Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Changes in spatial perception might also explain some mental visions, like truly massive scale structures that are hard to imagine when sober, but those incidents aren't as profound on acid in my experience, and you don't see them visually. They're more high-definition thoughts.
My main thing is with time; in the absence of other people / external factors forcing me to be synchronized, my subjective sense of time is "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff". That is, I might subjectively experience a few minutes as if it is a very long time (like the subconscious dimension in Inception) or conversely I might be doing a task and think only a minute passed and it was an hour.
Sometimes when I close my eyes I experience a sense being an ant in a tiny room versus being the size of Galactus in a solar system sized room, and then warping back and forth like looking backwards through a telescope. That is, the relative scaled distances remain the same but the subjective sense of absolute scale starts to oscillate.
I have amazing visualization skills for reasoning about spaces and machines that I'm not inside of, it's like a CAD program in my mind, but I'm fundamentally unable to track my own location in space. If I walk through a building and take two quarter turns, my ability to reason about where I came from and what's what direction folds over itself in on itself like the collapse of that 4D hypercube house in the Heinlein short story.
The connection to tracking beats was already apparent to me from experience: although I enjoy music, I subjectively experience lengthening and shortening in the time signature even on the scale of between beats in an 8 count. I actually had not understood that music had a beat until I went to a Zumba class for a few weeks and said, "OK I have just one question: how does everyone know WHEN to move?" I had to have someone tap my shoulder on every beat, and the multi-sensory experience like that allowed me to understand what the beat in music was and it was like not knowing there was another sense. (Prior to that I had assumed "the beat" meant "every percussion no matter how rapid" and couldn't figure out how people picked certain ones.
Interestingly, through years of various dance practice since then, I have now got to the point where I can keep a beat, most of the time. But, I still don't "hear" the beat. Instead, I experience it as like that half-breath-taking jolt of acceleration you get stepping onto a moving walkway or if you can imagine grabbing a door on an open train. When I catch the beat I feel it that way, and if I get off beat while dancing and need to catch the 1 or 5 I have to stop for a second with an imaginary hand out to catch that train car and be pulled along again.
While learning dance I felt like there was a varying random time delay between my different senses of hearing the music, seeing people move, moving myself, and my own kinestetic sense that I had moved (I have trouble with sensory fusion in general). It was frustrating to the point of literal tears because I wanted to do it but I couldn't get the circuits in my brain "forward the packets through the network" with a non-random latency. However over time it improved & I think it probably improved my other perceptual issues.
I have long had a feeling like this, like being tiny by simultaneously huge, but never have heard of anyone else who had experienced it, probably for lack of a good description of the phenomenon. Great description.
This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not conceptualize of change occurring within a stratum like time. Were there any reasons we would track the number of sunsets before the advent of agriculture?
I would really like to see some research on why time behaves so strangely on psychedelics. Our everyday consciousness is mostly stable and steady so it's quite natural to think of it as dependent on time, as if there is a constant metronome quietly ticking away in the background. Most people assume that 2018 will feel mostly the same and take about as long as 2017. Only when things start slowing down and we peer behind the curtains of our egos do we get the sense that things are much weirder than we'd like to think.
Personally, I think the illusion of time must involve a many different brain processes. Memory is certainly one of the keys, but I wonder if the overall state of connectivity or speed or processing of the brain doesn't have an effect. The ego also seems implicated somehow, as we experience time differently in states of flow and moments of awe and wonder.
Not the one who downvoted you btw. I did read somewhere that Buddhism doesn't have the concept of ego, which genuinely confuses me as there seems to be a very real process occurring in our brains that labels and categorizes information, which introduces distortion and the "ignorance" that leads to delusion and suffering (in the Buddhist view).
What exists itself is the truth. Who can see it as it is? No one can speak of something they haven't seen as it is.
Every living thing suffers.
I understand, thanks for taking the time to reply in the first place. I apologize if I was curt, but I found your posts here hard to understand. Reading your past comments helped elucidate what you mean.
