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As a brain researcher colleague says 'Life is Learned Behaviour Disorder'!

You are absolutely right. Time is yet another sense/signal that we pick out of all the noise, and our perception of time is learned (read 'imposed'). The artificial logistic rhythms of daily life are out of synch with our physiological circadian rhythms, and all the other artificial divisions of time (the working day, meal times, monthly salary etc etc) are in conflict with biological rhythms such as the internal biochemical gradients which influence what might be crudely called moods.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 06:31:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]
"You are absolutely right."

Isn't he only relatively right?

 Warning: trained physicists and other experts in Quantum mechanics are likely to find the following "trite"--not to mention erroneous.  Proceed with caution!

 Correct me if I'm wrong, won't you?

 Though I agree that "time" as we experience it and use it in language, is a human-construct, it is, nonetheless a construct which references reality.

  Perhaps that, for some, is all that needs to be said to make the point.  But, as I'm the way I am, I'll go on a bit with this.

  Motion and time have a relative quality,  as I vaguely understand it, but not one which excludes an absolute quality to time sequence.   There is, it seems to me, an indisputable absolute quality to the sequence of discrete events; for example: your parents' birth preceded your own; and in no other conceivable construct is something different possible since your existence presupposes that of your parents.

  I think that, unless everything we sense and experience is purely illusory, the figment of an imagination which subsumes all existence within it, then we have very strong grounds to believe that if anything is "objectively" "real", the universe beyond us, apart from us, is also no less real than are we.  Further, if all is illusory, what is it that is experiencing the illusion of reality?

  Thus, "time" is a construct which references a feature of reality--discrete sequential physical phenomena in motions which are relative only to various sets of points of view but not relative when observed from other sets of points of view.

  Or, time and motion can be observed to be seen in a manner that is relative to the observer's point of view.  But that does not mean, as I understand it, that all motion is then merely and only relative in nature and wholly lacking in any sense which can be called absolute.

  Isn't that correct?

  Oh, yes, by the way, I'm skeptical of the idea that for infants--whether pre-natal or post-partum-- "everything is noise", "no signal" at some initial point, unless that point is one which is prior to the development of what I can only describe crudely as a developing brain's "critical mass" of cells, at which point, I'd agree: there's no conscious being at that point in development.  But I suspect that as soon as there is a conscious being, there is something which is more than purely "noise" in sense data--one and probably more "signals", however slight and crude in "content".

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge

by proximity1 on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 11:13:44 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Just to blow your mind.

"Noise" comes in 4 designer colors: white, pink, brown, and black.  Depending on the context each of these can either increase, have no affect, or decrease information in a message.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 02:29:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
in and of itself is also a message, otherwise it would not be possible to categorize them.

Synapses fire apparently randomly, where no upstream dendritic input appears. Maybe they are just test firing. Clearing their throats. One of the most powerful neural actions is the choir. In a choir, a singer slightly off key is not noticed if there are enough other singers.

The choir effect makes it possible, for instance, to throw a ball accurately where the time window for release is only several milliseconds.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 03:43:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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