Dear All Learners,
In a book that I can't afford that I came upon today Peter Senge notes a
story wherein three Zen gentlemen are riding over some landscape or other)
and before them upon some hill is a pole with a flag. Rider no.1 remarks
upon the element of flag fluttering. Rider no.2 remarks the wind is the
'moving' element not the flag. Rider no.3 is the Master, he remarks that
it is not flag that moves, nor wind, but mind in motion. Andrew
thinks....it is all four;-)
Sub--Liminal--it(y)
Peter Beamish writes in another place/space/time
Reality has three and only three orthogonal spacial dimensions (osd's)!
Observers in relative motion have different worlds because different minds
read absolute real clocks, absolute real timetags, and absolute real
Timetags, in relative ways, DUE TO THE RELATIVITY OF MOTION AND THE
RELATIVITY OF MINDS. Such observers do not have a common present because
they have different personal Event Spaces (real spaces containing their
real "Now TIMES"). Hence simultaneity is not necessarily absolute, which
is perhaps the greatest discovery (1905) of the 20th century.
(C/R) Appendix. If communication between minds is "nearly instantaneous,"
then precise synchronicity is "nearly obtainable" and such
"Syncronization" (defined below), even containing biological error, opens
up a new, vast area of a real understanding of low stress Nature, now
known as "Rhythm Based Communication" and its associated RBC Theory. This,
we believe, is common, within our biosphere, in the absence of
evolutionary forces of survival, such as the need for nutrition, shelter
and quality "Now TIME."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - Definitions/Concepts - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - (Quotation marks are so attached for a first time use, only.) - -
#1 "TIME" = "Time KT + time ct (as vectors)." "Time KT:" a) is defined as
"The Perception of Lateness Relative to OnTimeness" (definition #10), and
b) appears defined mathematically by an approximation resulting from the
spectral representation of: exp(i theta) exp(-itH/hbar), a solution of the
Schrödinger equation, where theta is any fixed real number, t is
"conventional time ct," H is a Hamiltonian operator and hbar is the
rationalized Plank constant (reference web sites: a) and b), below).
Labels of TIME or, "TIMEtags," are "Timetags" and/or "timetags" as
vectors, or, combined, resultant, helical TIME lables, always within one's
"Event Space" (definition #8). Timetags are scalar labels, either mental,
inscribed, or other, of Time KT; timetags are similarly, scalar labels of
time ct.
#2 "RBC Theory" involves "Rhythm Based Communications" which are a result
of the discovery of a new and independent component of TIME, namely,
"Rhythm Based Time" or, Time KT.
#3 "AGV" is our Assembly of "Global Village," after the late Dr. Marshall
McLuhan, philosopher.
#4 A "timetag vector" or a "time-vector" (lower case t) is a timetag,
placed by mind, machine, Nature et al. onto a "mass/energy vector." A
"Timetag vector" or a "Time-vector" (upper case "T" used only to
differentiate Time KT from conventional time ct), is a Timetag, so placed.
They can be placed on the same particle of mass/energy, in which case,
"vector TIME" is their vector sum (and is helical in nature).
#5 A "counting scalar" is a scalar quantity for which the magnitude always
increases, never decreases.
#6 "Mass/energy" is either mass or energy or both, proportionally related
by e = mc^2.
#7 A "Clock" is any mechanism and/or life system that represents, or is
capable of producing cyclic, recurrent or predictable motion, and measures
TIME.
#8 "Event Space" is on or within one's Event Space Sphere Or Spheroid
("ESSOS"), an abstract space useful to describe the dynamic orientation
and magnitude of time, Time and space variables and containing one's "Now
TIME" (time and/or Time associated with events in one's present).
#9 "Synchronization" is the recognition of events, happening at the same
time ct and/or Time KT.
#10 OnTimeness is the recorded Time of "Synchronization." Closed words as
well as an upper case T, represent "orthogonal, cyclical Time KT," as
compared to conventional time ct.