I'm going to sleep now and I'm finding HN frustrating (I couldn't reply to you when I first saw your post) -- how can I contact you? I'm curious how you came to know what you know and if you had a teacher (your past comments hint that you did). I would like to find a good teacher, but I've been dismayed by my contacts with spiritual people and truth seekers. They are nice people, but they all seemed delusional and I had a bad gut reaction to them. You also seem delusional to some extent: you engage in pedantry and over-rationalization (I also do the latter so I recognize it easily). I do find certain delusions to be useful and engage in them consciously for my and others' benefit. Anyway, I want a teacher because my search has been haphazard and I basically stumbled onto my current elevated awareness (in comparison to my previous self) by sheer luck.
Thanks for posting on HN, even if people don't always want to hear you!
As for delusion when you say that to someone please provide something they can confirm.
What exist itself is the truth.
The call for a try to define ego as a precise as possible ("as a mathematician") and in the sibling post from user blueprint probably shall make you attemt just this, but fail at it. I think the "ego" dies when you see what you are looking for in what it is. Not in words not in labels not in labels. Just become aware that your model-maker is trying to model the world that really is there. You are what you are beyond the modeling process.
What exist itself is the truth
No one can speak of something they haven't seen as it is.
One fun thing to consider: When there are no models no labels no boundaries no judgements, where does something start and where does it end? Does that even make sense? Objectively the real world is just what it is, one. No things at all. These are just models. The underlying world is still what it is. One.
> Objectively the real world is just what it is, one. No things at all. These are just models. The underlying world is still what it is. One.
What is the answer of 1+1?
Math.
Is it access to a real realm of reality or just a bunch of tools to help us make it in the world?
Yea thats a good question. Looks like a question where my answer is probably "both".
By the way, everyone is in reality. So how can you say "access" to a real "realm" of reality?
When you decide you have something to you want to know, ask me again.
> Why do you think deteriorated forms of Buddhism nowadays have attached themselves to the term ego?
Is it deterioration or just accepting new ideas? I don't think that 2000-year-old Buddhism had all the answers, or would even be useful to a Westerner (I do feel that we are mostly exposed to "deteriorated" forms of Buddhism, but maybe it's for the better).
Buddha while alive only gave answers to the level of the questions people at that time were able to bring to him.
No one from modern times asked Buddha about gravity, or electromagnetism, or calculus, or about Bernoulli's principle, nor is he alive in modern times to inform us of what we ourselves can't recognize right in front of ourselves.
However, if, hypothetically, someone were to bring questions about black holes or dark matter to Gautama Buddha, then I feel very confident based on my understanding of philosophy that his reply would be to the effect or meaning of "if you can tell me or point out exactly what X from your question is, concretely, then I will be able to tell you whether it exists or not in reality, by placing that matter upon the formula that operates the world, and checking the result".
> would even be useful to a Westerner (I do feel that we are mostly exposed to "deteriorated" forms of Buddhism, but maybe it's for the better)
What is left is not helpful to us ordinary people for discerning or learning Buddha's teaching. We lost his truth through the process of it being handed down. His teaching is not meditation, four noble truths, eightfold path, nor precepts. It's not that you go to sleep, abandon yourself, stop suffering, and die forever. He taught people what exists, and how it exists, because he knew that was the way to enlighten people. Nevertheless he didn't explain about the steps to achieving enlightenment. First, falsehood must disappear (you must be free of lies). That means you have to open your eyes to the truth. Secondly, you have to be able to see 'what is'. You have to know where right and wrong exist: facts. Third, you need conscience and courage. You wouldn't go to people and teach them through terrible treatment without conscience and courage. Fourth, there must be endless love in yourself to go teach people 'what is' repeatedly. Through the process, you burn up the karma in your consciousness. Anyone who teaches enlightenment can be achieved without agony and love is telling a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histo...
Your fallacy is.....
The reason that fallacies exist is because there is underlying structure to arguments. For some arguments, its possible for every statement within the argument to be true, but for the conclusion to be false. The argument which you gave for skepticism toward the concept of ego is one such argument that exhibits structure level weakness. The fallacy label is argument from authority. Often this argument form is used despite it being fallacious, because authorities tend to be authorities for a reason. So using conclusions they derived, despite not sharing the logical backing which led them to their conclusion, can end up providing correct answers. In this case though, in addition to the flaws in argument form, some of the premises the argument is built upon are also untrue. Experts in the past aren't necessarily authorities on their subject matter thousands of years in the future and what someone teaches about doesn't reflect the full sum of their knowledge on a topic.
