EXCERPT: [...] For more than two thousand years, the world’s great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured—and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants? “The instant, this strange nature, is something inserted between motion and rest, and it is in no time at all,” Plato remarked in the fourth century B.C.E. “But into it and from it what is moved changes to being at rest, and what is at rest to being moved.”
For St. Augustine, writing his “Confessions” in the year 397, time was even simpler: it’s us. Augustine was forty-three, beginning his tenure as an overwhelmed bishop in Hippo, a port city in North Africa, during the decline of the Roman Empire. The literature on time perception generally begins with Augustine, because he was the first to talk about time as an internal experience—to ask what time is by exploring how it feels to inhabit it. Time may seem slippery and maddeningly abstract, but it’s also deeply intimate, infusing our every word and gesture. Its essence, Augustine argued, can be gleaned from a single line of speech: “Deus creator omnium.”
“God, creator of all things.” Say it aloud or listen: in Latin, eight syllables, alternating short and long. “Each of these latter lasts twice as long as each of the former,” Augustine wrote. “I have only to pronounce the line to report that this is the case.” Yet how do we manage to make this measurement? The line is composed of syllables that the mind encounters in succession, one by one. How can the listener consider two syllables at once to compare their durations? How can one hold the longer syllable in mind? Its duration can’t be defined until it’s completed, but by then both syllables are gone. “Both have made their sound, and flown away, and passed by, and exist no more,” Augustine wrote, asking, “So what now exists for me to measure?”
Here Augustine arrived at an insight so fundamental that it’s taken as a given: time is a property of the mind. When you ask yourself whether one syllable lasts longer than another, you aren’t measuring the syllables themselves (which no longer exist) but something in your memory, “something fixed and permanent there.” The syllables leave an impression that persists in the present. Indeed, Augustine wrote, what we call three tenses are only one. Past, present, and future are all immediate in the mind—our current memory, our current attention, our current expectations. “There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.” Augustine plucked time from the realm of physics and placed it squarely in what we now call psychology. “In you, my mind, I measure time,” he wrote. Words, sounds, and events come and go, but their passage leaves an impression: “Either time is this impression, or what I measure is not time.”
To consider this present is to glimpse the soul, Augustine argued. Modern science has abandoned the soul in favor of probing the framework of consciousness, a concept that is only slightly less elusive. Yet we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting awareness of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone, or a deep and common wish that “I” somehow belong to “we,” and that “we” belong to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to get through our to-do lists, that our time matters precisely because it ends.
So much—all that matters, for Augustine—unfolds in a sentence. Recite a poem or a psalm by heart: your mind strains to recall what you’ve said and reaches forward to grab what you will say next. Memory pulls against expectation: “The vital energy of what I am doing is in tension between the two.” Vital energy: that’s the essence of Augustine, and of you, too, right now, as you absorb these words, strive to remember, and wonder what comes next. “Time is nothing other than tension,” Augustine wrote, “and I would be very surprised if it is not tension of consciousness itself....”
EXCERPT: [...] But some statements in the future tense do seem to be true; I have given the examples ‘The sun will rise tomorrow’ and, after I have thrown the stone, ‘That window is going to break.’ Let’s look at these more closely. In fact, no such future statement is 100 per cent certain. The sun might not rise tomorrow; there might be a galactic star-trawler heading for the solar system, ready to scoop up the sun tonight and make off with it at nearly the speed of light. When I throw the stone at the window, my big brother, who is a responsible member of the family and a superb cricketer, might be coming round the corner of the house; he might see me throw the stone and catch it so as to save the window.
We did not know that the sun would fail to make its scheduled appearance tomorrow morning; I did not know that my naughtiness would be foiled. But this lack of knowledge is not a specific consequence of the fact that we are talking about the future. If the Spaceguard programme had had a wider remit, we might have seen the star-trawler coming, and then we would have known that we had seen our last sunrise; if I had known my brother’s whereabouts, I could have predicted his window-saving catch. In both these scenarios, the lack of knowledge of the future reduces to lack of knowledge about the present.