Reference web sites:
a) <http://www.animalcontact.com/research>
(for "DUAL TIME," communications concepts)
b) <http://kims.ms.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
(for QM mathematics, home page of Dr. H. Kitada)
Reference books: "TIME" beyond "conventional time" (Over 200 Ancient and
Novel Concepts Merge), ISBN 0-9689955-0-0, Edited and partially written by
the author of Dancing With Whales, ISBN 1-895387-28-0.
NOW
You may well wonder what the horizontal line dividing processing from
memory signifies in figure 12. What work is that line doing? The answer
is: it isn't doing any work; it is, in fact, simply a vestigial trace of
the bad model in figure 5. On the alternative model, there isn't any real
boundary in time or space separating processing from memory. Now this is
really not so surprising, in the light of the other presentations at this
colloquium, for a common theme in them has been that both memory and
perception are constructive processes evolving their constructions in
time, revising, embellishing, dissolving, changing. The mistake lies in
supposing that in addition to these editing processes, there is a
privileged process that amounts to the "official" presentation of a
canonical version (rather like the frames of a film being illuminated in
turn by a sort of Cartesian cinema projector.
[Host's Note: I asked Andrew about the "figures" referenced here. He
replied, "I did not append figures...they are too badly reproduced and I
think that the text conveys the message ok." ..Rick]
This alternative model, which I call the Multiple Drafts Model, fits the
neuroscientific facts better, much better, than the model in figure 5, the
Cartesian Theater. In the case of meta-contrast, for instance, here is
what happens if you are shown just a single stimulus, the disk or "first"
stimulus:
[figure 13 about here]
The first thing that your brain decides is simply that something has
happened--you don't yet know what. If you give the brain enough time, it will
go on to determine that what happened was, lets say, on the left, and that it
was a circle, and then that there was some blue, and finally these contents
get bound together to create the discriminated content: there was a blue
disk. What is going to be the future of that blue-disk-content bound
together? It may almost immediately deteriorate and have no more effects at
all. Or if the green ring doesn't come along, it may not only hang around,
but be recapitulated, reflected upon, and each time that happens this may
further consolidate it so that even years later you will remember that blue
disk.
[figure 14 about here]
But notice that however many times this happens, there is not a first instant
at which you are conscious of a blue disk. The content blue is actually
determined by your brain after the content circle, and the content that these
two contents go together is something that comes along fractionally later
still. But of course your experience is not one of first realizing that
something's happened, then realizing that there's a circle shape, then
realizing that it's blue or that there is blue in the world, then and finally
realizing that the blue goes with the circle; you can't distinguish that
sequence, but in fact, that sequence is occurring in your brain.
This temporal freedom provided by the Multiple Drafts Model permits us to
explain other initially puzzling, even apparently paradoxical, phenomena,
and in the time remaining, I will briefly present one example. For almost
a hundred years, psychologists have studied phenomena of apparent motion,
known as phi phenomena. We are all familiar with phi phenomena; they are
the basis for motion pictures and television. The rapid succession of
stationary shapes slightly displaced creates the illusion of motion. In
the simplest cases (which are the best cases for psychological research),
single spots of colored light are the stimuli. If a little red light is
flashed on a screen in front of you, and then another little red light is
flashed on the screen slightly to one side or the other, you will see what
appears to be a single moving spot of red light.
The philosopher Nelson Goodman once asked the psychologist Paul Kolers
some years ago, what happens if the lights are different colors? For
instance, what if you flash a red light, and then you flash a green light?
Will there be apparent motion? Kolers and von Grünau ran the appropriate
experiments, and the answer is: yes, there is motion. Now you may well
wonder: what happens to the color of the "single" light that you see? It
starts off red and then there is an abrupt mid-trajectory change to green.
But this is an illusory trajectory, of course, not a real trajectory, and
this presents a puzzle.
