On Jul 31, 10:09Â pm, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:> On Jul 31, 6:46 pm, Pop Fly
gmail.com> wrote:
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>>> On Jul 31, 8:05 pm, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:>
>>> On Jul 31, 4:53 pm, T-minus108
gmail.com> wrote:>
>>>> On Jul 31, 7:35 pm, "bigflet...@
gmail.com"
gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:>
>>>>> We used to look into the heavens, and thought we saw what 'is', but
>>>>> because of the scientific understanding of light, we now know are
>>>>> looking at what was. Logically just follow the light back to the
>>>>> source , then "voila".Greater mysteries are discovered
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>>>>> So much for large scale thinking.
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>>>>> Apply that to the images around you. They are all in the past also.
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>>>>> Only the observer is present.
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>>>>> See what I mean?
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>>>>> BOfL
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>>>> Everything is in the past if you're using a very miniscule scale of
>>>> time, just the time that it takes to write something after you are
>>>> thinking about it is in the past, i get it, but what do you mean by
>>>> "so much for large scale thinking"? What does thinking have to do with
>>>> alloted time for experience?
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>>> Maybe the present is the future becoming the past.
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>>> -----------------------
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>>> Benjamin Libet famously suggested it takes about half a second for the
>>> brain to get through all the processing steps needed to settle our
>>> view of the moment just past. But this immediately raises the question
>>> of why don't we notice a lag? How does anyone ever manage to hit a
>>> tennis ball or drive a car? The answer is that we anticipate. We also
>>> have a level of preconscious habit which "intercepts" stuff before it
>>> reaches a conscious level of awareness. And yet it really does take
>>> something like half a second to develop a fully conscious experience
>>> of life. You can read about the cycle of processing story and its
>>> controversies in the following....
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>> Nice link.
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>>> If there is one thing that seems certain about consciousness it is
>>> that it is immediate. We are aware of life's passing parade of
>>> sensations — and of our own thoughts, feelings and impulses — at the
>>> instant they happen. Yet as soon as it is accepted that the mind is
>>> the product of processes taking place within the brain, we introduce
>>> the possibility of delay. It must take time for nerve traffic to
>>> travel from the sense organs to the mapping areas of the brain.
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>>> It must then take more time for thoughts and feelings about these
>>> messages to propagate through the brain's maze of circuitry. If the
>>> processing is complex — as it certainly must be in humans — then these
>>> delays ought to measurable,
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>> You are wise and correct.
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>>> and even noticeable with careful
>>> introspection.
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> Maybe he means that in some cases we can notice a lag, a delay between
> perception and abstraction, for instance. We might see a friend
> walking towards us, but the memory that I was to meet him came after
> the recognition of who he was and then the memory about what we were
> meeting about might come in a little after that, this outside the half
> to five second span of the moment (overlapping the future and past)
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>> No, not necessarily. By definition, introspection can only detect what
>> becomes conscious. For example, you can detect your heartbeat, but I
>> don't believe that introspection could detect the automatic electric
>> impulse from the brain that causes heartbeats.
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>> I read a good popular science book on consciousness: "Theatre of the
>> Mind" by Jay Ingram. They took brain readings of people while having
>> them make decisions. With experience, they learned to recognize the
>> electric brain pattern associated with the moment of decision. They
>> also asked people to announce when and why they came to a decision.
>> The decision-pattern occurs a surprisingly long time before the verbal
>> announcement. Â Your brain makes the decision a couple of seconds
>> before it gets around to telling your conscious mind about it!
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>> This only scratches the surface of the mind's wierdness.
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I think there are some delays that we can notice, but some delays that
we can't.
Only as a metaphor, consider an artificial intelligence that is very
bad at arithmetic. That's not original with me - I think it was Turing
or Hofstadter.
Never mind whether or not an AI could be truly conscious, that's a
different discussion. All I want to mention is that the AI is running
on a digital computer, the ultimate arithmetic machine, but it has no
access to that level of its operation.
In the same way, our mind with all its boggling complexity still just
skims along on the surface of brain processes that support our
thinking without our awareness.