Seeing this lack of integrity in structure, I set out to provide counterexample which demonstrated the lack of integrity in the argument structure. In that sense, as inputs to the fallacious argument structure, both ego and the terms I gave are alike.
Both the terms I gave and the term ego were inputs to the argument structure, they can be categorized as inputs used in such a way, and they share that category with each other.
Edit. But I guess you were talking about our perception of time.
But you are right, if there was a outside observer the same stands, just for that observers observer -- hypothetically.
> In a world where physics depends upon time, is it even possible for time to not be steady?
I think so. Physics is a construct that we have to describe how our universe works.
Lets think about things in "ticks" where a "tick" is just one particle or I should say interaction happening in our universe. Or better think of our universe as a big state machine. Between each new state there are many ticks arranging the matter and getting ready for the next observed state. And by observed state I mean observed by the universe -- or realized. Now we have two time domains to think about. One, tick time. How long is a tick? Would it matter if some ticks took "longer" than others. Then you have the notion of time outside of a tick, that gives ticks its "tick time" or what makes some ticks "longer" than others. If this is anywhere near the case then time outside of the umbrella of each realized universe state does not matter.
I may not be doing a good job of getting the notion out of my head. But try to think of it if you were in a video game. Lets take it back to maybe the "Max Payne" days given it is a game that has some dealings with time. If you were playing the game on a laptop and closed the lid and the computer suspended would Max be able to detect or care even that the time between rendering one frame the other went from something like 60FPS (well back then 12FPS) to 2 hours our observed time to render the next frame? We would be the hypothetical observer. Max would not have a clue.
Anyways thinking about how time works is always fun. About all we can do is learn how time works from our observable position.
I can of course imagine a scenario where different entities, even in the same universe, experience the passage of time differently. For instance, a positronic robot whose consciousness is only switched on for one minute of every hour. To this being, events could appear to happen willy-nilly, without causation, due to activity between ticks, but the robot would have no way of knowing why the world works like this without talking to another being without the limitations who has been making observations in "real time". So perhaps something like this is happening to us and could explain some weird quantum phenomena, but I'm having trouble thinking of any way we could test it.
Yes, the problem of how to test such things. That is why it is so fun to think about it.
For all we know between the seconds a trillion trillion tiny life forms that resemble ants slip out between the cracks of space time and take a untold amount of time (to their reference) to nudge each particle just so according to a small tattoo on their forearms. When they are all done they slip away just as mysteriously as they came. And each time they come back to arrange our universe it is done so by ancestors of many generations removed of the last workers who came to enforce our its will on our universe.
This also brings me back to Lawrence Krauss? with the notion of there is not really nothing in nothing and we can't truly ever have a "vacuum" void of all. I think it was in his book Something out of Nothing.
And, somewhere in our brain, we probably have just such a periodic event generator, although it's probably a bit flawed in the implementation like most things generated by evolution typically are, but it does the job well enough for us to arrive at a sense of time that very roughly agrees with more rigorously-derived measurement devices.
Ultimately time is a shorthand for cause and effect, and the fact that causes propagate to their effects at roughly the same speed (relative to a reference cause and effect) everywhere we measure them (relativistic effects notwithstanding). If you have evidence this is not the case, I would love to see it, because it implies some new physics. You would win a Nobel prize for this, easily, if you could prove it.
"Oh, Kelowna is about 5 hours away."
Is this expression common anywhere else?
I would do the same referencing smaller cites or states/locations close by. 6 hours from the gulf or 2 hours from this college.
Usually people don't care about actual distance. It's not useful for much, unless you're drawing a map. Also, note how new transport options change the perception of the world. 200 years ago, my ancestor would probably not bother with a casual visit to a town 70+ km away. These days, I don't think much of running errands over that distance - it's a 1.5h bus ride away, so I can go there in the morning, do stuff, and come back before dinner (and thanks to the current tech, I can also clock in some work time during commute).
This might have been the consequence of switching from imperial measurements to metric in the 70s.
There are also congested areas in Col/Cle/Cin where it might take 20min to go three miles so distance is also time there.
