Time and the brain: the illusion of now

[C C]

Explores the absurdity of projecting one's own temporal metric and representational experiences upon an objective version of the world. As if subatomic events that measure a zeptosecond and less wouldn't already be a wake-up call that one's own microseconds long, subjective "now" is a ludicrous fail for the rate that change would be occurring "out there".

Of course, if you're a solipsist, then no problem, due to there being nothing more to the world than your extrospective-related manifestations and feelings.

But if you believe in a human-independent version of it, but are also still clinging to direct realism, then you need to do some serious inter-consistency evaluation between not only that pair, but also with the apparent conviction that your brain is just a useless, non-mediating space-filler in your skull that contributes nothing to perception.
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https://youtu.be/BEuNa1Vp_b0

VIDEO EXCERPT: . . . Your brain knows it's behind on the real world, so it compensates for that and predicts where the fly is going to be. It gives you a location where the fly never goes. You see the fly where the fly never is, never will be, never was.

So, no wonder you will miss it when you try to hit it.

So the prediction works sometimes, but it also breaks down sometimes.

And actually it gets even more complicated because this delay period isn't constant, the delay is variable depending on what sort of features we're talking about.

What do I mean by that?

Here's a scene - there's the baseballer I was referring to earlier. So, when you look at this scene, you see everything together, right?

You see the color, you see the motion, you see the shape - it's one object, one person.

But in the brain, all of those features are pulled apart and processed in different areas of the brain. More importantly, they're processed at different speeds.

So, it turns out that color is actually processed more quickly than motion, and that, in turn, is processed more quickly than form.

So why does that matter? Well, let's see. You see this image?

It comes on your retina, in your eyes, and your brain gets to work on it, and then the color information is extracted.

Well, according to this image not at all - there it is.

It's processed more quickly than the motion information, which, in turn, is processed more quickly than the form information.

So, one moment is spread out over time in terms of processing, which means that at any given time, the finished information that the brain has about the outside world comes from different pasts.

It comes from different moments in time, which means even if we just sort of put everything together that it has, what you would see is not this ... what you would see is this.

This scrambled mess where the color is more recent than the motion, and that, in turn, is more recent than the form.

But that's not what we see, right? This is not what we experience...

Time and the brain: the illusion of now

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/BEuNa1Vp_b0

[Magical Realist]

It's hard for me to imagine experiencing the past as anything less than the now happening moment. Maybe it IS illusory, this sense of the direct and immediate experience. But there is no other way for consciousness to experience something. Even a memory is experienced as a now happening event. The nowness of it acts as the pivot point from which the memory is felt as past. Perhaps the brain constructs nowness for itself after the fact of the experience. But even then the perceptual impact of the event is felt as coming after the event has happened, as being an artificial simulation of the real immediacy of the event. The present is quite literally the facticity of our presence in the world. We are here "immediately" or without mediation. We are epistemically adjacent to what is happening to us. Such is the many-layered mystery of consciousness.