenomenon in the medical literature—perhaps not entirely surprising, for such attacks are brief, rare, and not readily predicted or provoked—I used the term "cinematographic" vision for them; for patients always compared them to films run too slow.

[...] I heard strikingly similar accounts in the late 1960s from some of my post-encephalitic patients, when they were "awakened," and especially overexcited, by taking the drug L-DOPA. Some patients described cinematic vision; some described extraordinary "standstills," sometimes hours long, in which not only visual flow was arrested, but the stream of movement, of action, of thought itself.

These standstills were especially severe with one patient, Hester Y. Once I was called to the ward because Mrs. Y. had started a bath, and there was now a flood in the bathroom. I found her standing completely motionless in the middle of the flood.

She jumped when I touched her, and said, "What happened?"

"You tell me," I answered.

She said that she had started to run a bath for herself, and there was an inch of water in the tub...and then I touched her, and she suddenly realized that the tub must have run over and caused a flood. But she had been stuck, transfixed, at that perceptual moment when there was just an inch of water in the bath.

Such standstills showed that consciousness could be brought to a halt, stopped dead, for substantial periods, while automatic, nonconscious function -- maintenance of posture or breathing, for example -- continued as before... (MORE)
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
I don’t think we can stop time. If c is based on a vacuum and if there is nothing more empty beyond that, then would time be at a standstill?
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#3
stryder Offline
In the case of observation "time dialations", I'm pretty sure this stems all the way back to Aristotles "Minds eye" which is just down to the chemical and cellular composition of the human anatomy. It's not just that the brain "fills in the gaps", the chemical reaction has a small delay, over a greater volume that delay becomes larger. (that's why small insects react so much quicker, their physiology responds to a small chemistry change rather than one that took longer)

Why I say chemistry, well you only have to look back at how pictures were originally developed to understand how such reactions if short or too long would effect the outcome of the image.
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#4
C C Offline
(Jun 6, 2021 03:44 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I don’t think we can stop time. If c is based on a vacuum and if there is nothing more empty beyond that, then would time be at a standstill?


If space was literally a non-grainy, homogenous, continuous background fabric, devoid of quantum fluctuations... totally empty of content... Then there would seem to be no events and structure marking off any conception of changes or differences that could be construed as passage or coordinates, for any philosophy of time perspective.

As far as the mental representation or flow of time goes, all we have to do is to die to stop it (as well as make the whole universe disappear).

Beyond or outside such personal experiences, "stopping time" might be akin to talking about stopping the pages of a book or stopping a pre-digital reel of cinematic film that is residing in its canister.

Does light experience time?
https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light...-time.html

"Just think about that idea. From the perspective of a photon, there is no such thing as time. It's emitted, and might exist for hundreds of trillions of years, but for the photon, there's zero time elapsed between when it's emitted and when it's absorbed again. It doesn't experience distance either."


Seems more like each temporal part in a (fictionally conscious) photon journey would regard itself as a static individual photon stuck forever at its particular location (no elapse of time and distance in that respect). Rather than otherwise being the same photon moving through a worm-like form extending from point-A to point-B. There would not be a transition feeling of becoming the next temporal part in the developmental line, a feeling repeated over and over, as with humans or other brained creatures wherein light-speed is not applicable.

But, of course, since cognition actually has to extend through a sequence of temporal parts to complete itself, that thought orientation of "being distinct and stuck in one place" wouldn't even possible for a single (fictionally conscious) photon state in the chain.

Horowitz, Arshansky, & Elitzur: It seems that Einstein's view of the life of an individual was as follows. If the difference between past, present, and the future is an illusion, i.e., the four-dimensional spacetime is a 'block Universe' without motion or change, then each individual is a collection of a myriad of selves, distributed along his history, each occurrence persisting on the world line, experiencing indefinitely the particular event of that moment. Each of these momentary persons, according to our experience, would possess memory of the previous ones, and would therefore believe himself identical with them; yet they would all exist separately, as single pictures in a film. --On the Two Aspects of Time: The Distinction and Its Implications“ in Foundations of Physics (1988)

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