A New New Year 2009 gift for optipessi mist:

The Edge Annual Question—2009
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

FRANK WILCZEK_Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, The Lightness of Being
HOMESTEADING IN HILBERT SPACE

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_12.html#wilczek

What do you suppose the world, the universe, would be like if it happened as Wilczek describes?  What kind of humans do you think will exist, and will it even be worthwhile to exist in such a world?  What place would, could, music and art have in such a world?

No doubt memory in a literal sense is involved in all cognitive functions.  I think Optipessi was talking about what I called reminiscence, which is a specific activity one can choose to engage in, or not.  And that’s what I was referring to.

Because of the incontrovertible, impalpable amount of time it takes for an organism to sense experience the world, and taking even a longer though still imperceptible amount of time for the mind to intellectually cognize the world, then (I emphasize the word ‘then’) for a thinking organism to think about anything, I would take the even more radical position that all experience, pleasures, pains, or neutrals*, exists only through memory.

*for neutral experience, see Kahneman and Tversky, Choices, Values, and Frames.

While I would argue to the contrary that the body knows first then the mind, but agree that to know (anything) is to remember, in his dialogue the “Meno”, Plato rather elegantly defends the thesis that TO KNOW is TO REMEMBER: we do not have a genuine knowledge experience (of the universal being): when we say a mathematical proposition is true, it is not because we have just learned it, but rather because we remember the relations between the Ideas our soul (for me, mind) knew in the world of the Ideas before incarnating in our body. The perception of the sensible world cannot serve as foundation for strict knowledge but, since we have such knowledge, it must come from a previous experience. Therefore: to know is to update a knowledge already experienced, to know is to remember (this thesis is called THEORY OF the REMINISCENCE).  I would argue that the body’s experiences provide the material for the mind to synthesize into understanding truths rather than a body being provided knowledge by a separate entity called a soul ‘knowing’ prior to incarnation in a body.

Anarcissie, I might even take the radical position that pleasure (like dreams) only exists through memory!

Stephen—It seems, then, you would find Optipessi’s “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered” (to which my comparison of memory, immediate experience and anticipation responded) not something you might disagree with, but not even meaningful?

Anarcissie, “mental state” is, at best, a “fiction of convenience,” which we invoke for the sake of continuity with past studies of mind.  (Think of it as a necessary move in the language game we play.)  In bringing up Nader’s results in terms of reconsolidation, Shenonymous hit on a fortuitous pun in our language, since reconsolidation is essential re-membering.  Edelman carries Nader’s results further down the road to the point where this reconsolidation is the fundamental process of consciousness itself, sort of like the “operating system of mind.”

The reminiscence you had in mind is just one instance of that reconsolidation.  However, it is so tightly coupled to other instances, including anticipation and “processing sensation,” that I still shy away from any rank ordering.  It’s a bit more like Shenonymous’ analogy of grain and weed.  You do not know what the grain is until you are ready to draw upon it.  Prior to that moment, it is all one undifferentiated organic process.

What is a yellow arrow?  How far can a train go that has no beginning or end?  Aren’t we really stuck in this life?  Possibly a simile for time, the train does not stop.  A fascinating quote, optipessi mist.  Yes it was enjoyable to read, once more.  Somewhat remindful of Italo Calvino, Pelevin’s stories are more than worthwhile for contemplation.

In return, here is something you might enjoy about remembrance of a place, a sense of dé·jà vu.

  “If I say this moment I am living through is not being lived for the first time by me, it’s because the sensation I have of it is one of a slight doubling of images, as if at the same time I were seeing not one lion or one arrow but two or more lions and two or more arrows superimposed with a barely perceptible overlapping, so the sinuous outlines of the lion’s form and the segment of the arrow seem underlined or rather haloed by finer lines and a more delicate color. The doubling, however, could be only an illusion through which I depict to myself an otherwise indefinable sense of thickness, whereby lion arrow bush are something more than this lion this arrow this bush, namely, the interminable repetition of lion arrow bush arranged in this specific relationship with an interminable repetition of myself in the moment when I have just slackened the string of my bow.

  I wouldn’t want this sensation as I have described it, however, to resemble too much the recognition of something already seen, arrow in that position, lion in that other and reciprocal relation between the positions of arrow and of lion and of me rooted here with the bow in my hand; I would prefer to say that what I have recognized is only the space, the point of space where the arrow is which would be empty if the arrow weren’t there, the empty space which now contains the lion and the space which now contains me, as if in the void of the space we occupy or rather cross – that is, which the world occupies or rather crosses – certain points had become recognizable to me in the midst of all the other points equally empty and equally crossed by the world. And bear this in mind: it isn’t that this recognition occurs in relation, for example, to the configuration of the terrain, the distance of the river or the forest: the space that surrounds us is a space that is always different, I know this quite well, I know the Earth is a heavenly body that moves in the midst of other moving heavenly bodies, I know that no sign, on the Earth or in the sky, can serve me as an absolute point of reference, I also remember that the stars turn the wheel of the galaxy and the galaxies move away from one another at speeds proportional to the distance. But the suspicion that has gripped me is precisely this: that I have come to find myself in a space not new to me, that I have returned to a point where we had already passed by. And since it isn’t merely a question of me but also of an arrow and a lion, it’s no good thinking this is just chance: here time is involved, which continues to cover a trail it has already followed. I could then define as time and not as space that void I felt I recognized as I crossed it.”

