Sep 7, 2020 07:11 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 7, 2020 07:21 PM by C C.)
Is Consciousness Continuous, Like A Movie, Or Discrete, Like A Flipbook?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/fernandezel...3dc4bd3101
EXCERPTS: Is our consciousness continuous, or does it occur in discrete chunks? [...] scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have debated this for 1,500 years. ... The modern-day interpretation? Consciousness may be discrete. We may only aware for short times for certain, finite durations.
[...] In an opinion piece published ... in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, a group of scientists ... reviewed existing studies. They came up with a model that combined the continuous and discrete model of consciousness to illustrate how, and when, we are aware.
To see how this works, let’s imagine that you fall off your bike. If we were consciousness for the entire fall, we wouldn’t be able to process the fall quickly enough and may end up falling on our face. But in their model, we actually go through a period of unconsciousness, where our brain is furiously making calculations - how fast you were going, if the road is asphalt or gravel, whether to land on your wrists or your side. “We showed that you become conscious of an element only after a substantial delay of about 400ms,” says study lead Dr. Michael Herzog. “Unconscious processing is continuous but conscious precepts are restricted to certain short moments of time.”
Various experiments have confirmed this idea. [...] The time of “unconscious processing” may vary due to the situation. ... These seem to indicate that we are not aware instantaneously. Our eyes and our brains take time to process - and this translates to a delay in our awareness. We need to continually process information in the world around us, but our brains simply might not be able to handle that. "You need to process information continuously, but you cannot perceive it continuously,” says Herzog.
Of course, this does not translate to reaction time. Your body can react faster than your consciousness can kick in - and these certain reactions may not need us to be consciously interpreting information around us... (MORE - details)
Time flies, relatively speaking
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/september...-speaking/
EXCERPTS: The conventional explanation for this telescoping of temporal experience — attributed by William James to the nineteenth-century French philosopher Paul Janet, one learns from Joseph Mazur’s dumb-foundingly good The Clock Mirage — is arithmetical. To a ten-year-old child a year is a tenth of her existence, and thus feels like something of a stretch. For someone who’s twice her age a year is only a twentieth of the time they’ve already had, and by the time you get to 60, well, I’d say it doesn’t bear thinking about were it not for the fact that thinking about it is all you do once you get to a certain age …
But hold on a minute, says Mazur, who is a mathematician by training, but knows his way around physics and philosophy. Things are rather more complicated than that. To be sure, life in general does seem to speed up as you age. But particular moments can slow or even still the flow. The passing of a partner or a parent or, God forbid, a child will put the brakes on time no matter how old you are.
That’s because, Mazur argues, these are — with luck — one-off events and the longer you’ve been around, the fewer one-offs come your way. Your first fall, your first car, your first kiss — these are, as Mazur says, “landmarks” on your life. But the older you get, the rarer such landmarks are. Life becomes more mundane, more samey. The days seem to roll into one another, simply because there’s very little to demarcate them from one another.
Then again, there are objective reasons for the speed of subjective time changing as we age. Just as your metabolism slows the older you get, so, it turns out, does your body clock decelerate too. [...] It sounds paradoxical, but it’s that slowing of the older person’s body clock that leads to their faster counting — and their feeling that the rest of the world is speeding up. Relativity is all.
Still, back in the objective world, Newton’s suggestion that “absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external” still holds water, doesn’t it? [...] time, isn’t absolute but relative. ... All of this means that the first word in Mazur’s book — “Now” — has no objective meaning. Thanks to Einstein, we, er, now know that there is simply no now that we can ever agree upon. Indeed, what we call now, Einstein called “a stubbornly persistent illusion”.
[...] Perhaps because he writes poetry himself (The Clock Mirage is studded with his verse), Mazur doesn’t mention Eliot. Nor, surprisingly, does he mention Heidegger or Husserl or Merleau-Ponty — and Bergson crops up in passing on only a couple of occasions.
Still, he covers just about every other theorist of time with grace and wit [...] though for my money the most nourishing ideas come from a guy called Clint Barnum. “Time,” Clint tells Mazur, “is linked in some way to consciousness. It is the measure of life. We are conscious beings placed in a physical world that has no consciousness, a world of rocks and plants that change in connection with conscious beings who are trying to make sense of the connection. If you take away consciousness, you are left with nothing but change. There is an abyss between pure consciousness and pure mindlessness, a disconnect”... (MORE - details)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/fernandezel...3dc4bd3101
EXCERPTS: Is our consciousness continuous, or does it occur in discrete chunks? [...] scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have debated this for 1,500 years. ... The modern-day interpretation? Consciousness may be discrete. We may only aware for short times for certain, finite durations.