The success of modern science gave rise to the idea that this is always true: not knowing the future can always be traced back to not knowing something about the present. As more and more phenomena came under the sway of the laws of physics, so that more and more events could be explained as being caused by previous events, so confidence grew that every future event could be predicted with certainty, given enough knowledge of the present. [...] For a couple of centuries, Newton’s dream seemed to be coming true. More and more of the physical world came under the domain of physics [...] Capricious events such as storms and floods, formerly seen as unpredictable and attributed to the whims of the gods, became susceptible to weather forecasts; and if some such events, like earthquakes, remain unpredictable, we feel sure that advancing knowledge will make them also subject to being forecast.
This scientific programme has been so successful that we have forgotten there was ever any other way to think about the future. [...] Well, it was a nice dream. But it didn’t work out that way. In the early years of the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford, investigating the recently discovered phenomenon of radioactivity, realised that it showed random events happening at a fundamental level of matter, in the atom and its nucleus. [...] other, stranger discoveries at around the same time led to the radical departure from Newtonian physics represented by quantum mechanics, which strongly reinforced the view that events at the smallest scale are indeed random, and there is no possibility of precisely knowing the future.
[...] This theory is itself so puzzling that it is not clear that it should be described as an ‘explanation’ of the puzzling facts it subsumes; but an essential feature of it, which seems inescapable, is that, when applied to give predictions of physical effects, it yields probabilities rather than precise numbers. This is still not universally accepted. Some people believe that there are finer details to be discovered in the make-up of matter, which, if we knew them, would once again make it possible to predict their future behaviour precisely. This is indeed logically possible, but there would necessarily be aspects of such a theory that would lead most physicists to think it highly unlikely....
Time is extremely tough to contemplate (is there a pun there? unintended). I've heard rumblings that time is no longer considered a dimension, as in a 3 + 1 dimensional universe. Is time still a coordinate?
I've always wondered about how you can have a 1 or 2 dimensional object if one of the dimensions was time. What happens to +1 when your talking of such objects? Does zero dimensional space mean the time dimension is still present? Does that mean a 3D object, one we're familiar with, exist outside of the time dimension?
(Dec 29, 2016 04:05 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Time is extremely tough to contemplate (is there a pun there? unintended). I've heard rumblings that time is no longer considered a dimension, as in a 3 + 1 dimensional universe. Is time still a coordinate?
I've always wondered about how you can have a 1 or 2 dimensional object if one of the dimensions was time. What happens to +1 when your talking of such objects? Does zero dimensional space mean the time dimension is still present? Does that mean a 3D object, one we're familiar with, exist outside of the time dimension?
One state of the universe ("now") constantly being erased / replaced by another in yoctosecond intervals, and coherence being magically maintained throughout that annihilation / conjuring process, is part of why I favor eternalism over presentism. At least in the context of naturalism with a materialist bent. A world which is as fleeting and ephemeral as that hardly qualifies as substantive; it seems more like an immaterial process, brutely happening without any underlying or extended account of "how".
Whereas the opposite -- of all those slightly differing and developing states or changes simply existing as an ontological structure rather than as incredibly short-lived "happenings" of continual replacement -- seems to better fit the bill of naturalism / materialism. An extra-dimensional spatial framework or whatever. The "how" of the regularities and laws is built-in as the structural patterns of that cinematic reality.
There's also the "in-between" hybrid of eternalism and presentism sometimes called the "growing" block-universe (Sean Carroll calls its possibilism). But it seems all the more fantastic because the preserved moments are apparently accumulating from nothing (no pretense of recycling this "now state" from the last state).
But outside of that classical, philosophical orientation of science, I can regard presentism as maybe possible or as not posing potential conflict as it does in the corporeal preconceptions of materialism. Though a transcendent level which assimilates the natural stratum, minus interfering in it, is problematic (something that can only be inferred and delegated to suspended belief)... It would at least allow something unknown to be engendering and regulating what transpires in the presentism view of time. Alleviating the appearance of the conjuring and miraculous consistency when shifting back to the natural orientation (or sub-domain).