Stephen Smoliar:
‘Anarcissie, given how closely you have been following these Comments, you probably knew that you could expect disagreement from me on your “ranking” of anticipation, direct experience, and memory. ...’

Actually, most mental states we know about require memory of some sort.  I was talking more about mental activities, “memory” being “reminiscing” perhaps.  Reminiscing about a love affair or a visit to a great work of art seems weaker than either the ongoing experience of one, or its anticipation.  No doubt tastes differ, however.  To the Buddhist who has achieved true emptiness of mind, it’s all dukkha.  Or so they say.

Shenonymous,

I will answer your question(s) in a bit.  But, first a tidbit I hope you will enjoy.

”...What does it matter to me? There is something else far more important.  I am closest of all to happiness-although I won’t attempt to define just what it is-when I turn away from the window and am aware, with the edge of my consciousness, that a moment ago I was not here, there was simply the world outside the window, and something beautiful and incomprehensible, something which there is absolutely no need to ‘comprehend’, existed for a few seconds instead of the usual swarm of thoughts of which one, like a locomotive, pulls all the others after it, absorbs them all and calls itself ‘I’.

optipessi mist, you offer a tasty tidbit where a banquet is in order.  If I may offer a three course meal then maybe the journey on recollection will, truthfully, also have been a pleasure?  (ah, killing three birds with one stone and its happy contemplation.)  A memory about something is only as good as the last memory about it.  Researcher on memory, Karim Nader, did a convincing experiment that showed the usual way of thinking about memory was wrong. Each time a memory is used, it has to be re-stored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. Then it has to be reconsolidated.  Collected together, which act as reinforcement.  Reconsolidation, then, is the process of re-consolidating, that is, consolidating, or combining, again the memories being recalled that have already been consolidated before. According to research, it involves neural processes that are similar to those involved in an original consolidation. In laboratory animals, recall puts memories into an unstable reactive state.  However, after recall, the memory must be reconsolidated or it will be forgotten. Memory reconsolidation occurs upon review or repetition of the learned material. 

A small riddling analogy on truth and fantasy:
A sower went to sow,
he sowed good seed but there were weeds in the field as well
and the grain and the weeds grew together
and while the grain was still unripe, the weeds couldn’t be distinguished from the grain
but at the time of harvest when the grain ripened they could easily be distinguished
then the grain was kept and the weeds burnt up.

The sower is mankind,
the field is the world,
the good seed is the truth,
the bad seed is the fantasy of the world,
the truth endures,
but the fantasy of the world is temporary.

Pleasure and its effects in the mind: research is confirming pleasure has a direct biological involvement and may actually be a neural system serving different biologically-given functions and goals.  Affective phenomena in the brain we call pleasure is something biological, psychological, and experiential but what it is precisely is not yet known.  Does pleasure express successful unimpeded and perfect functioning of human capacity-fulfilling natural activities, as Harry Stotle would say, or is pleasure a whole menu of Platonic “improvement” indicators, that is “good” state indicators?  To what degree is dopamine reward involved, biological facts of mood, energy, circadian rhythms, body temperature, and nutrition have to do with how much pleasure can be experienced, not to mention the effects of too much, not enough, or just right amount of sleep?

I am trying to see into the metaphor you used to connect memory and truth as distantly related?  Because they each may be complicated how does that drive a relationship between memory, a physical phenomenon, and truth a non-physical phenomenon?  I am not saying there can’t be, I’m asking how being complicated makes them related?  They are different existentials. The physical process of making beef roulades is complicated, as PTSD is a complicated mental condition as well, but it would be a stretch to see them as related.

And the idea that memories of a pleasure one had through one’s lifetime up to the moment of death exist as the “real” experience, rather than at the moment the pleasure occurred is obscure.  How is the memory of something, even a collection of memories, more real than the real experience itself?

Anarcissie, given how closely you have been following these Comments, you probably knew that you could expect disagreement from me on your “ranking” of anticipation, direct experience, and memory.  It is one thing to talk about “direct sensation;”  but I would situate “experience” in the cortex, rather than the sensory neurons.  This means that, in the spirit of Edelman’s “remembered present,” “direct experience” requires memory!  I would further suggest that those memory processes that enable experience are playing off of both sensation and anticipation.  We thus have a tightly-connected graph that does not lend itself readily to rank ordering!

For my next trick, I shall turn to optipessi mist’s little aphorism about memory and truth.  It just so happens that my current library reading is KNOWING AND THE KNOWN, a compilation of papers by John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley (most of which were written jointly).  Anyone who enjoys polemic will take great delight in the thorough drubbing they give to the terminology of formal logic (including, of course, “truth,” not to mention “fact”).  I had so much fun with this that I wrote a post about it at:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/12/illo gical-logic.html

I also remember that, when we were reading LORD OF THE FLIES in high school, my teacher read to us an essay by Golding that had just appeared in some popular magazine.  Referring to Pontius Pilate, Golding wrote that the fool uses the question “What is truth?” to end a discussion, while the wise man uses it to begin one!  As I see it, the real problem is that we are seduced by the mechanical quality of formal logic to mistake consistency within a formal system for truth, thus assuming that no further discussion is necessary.  I went on to blame computer science education for this mistake in:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/12/hobg oblin-of-little-minds.html

Of anticipation, direct experience, and memory, I think memory is the least, at least in the realms of the senses and the emotions.

