Present opened

There may or may not be a universal Now. We have no way to perceive it, no way to measure it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’m ready to put this whole line of questioning to rest (about time!).

The Present is the interval between the ticks of our clocks. It may be arbitrary, but so be it. As for our perceptions, the Present is probably the interval between the beats of our hearts; or the interval that we are able to pay attention to incoming stimuli without the chatter of our brains.

Why are we so intent on capturing the feeling that time stops and everything exists in an eternal now? Probably because it gives us some measure of relief from the constant uncertainty of the future. It allows us to really feel life, and that feels meaningful. It  feels as if we are tapping into something that exists outside time, something eternal…If there is such a thing, the wonderful human mind will certainly try to find it and never know for sure if it is creating it.

The human condition is untenable, yet we thrive. Everyone has their ways of dealing with the knowledge that we will die and probably suffer, that everyone we love will die, that life may very well have no meaning other than what we bring to it. Yet when you feel time stop, it’s a moment of relief from all that. It’s quiet, yet full of energy, peaceful yet humming, existing as is, yet full of potential.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

A present for you

As I probably mentioned in an earlier post, I used to think that only the present was real, only the present existed; the past and future only in our heads. Then I realized the present does not have a measurable duration, so how can it be real? It must be a dimensionless line between past and present, or a dimensionless point.

So when I say “I am paying attention to the present, to what is happening now to and around me”,  I am paying attention to something, but we can’t use that experience to define it as the present. My paying attention to it does not automatically create a definition of the present as such. Technically,  we can’t experience what we think of as the present, because there is a lag time in our perceptions. So, where does that leave us? We have some relationship to this thing we think of as the present. Perhaps we revolve around it like a planet, or balance on the edge of a dimensionless line.  Wait, consciousness is dimensionless isn’t it? That could explain our ability to be there.

Aye aye Captain

I just finished reading “The Illusion of Conscious Will” by Daniel M. Wegner. It has been fun to consider his main hypothesis – that conscious will is a feeling, like an emotion, that helps us to distinguish what actions emanate from us. He argues that conscious will is a direct cause of little to none of our actions. His arguments are largely based on studies that found that the brain is configured for an action well before our conscious mind is aware that it is choosing to perform the action. However, I think this is a weak argument because he didn’t establish the source of the lag in conscious awareness. Conscious will could begin an action before  the Captain becomes aware of it. I have written about the Captain before. That is what I call the part of our mind that is able to monitor the mind itself. It is a meta-mind. Is Wegner’s argument that conscious will springs from this meta-mind? I contend that the meta-mind is an observer of sorts.

However, if one checks in during the day, one finds that very little activity IS initiated by the conscious mind. I may spend a second deciding to take a walk, and another second at the fork deciding to go left not right, but the whole rest of the time I am lost in thought and observation. In fact, it appears that 90% of the time I am on automatic. That certainly supports Wegner’s contention that we are not the agents we think ourselves to be.

I was wondering if perhaps agency shows up more in what we don’t do rather then what we do. As long as our actions are in harmony with our will, no problem. But if we act outside our inherently known will, then sparks fly. We take ourselves to task to stop the behavior, but sometimes we can’t. That is when we know our bodies are in control.  One thing he didn’t even mention (unless I missed it) is the feeling of control that we have over our thoughts. If I decide to direct my thoughts, I often can. Is that different from directing my body, since with the body there are more things to contend with? After all we are made up of numerous cells, other organisms, metabolic processes that once started have to finish. There is a lot of competition there that we don’t have when controlling our thoughts. We are a system, especially our bodies. Our sense of agency springs from the mind, but what part of the mind?   Captain?

True? Who cares

“Lets not worry about what’s true”.  This idea was proposed to me by an old friend in response to difficulties we were having communicating. She wanted to be able to tell me things without being challenged as to why or how she thinks what she thinks.  My first reaction was  “that’s absurd”, but luckily my husband said “why not try it?” Well it has been a revelation, though honestly I think I have taken it down the field far beyond its original intent.

If  someone tells you something you disagree with, you start thinking “that’s baloney”, “how shall I respond” “how can they think that” and so on. That is a lot of mental interference. If you listen and don’t worry about what is true, you are like a receiver tuned to accept information, tuned to hear. Later you can decide what portion of what you heard is nonsense, and what if any is interesting or valuable. The beauty of this is how helpful it is in talking to people that you basically disagree with. You might disagree with 90% of what they think, but you can pull some great stuff out of that other 10%. I enjoy talking to people I disagree with because I like to check my assumptions, something I rarely do when talking with like-minded people.  I enjoy it when I find common ground with people that are very different than I, though sometimes it is disturbing. I like to be challenged, generally it is  more interesting to talk to people that don’t have the same mind-set as I. This technique makes it easier. I have also found that when someone says something I  disagree with, I don’t have as much adrenaline pumping, I don’t get as emotional or upset as I used to. It actually helps me think more clearly.

The only thing I haven’t resolved is this – if I am quietly listening and don’t immediately disagree, will they take that as tacit approval? Another downside – I enjoy seeing how people deal with dissent. Most people don’t deal with it well, but I value greatly the ones that do.

From Tehran to Tegucigalpa

We need to support our brothers and sisters in Iran and Honduras fighting against sham democracies (to be clear, it is the new government in Honduras we need to support).  A sham democracy can not withstand the light of day.  But brave individuals have to shine the light. They take great risks, they need our support.

Today we need to add Niamey, Niger to this list.