(Dec 29, 2016 04:05 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Time is extremely tough to contemplate (is there a pun there? unintended). I've heard rumblings that time is no longer considered a dimension, as in a 3 + 1 dimensional universe. Is time still a coordinate?
I've always wondered about how you can have a 1 or 2 dimensional object if one of the dimensions was time. What happens to +1 when your talking of such objects? Does zero dimensional space mean the time dimension is still present? Does that mean a 3D object, one we're familiar with, exist outside of the time dimension?
One state of the universe ("now") constantly being erased / replaced by another in yoctosecond intervals, and coherence being magically maintained throughout that annihilation / conjuring process, is part of why I favor eternalism over presentism. At least in the context of naturalism with a materialist bent. A world which is as fleeting and ephemeral as that hardly qualifies as substantive; it seems more like an immaterial process, brutely happening without any underlying or extended account of "how".
Whereas the opposite -- of all those slightly differing and developing states or changes simply existing as an ontological structure rather than as incredibly short-lived "happenings" of continual replacement -- seems to better fit the bill of naturalism / materialism. An extra-dimensional spatial framework or whatever. The "how" of the regularities and laws is built-in as the structural patterns of that cinematic reality.
There's also the "in-between" hybrid of eternalism and presentism sometimes called the "growing" block-universe (Sean Carroll calls its possibilism). But it seems all the more fantastic because the preserved moments are apparently accumulating from nothing (no pretense of recycling this "now state" from the last state).
But outside of that classical, philosophical orientation of science, I can regard presentism as maybe possible or as not posing potential conflict as it does in the corporeal preconceptions of materialism. Though a transcendent level which assimilates the natural stratum, minus interfering in it, is problematic (something that can only be inferred and delegated to suspended belief)... It would at least allow something unknown to be engendering and regulating what transpires in the presentism view of time. Alleviating the appearance of the conjuring and miraculous consistency when shifting back to the natural orientation (or sub-domain).
Quote:C C
Alleviating the appearance of the conjuring and miraculous consistency when shifting back to the natural orientation (or sub-domain).
Before i forget, i ponder a theorhetical quick sand of causative dynamics where action & inaction are defined as quantum states of reality.
Can one observe the cat while doing nothing else and still be inactive. though does this require another observer to qualify it ?
Quote:Zinjanthropos
Is time still a coordinate?
I've always wondered about how you can have a 1 or 2 dimensional object if one of the dimensions was time.
What happens to +1 when your talking of such objects?
Does zero dimensional space mean the time dimension is still present?
Does that mean a 3D object, one we're familiar with, exist outside of the time dimension?
-i would theorise that time is a subjective point of annotation to the observer thus enforcing its own will as a dimensional relative upon all things.
(just musing on this)
-time as a dimension relative to materialist matter observered or intereacted with ...
... hhmm... here is a whacky thought... is emotion time critical ?
can you have an emotion that is devoid of a time reference ?
- liniar quantatative numerical imperatives ... what-if time is constant to everything BUT the expereincer ?
-Zero Dimensional Space... conceptually one must arrive at while potentially depart from the very notion of the reference and thus time is forced upon the relative observer.
maybe if you can remove time from it then it may be optional.
imagine orbiting zero dimentional space...
-does a 3D object exist outside of the time dimension ?
do we know it is there ?
do we need to know it is there for it to be there ?
can it effect us without or knowledge of it being there ?
will it still effect us if we apply different time values to ourselves ?
entropy is a fairly universal construct so it is difficult to plausibly subtract time from anything except in a theorhetical vacuum of time.
i gues it begs the question "is time still relative while devoid of entropy?"
just some crazy thoughts
SyneDec 31, 2016 10:37 AM (This post was last modified: Dec 31, 2016 10:38 AM by Syne.)