Shenonymous,

And traveling just a bit further,

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.  The pleasure is not the one thing and the memory another.

What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-
that is the real experience.  The other is only the beginning of it.

Shenonymous,

You asked several posts ago what I meant by,

“Memory is a distant relative of truth”

What I meant is that memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Shenonymous and Stephen Smoliar-  The excerpts below are from the following:

http://www.math.ru.nl/~landsman/HSQM.pdf

Using the Socratic method with highly intelligent persons like yourselves is very effective.  The tantilizing tidbits below go a long way toward bridging the math gap for particle physics amateurs like ourselves.

“...Maxwell’s theory, in which light is an
oscillation of the electromagnetic field…”

”...Von Neumann proposed the following mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. The observables of a given physical system are the self-adjoint (possibly unbounded) linear operators a on a Hilbert space H. The pure states of the system are the unit vectors in H. The expectation value of an observable a in a state ψ is given by (ψ, aψ). The transition probability between two states ψ and ϕ is |(ψ, ϕ)|2. As we see from (I.3), this number is just (cos θ)2, where θ is the angle between the unit vectors ψ and ϕ. Thus the geometry of Hilbert space has a direct physical interpretation in quantum mechanics, surely one of von Neumann’s most brilliant insights…”

It is so funny I was just using the very terms gestures and grunt in talking to a friend about the limitations of prehistoric man, and now Stephen Smoliar you give Mead as one who may shed some light on when and how and maybe even why humans became the kind of talking animal it is.  Doubtless this is the eventual source of contemplative thought, critical thought as well.  I am not able to find any data on when humankind developed the ability to think analytically.  If accounts of human evolution are true and hominids appeared on earth maybe as far back as 5 millions years ago but probably didn’t developed into recognizable humans until about 100,000 years ago, then it took a long time for analytical skills to show up.  As food for a metaphysics and a theory of self as practical necessity is something I definitely will study Mead’s work and have already ordered one of his books. 

I can only see a human mind developing as a result of survival need to negotiate its world (yes, there is that word negotiate again).  Why other animals did not evolve that way is still unexplainable by science unless the Darwinian perspective is taken and the random generation of species from environmental effects.  Darwin never gets involved in why the universe exists so I do not attribute any cosmology to him as I would with Plato, Heidegger, and other philosophers, and theologians, even though anti-atheists claim Darwin did publish such sentiments. 

All very interesting, and dearly loving George Balanchine’s choreography, I particularly loved his Jewels Ballet, nevertheless, no one has yet saved us from nonexistence from there being no time in which we would exist having done away with pastpresentfuture (spelled that way on purpose).  I am confounded as to why we can even be here discussing anything.  Is it all perception?  Is there no other proof?  And I guess it does matter if we only experience frames since the problem of existence only having being in that intersection of breathing in and breathing out arises. As to what is happening between the time one frame ends and the next one begins.  And I realize the redundancy of existence having being but there doesn’t seem to be any other way of putting it.  There are too many questions left begging in the psychophysics explanation and the lovely dance of the universe theory, or the interactive conversational one as well.

optipessi mist, my graduate studies in mathematics concentrated on combinatorial theory.  I learned about Hilbert spaces through a required course in advanced analysis.  I claim no qualifications for reading current documents in experimental physics.  Thus, while I have an abstract appreciation for the descriptive power of Hilbert spaces, I cannot intelligently comment on the impact that descriptive power has on the practice of research in particle physics.

Stephen Smoliar,

Being more specific.  Please give me your opinion of Hilbert Spaces regarding documented experimentation in physics, specifically particle physics.

If what you seek “are non-religious reliable explanations of signification,” then G. H. Mead would be a good place to start.  He develops some interesting hypotheses on how man progressed from “conversations of gestures” (which can be found in many life forms) to conversations of SIGNIFICANT (“signifying,” if you prefer) gestures, which are unique to the human species.  Since he was writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mead lacks many of the retrospective insights we now enjoy;  but he was definitely on the right track.  Note, also, how nicely the foundation of gestures fits with any dance-based metaphors!

Okay, Herr Professor Smoliar, since our brains are composed of electrons swirling around as fast as the speed of light, we could say we have a lot of electricity up there.  Then we can stick a metaphorical finger into the outlet of our brain, that might be signified by our gestures and language expressions and those results would be experiential reality.  But that does not seem quite to complete the picture (reality).  And you are right, Maxwell’s elegance on the nature of electricity and magnetism isn’t needed at all but we might need somebody else to explain the significance.  Does “Wovon man [or at least “ich”] nicht sprechen kann!” mean “About which I cannot speak!”?  There are many ways to do this I guess, religion being one way to explain, but surely there are non-religious reliable explanations of significaton.

The social world construction can be thought of as the interaction of the objective world that continuously involves the subjective when the subjective is paying attention to it.  I am comfortable with your last explanation.  I love the dance metaphor, merci.  I have to think on it for a bit (purposely using the metaphor of on as a description of what kind of strenuous thinking it will take to overcome puzzlement to see what questions may be leftover.