[figure 15 about here]
Your brain cannot create the content of a mid-trajectory color change--it
cannot create frames C and D in the metaphorical diagram--until it has
received and analyzed the second stimulus (as represented by frame B in the
diagram). It has to "know" that there's a second light, and it has to know
what color it is, before it can start creating the illusion that we observe
in this case. A Stalinesque theory to "solve" this problem would be to
suppose that there's something like a "delay loop" in the brain: that A and B
arrive in sequence at some antechamber, some editing studio, somewhere
between the eyeball and the theater of consciousness. And in that studio,
during that brief delay but after B has arrived and been recognized, frames C
and D are rapidly constructed or confabulated, and inserted into the film
that is then sent up to the theater for viewing in a Stalinesque show trial.
But apparently there's another, Orwellian, theory which also could explain
the illusion. According to it, you're conscious of A, and then you're
conscious of B, and then your memory plays a trick on you. Frames C and D are
spuriously inserted in memory by the Orwellian historians after the fact (of
consciousness). Almost immediately you seem to remember having seen motion
occurring between A and B, but this illusion, represented by frames C and D,
is simply a contamination of memory.
Now which theory might be the truth? The Multiple Drafts Model declares
that neither one is the truth. The truth is that the brain is quite
capable of putting retrospective content elements into it's narrative
stream. It can decide there's a circle on the left and it's red and
there's a circle on the right and it's green, and that there must have
been change in between them. But this natural but mistaken conclusion is
"pre-dated": it is given a "postmark" which places it at an earlier time
in the sequence in your own stream of consciousness. Now this is an idea
that many people find extremely hard to accept because it suggests to them
that there must be some sort of backwards causation in time, or the
"projection" backwards in time of a later event. For instance, the Oxford
physicist Roger Penrose, in his recent book The Emperor's New Mind (1989),
suggests that we have to have a revolution in physics in order to explain
these effects.
What such phenomena actually show is indeed that the subjective sequence
of conscious experience does not always line up with the objective
sequence of the events in your brain that determine your subjective
experience. Graphically, experienced time can have backwards kinks in it
when we map it onto objective time.
[figure 16 about here]
The order in which events seem to happen to you in your stream of
consciousness is not the same as the order of events occurring in your brain
which are the very vehicles of those contents in your experience. I want to
show you, however, that this idea is not as strange and revolutionary as it
first appears. In fact, we are already quite comfortable with it when it is
applied to a different dimension: space. Consider this diagram of a
periscope.
[figure 17 about here]
You know that when you use a periscope, you experience a rather striking
effect: the light bounces off the mirrors into your eyes, and this has the
effect of shifting your point of view, almost miraculously, up to where the
top mirror is. That is where your eyes seem to be, that is where you seem to
be when you use a periscope. The actual events in your brain that accomplish
vision are happening down in the brain, but where you seem to be is
translated up by a couple of mirrors which preserve the content of vision as
it would be in the higher location. This does not involve any mysterious
projection in space of some ghostly or immaterial eye or mind; it is merely a
logical projection. It is a projection that is embedded in the content of
your vision, not a property of the vehicles of that content. In an exactly
parallel way, phenomena such as the phi phenomenon (and other, more
complicated phenomena discussed in Dennett 1991 and Dennett and Kinsbourne,
1992), show that the brain can create what we might call temporal periscopes,
curious occasions when time itself is apparently bent by the way the brain
deals with the events falling on it.