(Dec 31, 2016 01:20 AM)C C Wrote: One state of the universe ("now") constantly being erased / replaced by another in yoctosecond intervals, and coherence being magically maintained throughout that annihilation / conjuring process, is part of why I favor eternalism over presentism. At least in the context of naturalism with a materialist bent. A world which is as fleeting and ephemeral as that hardly qualifies as substantive; it seems more like an immaterial process, brutely happening without any underlying or extended account of "how".
Whereas the opposite -- of all those slightly differing and developing states or changes simply existing as an ontological structure rather than as incredibly short-lived "happenings" of continual replacement -- seems to better fit the bill of naturalism / materialism. An extra-dimensional spatial framework or whatever. The "how" of the regularities and laws is built-in as the structural patterns of that cinematic reality.
There's also the "in-between" hybrid of eternalism and presentism sometimes called the "growing" block-universe (Sean Carroll calls its possibilism). But it seems all the more fantastic because the preserved moments are apparently accumulating from nothing (no pretense of recycling this "now state" from the last state).
But outside of that classical, philosophical orientation of science, I can regard presentism as maybe possible or as not posing potential conflict as it does in the corporeal preconceptions of materialism. Though a transcendent level which assimilates the natural stratum, minus interfering in it, is problematic (something that can only be inferred and delegated to suspended belief)... It would at least allow something unknown to be engendering and regulating what transpires in the presentism view of time. Alleviating the appearance of the conjuring and miraculous consistency when shifting back to the natural orientation (or sub-domain).
I agree that presentism does not pose much of a problem philosophically, but I don't have any objection to the growing block view of time, even addressed to materialism. To the extent that materialists, or at least naturalists or physicalists, accept quantum fields as the fundamental material, I see no problem in assuming the future is the unobserved (or measured or interacted with, depending on your favored QM interpretation) universal wave function. In that case, the future exists, in a sense, but is not yet actualized.
Taking QM into account, presentism would seem to imply that the past actually becomes as indistinct as a quantum system losing coherence to its environment. This may be a good analogy for our memories of the past or how past events reduce to the impact left on the present environment, but this doesn't seem very scientifically useful.
My problem with eternalism is both philosophical and scientific, and for same reason. A real, existing future implies superdeterminism. Every choice, experiment, ethical consideration, etc. completely determined by the past. We're just along for the ride, and it really makes no difference if we have any subjective experience at all, much less whether we experience the same "now" simultaneously. Eternalism just seems to quickly devolve into the same sort of anti-realism as presentism.
lines from the past
bubbles in the past
lines into the futre
bubbles in the future
some things are connected because people look back from where their percetion is and then formulate future events based on the same liniar connectivity of subjective analysis.
i was musing that the less opportunity and density of time the greater the potential divergance as a human time factor.
mostly less options for change tend to favour less variance because the human animal tends to preserve a state of stability as a form of evolutionary imperative.
if we wanted to define some type of collectively recognisable example we could use President Lincolns' assasination and the upcoming Presidential inauguration.
What events become absolute yes or no options to effect the absolute outcome and how does that get defined as a state of relivance to the observer in the liniar measure ?
Casually speaking (please don't take any of this seriously).....Is the 3rd dimension time? Do we know it as depth?
Just before I started typing I looked up at the point where two walls and the ceiling of my room meet. It's the farthest point in distance from my eyes and also the farthest back in time.
If I took a snapshot of the exact same scene, creating a 2d image of it, then is the entire image a frozen moment in time? There are no clues to conclude with 100% accuracy that the same point as in the above paragraph is farther in distance or time. Does that mean a frozen time moment is actually a combination of a series of past events? But there's no depth to a 2d image, thus no direct evidence to link any part of the image as a past event that is separate from all the others. All of the image is one past event? What the hell am I looking at time wise when I gaze at a 2d image, is it one moment in time or a combination of many moments in time?
As far as the light recorded by a picture, it is a combination of pasts, the further away being further in the past. But yes, a 2D picture contains no evidence of this. It could just a readily be a 2D picture of a 2D picture.
(Jan 2, 2017 07:44 PM)Syne Wrote: As far as the light recorded by a picture, it is a combination of pasts, the further away being further in the past. But yes, a 2D picture contains no evidence of this. It could just a readily be a 2D picture of a 2D picture.