Shenonymous, I like to think that “our perception of our existence” is a product of a rather elegant dance (think of the choreography of Balanchine) through which the objective, subjective, and social worlds engage with each other.  The metaphor of still photographs raises the question of whether or not the (objective) “physical hardware” of the nervous system is continuous or discrete.  At a chemical level it is continuous;  but, if everything ultimately depends on how the cells fire, then we can view it as discrete.  Indeed, the literature of (subjective) psychophysics now reports on experiments that try to determine the “sampling rate” associated with both auditory and visual perception.  Thus, where vision is concerned, we would be talking more about the evenly-spaced frames of a film, rather than individual still photographs!  The “continuum of reality” is then constructed “in the mind,” just as it is when we watch movies.  Indeed, the very concept of a continuum is, once again, a mathematical abstraction that facilitates our powers of description, such as explaining why Achilles really does overtake the tortoise.

The social world enters this dance in a variety of ways, one of the most important being the emergence of language itself.  As Wittgenstein would have put it, the rules of the language game are a product of the social world and are thus independent of both the objective and subjective worlds.  Mead’s social behaviorism can be read as an early inquiry into how those rules are formed and probably pre-dates Wittgenstein’s initial thoughts about language games.  Alas, it appears that their paths never crossed, either physically or in the virtual forum of their writings.

Shenonymous, I suppose one answer to your question is that the concept of the Hilbert space facilitated description in quantum mechanics in a manner analogous to that in which vector calculus facilitated the description of electromagnetic phenomena.  I am not sure how either of these would rate on your scale of “experiential reality.”  There is, of course, the experiential reality of sticking your fingers into an open electrical outlet;  but you do not need Maxwell’s equations to explain it!  When it comes to the “experiential reality” of quantum mechanics, that, for me, constitutes an example of Wittgenstein’s “Wovon man [or at least “ich”] nicht sprechen kann!”

From Smoliar’s website:  “...one might say that the world is that which emerges through our conversations.”  Or in Descartes’ case, his soliloquy, the conversations with himself.  If we can rightly say that Edleman was a solipsist kicking a stone in the street, we have to think we are part of his self-consciousness and that the stone is one of his own creativity.  If in his theory our consciousness is a matter of chemical interaction, may I ask so what does that mean?  It reminds me to take a look again at Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene which goes a bit further and implicates a community for survival. 

I would submit that there cannot even be “an instant of time” and we are left with the reductio ad absurdum.  Is our perception of our existence really like a series of still photographs?  It seems we cannot select a frame at any one time, but as they occur they fly away just as swiftly as they came in for a landing.  Furthermore, it seems we have to construct an existential moment and hang onto it for dear life, literally.  Thus the notion that the world is a construction of the mind.  But that is over the edge into solipsism and that leads to the absurdity as well.  I think the analogy with the phenomenon of sound is excellent and gives as sharp a “picture” to understand the problem as there is.  I shall read Husserl.  It also seems that we only exist in a world of seeming.  Isn’t that akin to the Maya of Buddhism and Hinduism?  The world of illusion?  The one that Plato also discusses so eloquently in the Allegory of the Cave.

Difficulties are built into the language through the definitions we construct for our making ‘sense’ of the world through sense perception and subsequent figuring out what it all means then what it means to have the Other in the world with whom we interact.  Wittgenstein was the one who let us in on those inherent problems.  Knowing all of this, or at least a part of it, now what do we do with it?  How do we account for a constructed coherent existence that contains both me and thee?

Being completely ignorant, and looking up Hilbert space online, from what I’ve read, if Hilbert’s theory of space depends on cauchy sequencing for construction, then it seems it will fall into Zeno’s paradox of infinite space (time) or an infinite regress of repetition and we get caught up in rational and irrational numbers even if there is a convergence of vectors.  But saying this doesn’t even qualify as a cursory overview and may not be even within the vicinity of the ballpark.  For all I know I could be sipping MaiTais on the beach at Waikiki or roaming in the labyrinth at Knossos (the latter does not exist in the physical realm), at the same time.  The infinitesimal knowledge I have of mathematics won’t let me get beyond amusement.  I would say I don’t even have a ticket to get in the gate.  I would welcome any insights offered for consideration.

Talking about vector space or linear algebra found in mathematical concepts such as Hilbert space are terms in a language with which I am a foreigner and about which I cannot speak coherently.  Hilbert space and Banach space as well discuss theoretical constructions that are devised to be able to speak about abstractons.  From this layperson’s perspective, I want to know how they are applicable and understandable from an experiential reality?  In any case, I find the language in the description of Hilbert space most fascinating.  It is like listening to Sanskrit without knowing what is being said.  The sound (bowing to Smoliar’s obvious penchant for it) is beautiful from the relationships of the verbal word and phonemic constructions. 