I'm sure it has happened occasionally, but I wouldn't know how to process the information. Especially since equal distances can take different times depending on speed limits, etc
Btw, there's this joke about a soldier asking a sergeant "what is timespace", and the sergeant answers "get a shovel and dig from here till sunset".
Try this experiment and see how you fare. When you're in the shower, imagine that the feeling of the water (preferably cold), is like being in the middle of a fire. Imagine being bathed in the flames. Try to associate "wet" with smoke, dancing flames, no pain in any way. It's surprisingly hard but possible. It almost puts me in a meditative state when I try this unintuitive association excercise.
Anyhow, there are learned separations between observations and qualia. I think the one between time and space is such -- learned, not so much due to actual specialization in the brain's anatomy.
[0]: https://gizmodo.com/5874433/the-pill-that-could-cure-depress... (I once read about a differently-named drug which increases hippocampus size and treats depression but I'm unable to find it now)
I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned.
Yeah, I suspect these are all deeply related. Fascinating.
> I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned.
Sounds like something that could bankrupt you stateside. If you want to get it done cheaply and by qualified people, there's always Eastern Europe :)
You may also want to try remote controlled toys - cars, planes, drones. Controlling them well requires that you be able to transform your position into the vehicle. Beginners tend to turn the wrong way when the vehicle is coming toward them.
Now that I think of it, don't walk around at first. Just face away from a door, look around, then shut your eyes and try to turn around and reach for the doorknob. If by chance you make a real experiment of this or find a way to get better at it, please write about it!
For instance in my case I'm actually better at steering an RC car or similar than I am at figuring out which way I should turn myself. To the point that sometimes when I'm lost, trying to relate a map on the wall to hallways in a building, my best strategy is to step outside myself and say, "OK if there were a mouse in a maze which way would the mouse have to turn here?" Often, the answer I get from doing that is different from what my brain tells me I myself should do; always, it is my first-person reasoning which has it wrong and the 3rd-person reasoning which is right.
Coordination of movement in space (for example something like grasping an object) is more dependent on parietal cortex & the dorsal visual stream (the so-called "where" pathway), and the cerebellum.
"Visuospatial skill", as typified by tasks like mental object rotation, is more ascribable to temporal cortex & the ventral visual stream (the so-called "what" pathway, responsible for object recognition). However, it often requires both ventral and dorsal visual cortex.
Navigation is hippocampus-dependent. However, the hippocampus is not a "GPS". I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is a hub for integrating and associating disparate information from across the brain in order to form representations of and the relationships between behaviorally-relevant states. This explains why the hippocampus is also involved in "navigating" abstract state spaces, for example turn-based game states [0] or auditory frequency [1], when they're behaviorally relevant. It gets analogized as a GPS because 1) most of the research involves spatial tasks, so space is the behaviorally-relevant dimension, 2) a certain Nobel Prize winner does not feel the need to update his theory, and 3) "Hippocampus = GPS" is too sexy and intuitive of an analogy, especially for the lay press.
The idea of the hippocampus as an "associative engine" also helps unify its seemingly disparate roles in "navigation" and memory when you consider that a memory is just information from disparate brain areas that's been associated via temporal correlation because of its behavioral relevance. It also explains why researchers observe "place cells" and "time cells" and "head direction cels" and "eye position cells": because these variables are behaviorally relevant (i.e. important for maximizing reward) in the task the animal is performing.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523
Time, on the other hand, is a complete mystery to me - I can not tell if a few minutes have passed or hours. I am totally dependent on my clock and calendar to be a functional adult. Similarly, I have no sense of rhythm, beats etc. Nada, zilch, zero.
This even affects their concept of time, whose flow from past to future is described in terms of an absolute geographical orientation frame. Rather than me repeat it here, if you're interested, read the abstract of [1].
[1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610386621...
Both are interesting ways of framing space and the senses, but I'm not sure what you mean by "only". To reduce space to "only noise", in my understanding of your statement, is to imply that it is something extraneous, something to be ignored, or at least given less significance, instead of it being actual, existent, a fundamental aspect of reality that we can describe in useful ways. Either way is interesting imo.
I find percussions to be highly abstract and mathematical, also probably related to our sense of balance