[...] In an opinion piece published ... in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, a group of scientists ... reviewed existing studies. They came up with a model that combined the continuous and discrete model of consciousness to illustrate how, and when, we are aware.
To see how this works, let’s imagine that you fall off your bike. If we were consciousness for the entire fall, we wouldn’t be able to process the fall quickly enough and may end up falling on our face. But in their model, we actually go through a period of unconsciousness, where our brain is furiously making calculations - how fast you were going, if the road is asphalt or gravel, whether to land on your wrists or your side. “We showed that you become conscious of an element only after a substantial delay of about 400ms,” says study lead Dr. Michael Herzog. “Unconscious processing is continuous but conscious precepts are restricted to certain short moments of time.”
Various experiments have confirmed this idea. [...] The time of “unconscious processing” may vary due to the situation. ... These seem to indicate that we are not aware instantaneously. Our eyes and our brains take time to process - and this translates to a delay in our awareness. We need to continually process information in the world around us, but our brains simply might not be able to handle that. "You need to process information continuously, but you cannot perceive it continuously,” says Herzog.
Of course, this does not translate to reaction time. Your body can react faster than your consciousness can kick in - and these certain reactions may not need us to be consciously interpreting information around us... (MORE - details)
Time flies, relatively speaking
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/september...-speaking/
EXCERPTS: The conventional explanation for this telescoping of temporal experience — attributed by William James to the nineteenth-century French philosopher Paul Janet, one learns from Joseph Mazur’s dumb-foundingly good The Clock Mirage — is arithmetical. To a ten-year-old child a year is a tenth of her existence, and thus feels like something of a stretch. For someone who’s twice her age a year is only a twentieth of the time they’ve already had, and by the time you get to 60, well, I’d say it doesn’t bear thinking about were it not for the fact that thinking about it is all you do once you get to a certain age …
But hold on a minute, says Mazur, who is a mathematician by training, but knows his way around physics and philosophy. Things are rather more complicated than that. To be sure, life in general does seem to speed up as you age. But particular moments can slow or even still the flow. The passing of a partner or a parent or, God forbid, a child will put the brakes on time no matter how old you are.
That’s because, Mazur argues, these are — with luck — one-off events and the longer you’ve been around, the fewer one-offs come your way. Your first fall, your first car, your first kiss — these are, as Mazur says, “landmarks” on your life. But the older you get, the rarer such landmarks are. Life becomes more mundane, more samey. The days seem to roll into one another, simply because there’s very little to demarcate them from one another.
Then again, there are objective reasons for the speed of subjective time changing as we age. Just as your metabolism slows the older you get, so, it turns out, does your body clock decelerate too. [...] It sounds paradoxical, but it’s that slowing of the older person’s body clock that leads to their faster counting — and their feeling that the rest of the world is speeding up. Relativity is all.
Still, back in the objective world, Newton’s suggestion that “absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external” still holds water, doesn’t it? [...] time, isn’t absolute but relative. ... All of this means that the first word in Mazur’s book — “Now” — has no objective meaning. Thanks to Einstein, we, er, now know that there is simply no now that we can ever agree upon. Indeed, what we call now, Einstein called “a stubbornly persistent illusion”.
[...] Perhaps because he writes poetry himself (The Clock Mirage is studded with his verse), Mazur doesn’t mention Eliot. Nor, surprisingly, does he mention Heidegger or Husserl or Merleau-Ponty — and Bergson crops up in passing on only a couple of occasions.
Still, he covers just about every other theorist of time with grace and wit [...] though for my money the most nourishing ideas come from a guy called Clint Barnum. “Time,” Clint tells Mazur, “is linked in some way to consciousness. It is the measure of life. We are conscious beings placed in a physical world that has no consciousness, a world of rocks and plants that change in connection with conscious beings who are trying to make sense of the connection. If you take away consciousness, you are left with nothing but change. There is an abyss between pure consciousness and pure mindlessness, a disconnect”... (MORE - details)