I agree that Plato’s insights expressed in his Theaetetus are one of the best doorways to the problem of what exists.  His Meno demonstrations also unlocks the door a crack.  Both worth revisiting from time to time (oh my gosh, we cannot do that until our existence is verifiable).  We’ve no help yet on that problem.  Yet I am here and wonder if you are?  Maybe a visit to The Rehearsal Studio will give a clue?

optipessi mist, I have not studied Hilbert Spaces since I was a graduate student.  I am afraid I have followed Bertrand Russell’s path in trading mathematics for philosophy.  (Will I live long enough to end up writing short stories?)  I certainly think that philosophy will do more to rescue Shenonymous from her paradoxical non-existence than physics will!

The agent for this rescue will be Plato, specifically in “Theaetetus.”  This is the one where Socrates prompts Theaetetus to define knowledge and shoots down each of his four attempts.  We thus end without a definition but with a lot more knowledge!  Most interesting is the way in which Socrates’ reasoning keeps interleaving the nature of knowledge with being itself (Can knowledge be?), memory (to which the question of being also applies), and description (to the extent that anything can only “be” to the extent to which it can “be described”).  This should take us back to some familiar ground:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/11/phil osophical-investigations.html

Plato’s journey leads us up to Ringo Starr’s immortal punch line in HELP!:  “It’s all in yer mind!”

With due respect to Samuel Johnson, we may best view Edelman as a solipsist who figured out how to kick the stone in the street.  In more contemporary language he subscribes to the premise that reality is constructed through the processes of consciousness.  (The extent to which reality is “shared,” so to speak, can be accommodated through George Herbert Mead’s social behaviorism, which posits that those formative processes have a social dimension, as well as physical and psychological ones.)  In other words past, present, and future (along with knowledge and memory) all exist by virtue of those processes;  but, because they emerge from processes, none of them “exist” at any “frozen instant of time.”  (For me the conclusion about memory is the most profound one, since it posits the speciousness of the concept of a “memory state.”  In other words, Virginia, our memory is NOT like some enormous server for Google!)

By way of a post script, optipessi mist, you may turn to philosophy for a Platonist view on Hilbert Spaces, but only as an instance of a more general premise.  One way to view the abstractions of mathematics is as a means of simplifying descriptions of the complex.  The best example is probably how the language of vector calculus served to simplify the original expressions of Maxwell’s equations.  From that point of view, we can view the concept of the Hilbert Space as providing means to describe phenomena that are not easily (if at all) described in Euclidean Space.  Once the apparatus is in place, it can then be studied in its own right (as many have done with vector calculus).

Shenonymous and Stephen Smoliar-  Each of your last posts are more or less correct.  Individually your post describes one aspect of reality in physics.

To keep things simple for now please give me your opinion of Hilbert Spaces.  I will give you mine with my next post.

What you, Edleman, and Husserl say seems so true Stephen Smoliar.  But I see a very small problem.  It does seem so true that the present never arrives and is a mathematical abstraction, as much as past and future are for that matter.  For as you say, as it arrives it simultaneously leaves and there is never a moment, the moment, when it is Here.  But now let’s think for a moment, if thinking is possible under the circumstances.  We will try anyway:  The past does not exist as it has slipped away as fast as it arrived and slips away as fast as it arrived from the future as Time (shall we say unidirectionally) moves on.  And the future does not exist as it has not yet arrived but lays in wait to happen, kind of stalking the present, so to speak, and as it tries to arrive in the present there is always that kind of Zeno-problem of the present slipping away captured by that bandit, The Past.  So if the past does not exist nor the future, and you, Stephpen Smoliar, et al, have rightly taken the present away, then the small problem I see is that there is never any Time when we exist. 

I certainly hope someone can save us, we who do not exist.  optipessi mist or Ozark!  Sodium could be good for it!  How about our resident triumvirate:  Anarcissie, Folktruther, Paracelsus?  I cannot do it!  I wouldn’t know where to begin, She exclaims.  Maybe the ladies leilah or Lisa?  Maybe FENWICK?

Thank you Stephen, that was a fun metaphorical playground event:  In the manner of the Zen Buddhists who propose that existence is at the juncture of breathing in and breathing out.

Shenonymnous, let me elaborate on your “bottom line” (actually, final paragraph) about presentism and consciousness.  If we pursue the Edelman model of consciousness, then, as I have previously discussed regarding sound, consciousness CANNOT EXIST in an instant of time (an abstract “now,” so to speak) any more than sound can.  This is because consciousness is not a state but a property that emerges from a vast complex of neuronal activity.  No “snapshot” of that activity, taken on its own, can tell you anything about that emergent consciousness.

The title of Edelman’s book THE REMEMBERED PRESENT reflects the proposition that the present only exists to the extent that we are conscious of it;  and our consciousness of the present only exists (is formed, actually) through neural processing (which takes time, however brief the duration may be).  Thus, whatever it is that we perceive in the present is being installed in the dynamic processes of our memory at the same time;  and our capacity to reflect on the present actually takes place through those memory processes.  Edelman thus emerges (so to speak) as a “real-world” champion for Husserl:  The present only exists in conjunction with two horizons, once facing the past and the other facing the future.  (Husserl called these “retentions” and “protentions.”)

From this point of view, the “instant of the present” can never be anything other than a mathematical abstraction, no different from a point in space (which should not be any big surprise to anyone who has been following this discussion).

Sorry for the delay (a time constraint) in getting back due to my obvious lack of speed, work interrupts.  Often there are two interesting roads to take.