Re 2D pic: Exactly what I was thinking.
Switching attention to my PC screen. Letters, lines, colors, smilies and such laid out in 2D splendor. How would I be able to tell if time elapsed just by taking a photo of it? I think all i need to do is superimpose(?) my cursor on the image and have it moving while snapping the pic. Is there a shutter speed that can do this without creating even the slightest trace of a blur? I'm thinking that unless the shutter moves at c then it isn't possible. Any pic of the 2D screen while an image is moving across it has to contain an indication of time. IOW's in order to know if time elapsed on a 2D image I would need something moving.
Wouldn't a blur on a 2D image pic be an indication of a series of events? The actual blurs are 2D images also, no? So I would have a 2D image that indicates time has elapsed, a past to present representation without depth of field. So do I, as a 3D observer, in order to discern time from a 2D image need some part of that image to be in motion whereas I don't need it in a 3D setting?
C CJan 2, 2017 09:03 PM (This post was last modified: Jan 2, 2017 09:13 PM by C C.)
(Jan 2, 2017 04:15 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Casually speaking (please don't take any of this seriously).....Is the 3rd dimension time? Do we know it as depth?
Well, in a 2D Flatland I guess "time" as a continuous structure or as a coordinated framework of all distinct moments (but not "time" as the passage of each slice as some "special" now) could be regarded as extended in the 3rd dimension. And getting rid of one dimension obviously helps us deal with envisioning some of the scenarios sported by Eternalism too, whether generically in philosophy or particular constructs in physics.
Another problem with treating the "present" as if it is all there is to existence... The smallest unit of temporal measurement is "Planck time". But we might move up that a notch to a "yoctosecond" so as to ensure there actually are sub-atomic events taking place for such a bottom-most interval. In order to accommodate quantum fluctuations, particle decays and interactions, any "now" that globally embraced the whole universe as a discrete "frozen" state would have to be of that vastly lower magnitude rather than the milliseconds-long "snapshots" of human cognition.
Thus our personal notions of what "now" is, which we commonsense-wise throw as an objective net over the cosmos, would be subjective or specious even in the context of presentism (i.e., the typical view that only "now" exists and it will disappear and be replaced by the next now).
Also, in comparison, our temporally longer, irregular moments of human cognition certainly aren't "fitting" into the absurdly tiny yoctosecond. Which in itself suggests either unbroken continuity or some hyper-structure being divided into co-existing paginations which our intervals of consciousness would be "extending" through (corresponding to a sequence / collection of brain processes). Note that Eternalism doesn't necessarily require a 4-dimensional "block" or hypersolid that is foliated or not foliated -- it could be a field or other abstract conceptions; it's just simpler to treat the situation as geometrical in order to get an initial handle on it.
These quotes should clarify.
Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [AKA worldline] of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time. --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
Paul Davies: Our senses tell us that time flows: namely, that the past is fixed, the future undetermined, and reality lived in the present. Yet various physical and philosophical arguments suggest otherwise. The passage of time is probably an illusion. Consciousness may involve thermodynamic or quantum processes that lend the impression of living moment by moment. [...] Physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety - a timescape, analogous to a landscape - with all past and future events located there together [...] Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into the present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow. --That Mysterious Flow ... Scientific American, Sept 2002
Robert Geroch: There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle."--General Relativity from A to B
Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'."--New Scientist ... 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters
Rudolf Carnap: "He [Einstein] explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. I remarked that all that occurs objectively can be described in science; on the one hand the temporal sequence of events is described in physics; and, on the other hand, the peculiarities of man’s experiences with respect to time, including his different attitude towards past, present and future, can be described and (in principle) explained in psychology. But Einstein thought that these scientific descriptions cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside of the realm of science. We both agreed that this was not a question of a defect for which science could be blamed, as Bergson thought. … I definitely had the impression that Einstein’s thinking on this point involved a lack of distinction between experience and knowledge. Since science in principle can say all that can be said, there is no unanswerable question left. But though there is no theoretical question left, there is still the common human emotional experience, which is sometimes disturbing for special psychological reasons."--Intellectual autobiography ... In Paul Arthur Schilpp, editor, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap ... volume XI of The Library of Living Philosophers, pages 1–84. Open Court, La Salle, Illinois.