This has some rather striking implications. What we learn from the periscope
is that the idea of here--the observer's spatial location--is fixed by the
content, not by the physical location of the brain events the neural events
that are its vehicles. It is also true, I am claiming, that the subjective
sense of now--the observer's temporal location--is fixed by the content of
those brain events, not by their temporal locations. That is, the temporal
sequence of subjective experience is not fixed by the sequence in which the
relevant events actually happen in in the brain, but by the sequence that
they represent. In other words, for the same reason that subjective location
is not to be equated with some location of transduction, temporal location is
not to be equated with some time of transduction. Notice that the apparent
location of your eye when you use a periscope (see figure 17) is not due to a
special transduction event. Reflection in a mirror is not transduction at
all--there is no change in medium. The transduction of the light actually
happens in your eye, and it is followed by later transductions and other
operations in the brain, but the apparent or subjective location of the
observer--of you--is determined by the content (not by the vehicle), which is
fixed by the structure of the light at that point. By the same token,
subjective timing--subjective sequence and subjective simultaneity, which
constitute the order in which your stream of consciousness unfolds--is not
actually determined by the order of the contentful events that occur in your
brain, but rather by the content: by the sense that your brain makes of all
of those contents.
[figure 18 about here]
One last little story will illustrate my point. Figure 18 is in fact an early
diagram of the brain by Vesalius. Right in the middle, marked "L" is the
pineal gland. But I want to make opportunistic use of his diagram to
illustrate my main point on a different scale of space and time. Let's
pretend that this is a map of the Earth. "L" can stand for London. "G" can
stand for Ghent. What is known in American history as the War of 1812 was
fought between the British and the Americans, and on Christmas Eve, 1814, in
Ghent, the two opposing nations signed a peace treaty. The news of that
signing thereupon began to travel out around the globe in all directions at a
rather slow pace. It arrived in London, no doubt, within a few hours, at most
a day, after the signing of the treaty in Ghent. It arrived in New Orleans
too late to prevent a battle, the notorious Battle of New Orleans, which was
fought two weeks after the treaty was signed. Over a thousand British troops
were killed.
Now suppose we were to ask the following somewhat bizarre question: when
did the British Empire learn about the signing of the truce? The
ambassador in Ghent learned about the signing of the truce
instantaneously; he watched his own hand sign the treaty. The members of
Parliament, and the King, and the other officials in London learned it
some time later. The poor commander of the British forces near New Orleans
learned it only too late, alas, several weeks after the event. Suppose we
knew to the day, to the minute, to the second, when each element, each
agent, of the British Empire learned of the signing of the truce. This
still wouldn't tell us when "the British Empire" learned of the signing
of the truce, because no one of those agents counts as the place where the
British Empire resides.
You might be tempted to say this is false: what matters is when the King
learns. As Louis XIV said, "L'état, c'est moi!" But in this instance, the
King was George III, and it really didn't make much difference when he
learned things! He was not really in charge. (he was insane (Andrew's
note);-) So the best we can do, in answering the question about just when
the British Empire learned of the signing of the truce, is to say
something along the lines of "late 1814 to early 1815." In exactly the
same way, since you are not located in any one place in your brain, but
are rather distributed around throughout your brain--since Descartes was
wrong about there being a point in the brain "where it all comes
together"--if you ask yourself the question, "When did I become conscious
of some particular event?" that question can have only a vague answer, not
a precise answer. It could have a precise answer only if we could locate
you at some point in your brain. Since the transmission of information
around in the brain is relatively slow, the dating of events in
consciousness--the dating for you--has to be smeared
Material from: Is Perception the "Leading Edge" of Memory? In A. Spadafora
(ed.) Iride: Luoghi della memoria e dell'oblio, anno. VIII, n. 14, April
1995, pp. 59-78. [Italian] Daniel C. Dennett
"Vorrei voler, Signor, quel chio no voglio,
Tra 'l foco e 'l cor ghiaccio un vel asconde,
Che ' l foco ammerza ; onde non correspone
La penna all'opra, e fa burgiardo 'l foglio..."
I would will, My Lord, what I do not will.
Between the fire and the ice cold heart a veil is interposed,
which the fire absorbs; meanwhile what I write
does not correspond to what I do, and makes a lie of this page...
TIME to go;-) to SLEEP,
Love
andrew, Andrew, ANDREW ;-)
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