Since we have been on the topic of time, and to try to etch away a bit at the notion of the malaise of illiteracy, a summary of Neil McKinnon’s view of Presentism is offered without the bogeyman light and its speed, although it is agreed that understanding the phenomenon of light might help clarify the idea of time.  And a bit more on Lorentz’s Transformatons (LTs) with the help of Gabriel LaFreniere.  But let’s just accept the assessment of understanding light as a given,  Rest assure it would be welcomed that Shenonymous’ mass might increase as She increases Her speed (in hot pursuit of some truth), and She might need untold amounts more of energy to keep increasing Her speed.  She could use the extra energy since She is increasing Her speed and time has almost become nonexistent.  She really is slender, if not thin, and probably could use more mass anyway.  Except She would appear (contract) to be only half Her size.  Yikes.  The Lorentz transformations are puzzling it is true.  It seems to be very important to note that they are like doppler effects that apply to waves, nothing less and nothing more, according to one explanation.  Apparently LTs really occur and they are absolute.  The only problem for the observer is that he cannot know for any certainty whether he is truly at rest from is own point of view.  What pray tell could be the implications of that?

Matter really transforms according to the LTs because matter waves are involved.  It turns out apparently that Lorentz was right in 1904.  This is of the utmost importance. Lorentz was not aware of the wave nature of matter, so he could not explain why such a contraction should occur. But today we know that matter exhibits wave properties. So we should reconsider Lorentz’s theory. Our knowledge about the true nature of matter and forces, such as magnetic fields, is quite uncertain. Today’s unexplainable, actually inadmissible certitude about the non-existence of aether is a serious obstacle to finding the truth.

To say it shortly, the LTs are still relevant but they have a simpler and more important cause: the electron frequency slows down according to g. So let me introduce the “formula of the century”:  f ’ =  g f where the electron frequency slows down according to Lorentz’s factor.

From its own point of view, any material entity seems at rest, and other entities only act, react and seem to undergo the Lorentz transformations in accordance with their apparent speed.

The law of Relativity.  Relativity is all about appearances and illusion.  It is not what is really going on, it is just what any moving observer will record.

On the other hand, it is said that Lorentz’s discovery is much more important than Relativity because it is how matter really acts and reacts. Scientists will finally realize that the LTs are a mechanical law of nature, probably the most important of all. So it should be called Lorentz’s first law.

Lorentz’s first law.  It is not an illusion. It is what is really going on.  It should include the mass gain, which is kinetic energy, and was also discovered by Lorentz.

However, I found this idea intriguing from an Apeiron article by Robert J. Buenker on GP system, that In order to remove some contradictions from relativity theory, it becomes necessary to discard the LT and take account of the fact that the units of all physical quantities vary with the state of motion of the observer.  The laws of physics remain the same in all inertial systems,

Matter axial contraction is caused by the Doppler effect, which transforms its standing waves according to its absolute velocity. Its mechanics work slower and in different times in accordance with the unequal relative wave velocity, and the wave compression causes higher mass, force and energy.

All that notwithstanding, becoming acquainted with the presentist view of time it seems not to be too difficult not to agree that this how time necessarily is. What is it about their arguments that makes the presentist theory of time so forceful?  Perhaps its attraction resides in the way that it illuminates that aspect of human experience we call time. Psychologically, it seems the present is all there is (exists).  All of human thoughts, feelings and actions happens in the present.  Or so it seems.  Joys and hurts we have had become less palpable and seems to recede into oblivion as they fall deeper and deeper into distant memory, while past visions and sounds become only dulled echoes and without much color. The future is more elusive and even less tangible than the distant past.  We often attempt to divine it, desiring to grasp it.  We cannot appreciate it what it is since it does not yet exist, we can only excitedly anticipate what it will be. But the Present knowing it, it is fresh, immediate, lustrous, more exciting in the way that remembering the past never is.

Given the psychological uniqueness of The Present, it is therefore most tempting to pervade, permeate this specialness with essential importance and make this psychological current circumstance a focus of our metaphysics, a description of what we perceive reality to be.

The presentist emphatically does this.  He does not do this just by raising the metaphysical status of The Present occurrences above all other temporal states of concerns.. What the presentist does is to exclude all other temporal states of affairs as nonexistent.

There are arguments about certain difficulties for the theory of presentism. Contrary to appearances, a central feature of our psychology, that is, our conscious experience, embodies a major obstacle to presentism. This obstacle can be surmounted if and only if the presentist is willing to accept some form of mind/body dualism.  And insofar as mind/body dualism is unattractive, so too is presentism.  If interested see the article at Presentism and Consciousness at http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/mckinnon.htm

Lisa, the Fundamental Christian: ’... Did you read recently about the gays, in the wake of Prop 8’s failure, who violently disrupted church services in retaliation? Is that reprehensible to you, or laudable? ...’

One of the problems for religious organizations taking a political position which others believe is strongly detrimental to their interests is that the targets are likely to retaliate in any way they can simply as a matter of self-defense, just as they might against a secular organization.  A religious organization which has promoted state laws or policies which deprive a section of the population of equal rights can’t reasonably then claim it is only practicing religion and should be left alone.  Bringing religion into politics inevitably brings politics into religion.