Brian Greene: Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar experience of time [flow] with "painful but inevitable resignation." The developments since his era have only widened the disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.--The Time We Thought We Knew ... NYT, 2003
Christof Koch: Well, let's first forget about the really difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, for they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose - there seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level. Let's focus on things that are easier to study - like visual awareness. You're now talking to me, but you're not looking at me, you're looking at the cappuccino, and so you are aware of it. You can say, `It´s a cup and there´s some liquid in it.´ If I give it to you, you´ll move your arm and you´ll take it - you´ll respond in a meaningful manner. That´s what I call awareness."--What is Consciousness" ... Discover Magazine, Nov 1992
Christof Koch: If NCCs [Neural Correlates of Consciousness] arise within the various processing centers in the brain at different times, shouldn't each of the attributes be perceived with a time lag? How is the brain able to integrate all these individual activities? Neurobiologist Semir Zeki of University College London has been researching this problem for many years. By measuring how subjects perceive squares that can randomly change color as they move on a screen, he has shown that a change in color of such an object is seen 60 to 80 milliseconds faster than a change in the direction of that object's movement. That is, one attribute is registered at a different time than another attribute of the same moment. This finding suggests that there may not be much truth to the presumed unity of consciousness --at least not when we are looking at extremely short time spans.
Such discrepancies rarely make themselves felt in our everyday lives, however. When a car races past me, its form does not seem to lag behind its color, even though each processing step --awareness of form, color, sound, speed and direction of movement-- requires separate assessments by different regions of my brain, each with its own dynamic and delay. A unified impression is rapidly reached because the brain has no mechanism for registering the asynchrony. We are almost never aware of the differing time lags. We simply perceive all the qualities of an object simultaneously--as incoherent as that composite image might be.
A common metaphor for consciousness is that we live and experience things in a river of time. This implies that perception proceeds smoothly from our first waking moment of the day until we sink our heads onto the pillow at night. But this continuity of consciousness may be yet another illusion. Consider patients who experience "cinematographic vision" resulting from severe migraine headaches. According to Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and noted author who coined the term, these men and women occasionally lose their sense of visual continuity and instead see a flickering series of still images. The images do not overlap or seem superimposed; they just last too long, like a movie that has been stuck on freeze-frame and then suddenly jumps ahead to catch up to a real-time moving scene.
Sacks describes one woman on a hospital ward who had started to run water into a tub for a bath. She stepped up to the tub when the water had risen to an inch deep and then stood there, transfixed by the spigot, while the tub filled to overflowing, running onto the floor. Sacks came upon her, touched her, and she suddenly saw the overflow. She told him later that the image in her mind was of the water coming from the faucet into the inch of water and that no further visual change had occurred until he had touched her. Sacks himself has experienced cinematographic vision following the drinking of sakau, a popular intoxicant in Micronesia, describing a swaying palm as "a succession of stills, like a film run too slow, its continuity no longer maintained." These clinical observations demonstrate that under normal circumstances, temporal splitting of sensations is barely, if ever, noticeable to us. Our perception seems to be the result of a sequence of individual snapshots, a sequence of moments, like individual, discrete movie frames that, when quickly scrolling past us, we experience as continuous motion. The important point is that we experience events that occur more or less at the same moment as synchronous. And events that reach us sequentially are perceived in that order. Depending on the study, the duration of such snapshots is between 20 and 200 milliseconds. We do not know yet whether this discrepancy reflects the crudeness of our instruments or some fundamental quality of neurons. Still, such discrete perceptual snapshots may explain the common observation that time sometimes seems to pass more slowly or quickly.--The Movie In Your Head ... Scientific American, 2005
Dec 28, 2016 07:01 PM
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