Dark Gravity

Physicists are looking for gravitons, because a particle mediates all the other known forces. But, if gravity is a distortion of space, as Einstein thought, a particle isn’t really necessary to carry the effect. I am thinking that where dark matter is needed to make sense of things that we observe, such as a  system that stays together when there isn’t enough mass to keep it together. Perhaps there is a distortion in space from a very heavy mass that used to be there, but no longer is. This very heavy mass may have distorted space so much, that it will stay distorted until another force acts upon it. Perhaps in this case, space can’t “bounce back”, when the extremely dense mass is gone. I believe that the age of the universe would need to be older then we think for there to be dead large black holes around. Perhaps dark matter is a gravitational memory imprinted in space from the original singularity.

Egypt in the Abstract

Sometimes I revisit something I already knew in a blinding flash of new awareness.  Today it is the power of language to encode information. The word Egypt is an abstraction for a huge amount of information. All the land, the culture, everything about the country represented by a single word!

Language gives our brains the ability to process huge amounts of information extremely  efficiently. If there were no word for Egypt, in order to consider Egypt I would have to imagine all of the individual bits of information I know about the place. Not too much really, but still so much bulkier and harder to handle than the one word that represents it all. In this way language has created mind as much as mind has created language. Our minds can travel across the universe at the speed of light. I don’t think this would be possible without some form of symbolic representation such as language or math.

Of course, life as we know it  wouldn’t be possible without the code that is DNA or RNA. That abstraction. Life is messy and inefficient in many ways, but it is quite efficient in passing genetic information. Physicists study the mathematical abstractions that underlay the non-living aspects of the universe. Are those abstractions necessary for the very existence of the universe. Could the universe really come into being without an abstraction?

Its time to decouple entropy and the arrow of time.

This idea has been making its appearance in my posts for a while, but its time to say it outright, entropy has nothing to do with the arrow of time.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in a closed system, entropy will never decrease. The two main examples are 1) a gas will disperse randomly and never gather again in a corner of a container and 2)  heat will never flow from a cold object to a hot one.  First the gas. If you have a concentrated area of a gas in a container, the gas will flow from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration. This is a “downhill” process of movement from high concentration (or pressure) to areas of lower concentration (or pressure).  By itself (without the addition of energy), the gas wont flow “uphill” into an area of high concentration or pressure.  This attribute of matter happens to be irreversible in time, again, unless you add energy.  So, perhaps it is fair to say that within this process there is an arrow of time that can be identified. It is just that what we call (for convenience) disorder is energetically downhill of order. What is it about this attribute of matter that causes physicists to apply entropy to the arrow of time for the whole universe? As I mentioned before, cold can not flow from a cold object to a hot one. Heat is movement, the lack of heat is stillness, and stillness can not flow. Again, this is an attribute of matter that happens to be irreversible in time because of the form of the materials.

Broken cups and scrambled eggs.  Physicists love to give the example of the broken cup to describe entropy. The cup is formed by energy and broken by energy. The materials of the cup can not be reformed into the cup once broken, because those materials have been changed (fired in the kiln). If the cup is made out of unfired clay when you drop it, you CAN pick it up and reform the cup. The fact that it takes energy to increase entropy (make the cup) and energy to decrease it (break the cup) makes me wonder why one direction is considered so different from the other. The same with the egg, energy to make it, energy to unmake it. So what if it can’t spontaneously reform, it can’t spontaneously form either.

The issue is that physicists found that physics equations are time symmetric, they work going forward and backward in time. These equations are abstractions, but perhaps the processes they describe could go forward and backward in time (billiard balls for example) but they don’t, do they? For entropy, there are many more disordered states possible than ordered ones, so probabilities send you in that direction.   As to why the early universe had such low entropy, well it was a singularity wasn’t it? Wouldn’t that have low (to no) entropy? Is time the direction that is energetically downhill for matter? Then all this organization in the universe must be either going backwards in time, or defying the arrow of time.

Mind or Brain

Consciousness and subconsciousness use the whole brain. But one half  of the brain accesses the subconscious easier.

Mind brain paradox solved:  The brain is the organ, the mind is the process.

Examples of organs and their processes: The brain is the stomach, mind is digestion. The brain is the heart, mind is flow. The brain is the penis (that’s a first) the mind is procreation. What is the big philosophical problem here? Who are we? We’re both.  We are not made up of body and mind, but body and processess. Consciousness is one hell of a process. Whew we, E ha.

Conscious Dream

I had my best ever lucid dream this morning. I was perched on a high rock projecting into a huge sandstone cave. I started to slip off and thought, its OK I’m dreaming. I let myself slip a little, asked myself again if I WAS dreaming, felt confident I was and went for it. I swooped off the rock and flew around the cavern. I touched the wall and felt the rough texture, then flew down low near the ground. I noticed that I was having difficulty breathing, like I was exercising.

After that I woke into another dream where I was mulling the lucid dream. I thought, maybe I felt the fear and adrenaline, and had trouble breathing because my brain wasn’t sure  I was dreaming, so it cause a physical fear reaction. The brain can’t really tell the difference between playing the violin and thinking about playing the violin. But my higher consciousness, the one that can observe myself thinking,  knew I was dreaming.  In this dream I created a whole story about the cave. It was a place I had visited earlier, a place where modern day Aborigines lived, a place where I had stolen some artifacts. I was thinking that the artifacts were stored in my loft and so, why did I steal them just to pack them away? I thought I was awake.

In the past I have had similar dreams where I would fly  around the room. I was never in such a large amazing place before. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last very long before I lose the thread of the lucid dream. Still, quite an amazing experience.

The hierarchy of consciousness is an important theme to me. I feel that a lot of what we are and the way we think about the world is due to this structure of our mind.