I have looked it up and I correct myself:

The mass of shenonymous as she runs so fast would increase, not the length of her. I guess the mass increases because she cannot continually go faster and faster and faster without needing an exponentially increasing amount of energy put into her. In my example she was not moving at the speed of light.

As far as length, as she measured the speed of light from her rapid frame of reference her yardstick would need to seem SHORTER to me, so that when she measures the same light beam as i do, its moving just as fast for her as it is to me. These strange changes are called Lorentz transformations

Are you sure of your flashlight experiment Ozark?  What makes you think if Shenonymous were running at the speed of light any distinction of a flashlight being turned on or any additional beam of light would be emitted would be detectable.  It is not even remote, it would not happen since Shenonymous and Her flashlight traveling at that speed is the speed of light and hence all would be traveling at the same speed.  Your experiment is hypothetical so to entertain it, you yourself would be, as you rightly surmised, too slow to detect the light beam known as Shenonymous and Her switched on flashlight, and also any yardstick She might have in Her hand.  You erroneously think that anything traveling at the speed of light could in fact be identifiable separately such as Her extended hand with a yardstick in it.  If, say, She started out with the yardstick extended already, the distinction between it and Her would not exist once they achieved the speed of light.  You would only perceive a streak or beam of light.  Horray for Shenonymous!  Tell us why, Ozark, why something has to give in any case (you stated that but did not elucidate).  While I do not argue that time and distance are not absolutes, but are relative, in the same way truths are relative, I would argue that in your stationary position, nothing that She does will be perceptible to you except Her along with the lighted flashlight as the beam of light.  I would submit that what is an inch to Shenonymous would be 1 inch over the denominator of the number of miles light travels in the time you are watching the beam of light.  BTW She would not actually detect your existence either.  I doubt She would have any consciousness at all.

If there were a God, then if we let God be true and if that makes every man a liar, then if any man says there is a god, then that man is lying even though god may be true in any event.  No man would be able to “know” it as truth.

What is the consequence of stopwatches and yardsticks being made liars with respect to constant light?  Would it be they simply cannot be used to measure time or distance?

We both await the resident physicists who may read these comments and wish to add, correct, or agree with what has been written.

While Rev. Wright might be at large for criticism, using him as a foil for criticism levied at the Christian Right is an ad hominem fallacy among a couple others, in other words, the basis of your argument about Rev. Wright is completely irrelevant.  If you want to criticize Rev. Wright attack him for whatever reason you wish but not to hide legitimate criticism of Fundamentalist Christians.

To open the pedagogical can of Enough Education will take the intellgence of using a didactic can opener.  The fallacy of omission is what you actually present to this forum, and whether or not Timothy Leary is to whom you were referring Lisa, was not clear at all from your earlier post.  It is your limited knowledge of history and fatal mistake to think that the drug guru Leary represented everybody of the 60s.  It is just like your prejudiced crowd to make that error to try to give some semblance of validity to your empty arguments.  It is the fallacy of inclusion.  No one is usurping your rights Lisa the FC.  Not quite sure what you mean by “real” education at any rate as if the classroom is some kind of vacuum and real people don’t attend classes.  Let us hope that you do speak out against intolerance, particularly the intolerance expressed by the Fundamentalist Right Wing Republican Christians.  Fanatical intolerant Islamists are not really the issue here but if you wish to throw them in with all intolerant ones in the world, be my guest.  If those gays disrupted the Mormon Church then bravo for them for being brave enough to protest since the attack against them came from that radical Christian denomination hiding behind their religious cloaks.  As a former Christian myself, I am interested in what you define a “real” Christian as since I have a doubt there really is such a definition.

Shenonymous says: Some have pimped atheism for the sake of power but I have never heard any say “In the Name of Atheism” as has been done by Christians throughout history In the Name of God I kill thee.

If a person, even an unbalanced one, killed in the name of ‘nothing’ that would be odd. Yet that seems to be the test that an atheist measures her kind against. “Since we never killed in the name of ‘nothing’, then we atheists are safe compared to the dangerous religious ones, who kill in the name of their God”

But i think the claim of ‘nothing’ as the only motivation for an atheist is pretty weak. Because atheists are tempted to create ‘something’ to put in place of the ‘nothing’. Something positive, something that provides hope and kindles passion. Something which might be worth dying for. And killing for.

If we looked for that something, we might find it. Or the atheist doesnt have to look at all, opting to do as a Christian might do and say, “But I have not killed anyone, therefore what I believe(or disbelieve) is harmless.”

In that case the lessons of history have nothing to say to us. In that case the possibility of drifting into the same old pitfalls is higher than we suspect. Which is not so bad. It is the usual state of affairs for us all, believers and nonbelievers, east, west, north and south, past and present, and also, unfortunately… the future.

As for my statement about absolute time and distance… the tests and theories of 100 years ago suggest these are not absolutes.

If shenonymous ran by me at nearly the speed of light, and while doing so, she turned on a flashlight, she would measure the speed of that light as traveling ahead of her in a perfectly normal way. she would measure it with yardstick and stopwatch to be travelling away from her at the speed of light.  How is that possible? Cant light go faster since she is so fast? Or slower because i am so slow?

No. Lightspeed is constant.

