Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/09/01/ten-things-everyone-should-know-about-time/

by rkda • 15 years ago

14 12 15 years ago

blogs.discovermagazine.com

Brashman• 15 years ago

This sort of feels like it's butchering physics to try to make some philosophical claims.

CMartucci3• 15 years ago

How is it butchering physics?

crazydiamond3• 15 years ago

Some misconceptions need to be cleared.

| 4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past

This may hold true for sensory perceptions, thoughts etc but not for consciousness. When there are no thoughts, there is absolutely no gap in consciousness. When you live "consciously" there is no time-lag.

| 6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture.

Who is this "we". Consciousness does not depend on anything, unless you've incorrectly defined it. Everything else depends on it.

| Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times

Utter tosh. Who has cooked this up ? We've been through this for at least 2-3 millenia. Those who meditate, and there are lots on HN, understand that consciousness is independent.

"Everyone experiences time differently" -- if we talk of perception of time, then yes. A moment of boredom or pain can feel longer than an hour of pleasure but we all know that.

| 5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. We all know this don't we.

| In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.”

We really don't know that do we. Just speculation.

sharkbot3• 15 years ago

Considering we don't have great definition of consciousness, it's a bit of a stretch for you to say that "Consciousness does not depend on anything..., everything else depends on it".

In fact, your broad statement isn't true. Consciousness does depend on having a physical brain in a certain state of development, and depends upon a "normal" chemical environment surrounding that physical brain (ie, no anesthetics). There are autonomic functions in the brain that absolutely don't depend on consciousness.

CMartucci3• 15 years ago

Agreed. To say that everything depends on consciousness is somewhat naive. In fact, the things we are "conscious" of are not always accurate representations, whatever that may mean. For example:

"People commonly misreport their own experiences. We don’t even have good insight into how much fun we are having or even whether an experience we are having at a particular moment in time is pleasant or unpleasant. Some examples (among many): being paid a paltry sum to tell another person that the boring and repetitive task in which we have just engaged is fun leads us to think we enjoyed it (Festinger & Carlsmith 1959); observing that we have chosen one item from a range that seems identical leads us to conclude that we have detected differences between them (Nisbett & Wilson 1977). Subjects who experienced arousal caused by an injection of norepinepherine reporting being happy or angry, depending on what cues they’re given (Schachter and Singer 1962), while subjects who exercise prior to encountering an opposite sex confederate of the experimenters rated the confederate more attractive (Allen 1989). We are systematically bad at assessing the causes and the precise character of our experiences. Moreover, there is evidence that our intuitive physics is unreliable. Naïve subjects assume, falsely, that an object that is travelling through a curved tube will continue to follow a curved trajectory when it leaves the tube (McCloskey et al. 1980)." [Source: http://agencyandresponsibility.typepad.com/flickers-of-freed...]

crazydiamond3• 15 years ago

| Considering we don't have great definition of consciousness

Yes, you will not be able to "define" consciousness. However, you can point to it, so others can get it. It is on the basis of that discovery of consciousness that we can say it is independent. And yes, modern/western science has it backwards. Consciousness does not depend on the brain or body, these are events in consciousness.

A simple book that can help you get it is The Power of Now by Tolle. Science assumes that consciousness depends on the brain, we often take these assumptions to be facts.

Auguste• 15 years ago

"Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so."

-Douglas Adams

baltcode• 15 years ago

"""every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. """

I didn't think so (according to current physical theories). We don't know where a particular photon will land in a double slit experiment.

CMartucci3• 15 years ago

Can't you use the Schrödinger equation to assess the wave function and estimate (roughly) the future position?

Also, just because we don't know exactly where the photon will land doesn't mean photons break the laws of physics. Quantum mechanics are difficult to observe by nature -- that's what the uncertainty principle states: there is no way to observe quantum particles without moving them in hard-to-detect ways. I don't think the uncertainty principle states that quantum particles randomly defy the laws of physics in indeterministic fashion.

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

Related Stories