To keep lightspeed the same, something else has to give. And that something is time and distance, which are not absolutes, but relative. To me, standing still… her time and her yardstick are distorted. What to her appears to be a second would seem to me to be a minute. What to her was an inch would seem to me to be a mile. We would as usual argue about who was giving an inch and who was taking a mile. But we both measure the speed of the same light to be exactly the same.

There is a saying: “Let God be true, even if that makes every man a liar”

which i suppose has a twin in the realm of physics: “Let the speed of light be constant, even if it makes both stopwatch and yardstick into liars.”

This was suggested by experiments and mathematics before Einstein’s work. I hope a physicist here would kindly correct or improve my example.

Lisa, the Fundamental Christian: ’... especially when I’ve never bashed or bombed or acted violently once in my life toward those who label me and others of my ilk as such. ...’

About 70% of fundamentalist Christians, and almost all of their prominent leadership, supported George W. Bush, who did a great deal of bashing and bombing, to the tune of killing about 100,000 innocent bystanders.  There is also the matter of voting for domestic repression through state force of harmless persons like homosexuals and drug users.  You, yourself, may have opposed all of these things, but as a group, fundamentalist Christians are not innocent.  On the contrary, they are accomplices with Bush, Cheney and so forth in the furthering of war, imperialism and other massive crimes.

Had it not been for their corrosive assault on society, the Christian Right would not have had such vitriolic reaction to their narrow view of existence.  The question of “how much education is [enough]?” is naive to put it mildly.  Most intelligent people say one never stops learning.  Formal education is available in this country until one drops dead.  As a matter of fact I knew at least three such geriatric individuals who died while being students at the university where I taught.  They were among the best of students and had the most engaging minds in class.  The response to education that CRs take is the frightening one.  Funny how the ignorant always complain about the educated.  Closed minds is what I call the basis for such tripe as the “Army of God” manuals and the 65 ways on how to destroy abortion clinics and recipes for making homemade bombs to kill people and destroy property. That is sooooo RW Christian it makes me sick and should disgust any human that is awake to the horror that can be festered in the human mind then acted out in society.  Get a grip.  The problem is the aggravating factor of the set of beliefs that one’s own ideology represents the only form of truth and negative beliefs about individuals who are not members of one’s own group is the kind of intolerant and bigoted thinking that gave rise to Christian fundamentalism.  The reality is that in this country of mixed races, ethnic groups, and sexual preferences, an aggregate plenitude of attitudes exist.  White washing prejudicial values is a figment since the demographics of this country shows minorities are gaining and will actually become the majority within a few decades.  White biases will be a thing of the past and all we are hearing now are echoes of irrational phobias that will die out as homogeneity or total mixture of races takes place.  A kind of social entropy, if you will.  My new T-says Let’s hear it for gray people!

Lisa, the FC is like so many who accuses without giving any actual examples.  The mouth goeth before real.  For instance, which great thinkers taught “truth is relevant?”  Precisely what “new philosophy” could she be talking about?  It is one thing to bandy slogans and another to properly criticize.  Maybe some of us already know but she obviously doesn’t think so as she fallaciously lumps everybody in one big criticism.  Perhaps she is ignorant of those great thinkers herself and hides that ignorance in a common device called hearsay.

Problem is Lisa, we on our lofty perches do know a lot about the likes of you and Christian fundamentalism and the odor is almost overwhelming.  I say almost for we always have the hope things can get better with the invention of an aerosol air freshener of the mind.  Oh, shucks, I think there already is such a canned product called “Enough Education.”

Personally I need humor as a break.  It breathes fresh air into my thinking.

If we can conceive of terraforming entire planets why not uniforming the entire cosmos.

“We are Homo Sapiens. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”

I thank you Sodium that you have explained further what we have been playing with for a few days here, Time, Light, Space, and the Universe.  What a lofty set of topics!  I’m glad you did not unplug your computer and that we have the benefit of your explication.  I have read optipessi mist’s comment on the latest theory as well.  I’ve copied as much of our forum as I was able before TD dissolves it into oblivion.  I want to reread all of our posts. 

Yes I think I noted that while the blind do not see a lighted universe they could in fact get vitamin D from the sun, so they are still affected by a light adorned universe.  More interesting is Stephen Smoliar’s intrigue.  Can there be a universe without electromagnetic radiation?  Imagine a lightless universe next door to ours, I doubt it could be connected in anyway since light from ours would seep in, or so it would seem.  There are shadows of doubts being chased here.  But wait a minute optipessi mist,  even though it might be off the beaten path, please explain your metaphor about Memory and Truth.  Oh, pardon, I noticed a typing mistake when I meant to say earlier “the destiny of dense water.”

Hello Ozark…so nice you and your piety have joined us.  As I’ve said before, I like your backwards then-to-forward approach.  So I will give a micro history of the study of light and its speed.

Actually experiments with light began longer than 100 years ago.  Empedocles had an idea, then Harry Stotle did too, course he had ideas about everything.  He was quite wrong about light though.  One ancient theory thought vision was light emitted form the eye.  Then Heron of Alexandria thought that the speed of light must be infinite because distant objects such as stars appear instantaneously when one opens one’s closed eyes.

The two famous Islamic philosphers also had a theory that light had a finite speed.  I guess they were right: 299,792,458 metres per second (1,0