Is Consciousness the True Measure of Time?

[petm1]

My current (pun intended) understanding is that there is really no such thing as the "present". I see it only as an illusion created by the cumulative experiences, stored in our memory cells, in each point of time.

I see the present as the processes of our conscious, cut into one second durations.

>> Where is the "point of time" if not the present?

> I don't really believe there is...

Sorry, I guess I didn't really answer your question. My answer is: in every point of my (past, current and future) lifetime.

You are your own "point of time" with your past as a reference to help you navigate in the present, I still wonder about the future.

 

[apeiron]

You need to be prepared to think about consciousness in more complex ways.

Every moment of awareness involves both fringe and focus, the general and the particular, the event and the context.

So if we are talking about temporal flow, William James described the perch and flight of consciousness very nicely.

You have a running generalised impression of what has been and what will be. A backdrop modelling involving working memories and expectations. Then this flow can get pinched up, focused around, fleeting "perches". There are little aha moments when something significant become the higher contrast departure points for fresh angles into what has just happened, what is more likely to be happening next.

And there is a neural rate for this. It takes about a third to half a second to reorientate the brain from one state of focus to another.

So in terms of "points" in a flow, about a third of a second after some unexpected occurence, or some significant event, you will be sharply aware of the fact, and also re-oriented, expectation set updated, as to what will come next.

Sometimes this lag is noticeable. Take the cocktail party effect - someone across the room saying your name or something else of personal signficance. Suddenly it is as if you were listening to that distant conversation as it was happening. You picked up the event "immediately".

Yet also you know that you are kind of mentally back-tracking as this instantly perceived event swam into true oriented awareness - you both heard the words and also have a train of thought, a fresh avenue of expectation, as a result of the words.

So the present moment is a fluid construct. Sometimes (indeed mostly) awareness is more of a smooth unbroken flow. We anticipate accurately and move seamlessly along. Other times, surprises happen and the moment gets bunched up into something distinct. There is a high contrast that creates a sharp break, a sharp feeling of before/now/after - an aha, a peak in the flow to mark a different direction starting.

It is very tempting to think of consciousness as a succession of film frames, or a sequence of computational states. So the brain gets input at time t=0 and then generates conscious output at t=300ms or whatever. But this gets the processing logic back to front.

Instead, the brain goes from output to input! At t= -300ms, it is anticipating what is about to happen. It has already generated a conscious state, a generalised mental image. It is primed. What do you think mental images are but expectations that are not being matched to actual sensory data?

Then at t=0, the anticipated input arrives (and so can be ignored). Or it contains surprises, and mismatch activity begins.

By t=300ms, mismatches are generally resolved. The brain is saying well that is what just happened, and here is what I now think about it, in terms of what I can expect next.

Where was the present in all this? Well we expected one kind of present at -300ms, the physical present happened at 0ms, and by +300ms we will have a mopped up mental state in which we are either aware things went unsurprisingly, or someone surprised us by mentioning our name in a distant conversation.

This happened just a moment ago, and we felt like we both heard it as it happened, but had to somehow turn towards it to be really sure that it happened.

All this is regular psychology or psychophysics 101. No mystery.

 

[dimensionless]

As a observer everything that I sense is the past, from the impulses sent within my body to the photons I see, do you think that makes the information processor I call my consciousness the present?

Where is the present?

I'd say that there is no present, but the effect is barely noticeable.

 

[drizzle]

[personally] I think there is no present here, it’s only past-now moments not more than 70 years [approximately] per person, the real present will be in the afterlife where the never lasting time...yah, supernatural or whatever you wana call it!

 

[ConradDJ]

Where was the present in all this? Well we expected one kind of present at -300ms, the physical present happened at 0ms, and by +300ms we will have a mopped up mental state in which we are either aware things went unsurprisingly, or someone surprised us by mentioning our name in a distant conversation.

All this is regular psychology or psychophysics 101. No mystery.

Apeiron - "Regular psychology?" Ok, but I doubt it happens very often that so much gets explained so clearly in a few sentences. Thanks for the mini-lecture! This is another post of yours I have to copy into my notes for future reference.

You mention the "physical present" as the "point in time" t=0. This is certainly how "the present" shows up in standard physics -- consider pe3's comment:

I don't really believe there is such thing as a "present", in the meaning that there would be a moment in time that would have such a universal meaning. I understand the special relativity so that all the points in the time are equal, pretty much like all the points in space are equal even though I am sitting here by my desk. (There's no universal "here" neither.)

This is really just as true in Newtonian physics -- all "points in time" are the same so far as physics is concerned. In Newtonian physics you can think of the entire universe as existing "right now" in this present moment -- in Special Relativity the "now" becomes local, not global. But in either case we're imagining the universe from a standpoint "outside" of space and time.

This is the point of view from which it makes sense to parse what happens in consciousness over a duration of +/- 300ms.

From this standpoint, it makes sense to say that "the" present moment doesn't really exist, in any important sense. But from any standpoint IN the world, it makes much more sense to see the present as something ongoing, rather than as a "point in time". Per Sorry! --

I think the present is ever constant. You can't give it a special point on a timeline but it is always with us in our current position in space.

What is the present isn't what goes from the future to the past it just IS.

This is a description of the physical present moment "from inside" -- corresponding to the present of "real time" conscious experience. The whole process you describe of expectation, sensation, discovery, looking back for confirmation, all belongs together in our experience of the ongoing "now", which has no duration. It's always only this moment -- but a continuing moment in which things happen, not a static "point" on the timeline.

I think both ways of thinking about time, from outside and from inside, are important -- whether we're describing physics or the psyche. But as I noted above, we're much more used to imagining the world "from outside" than from the standpoint of real-time experience.

 

[pe3]

Thanks Apeiron, really clear and interesting information indeed.

ConradDJ, yes I have been mostly thinking about physics (closer to my background) - but have been interested how we can feel the "present" so strongly even if does not exist.

 

[ConradDJ]

ConradDJ, yes I have been mostly thinking about physics (closer to my background) - but have been interested how we can feel the "present" so strongly even if does not exist.

Well, I agree there's no single "now" for the entire universe at once... but I don't think Special Relativity gives any reason to believe that my "now" (as I write this) doesn't physically exist -- or your "now" (as you read it), even though these two are clearly not the same present moment.

From any point of view in the universe, there's a clear separation between the factual past and the possible future -- even in Relativity. There's no reason to think that our experience of things happening in this moment -- possibilities becoming facts -- is something that only happens "in our heads".

I think that the significance of spacetime structure in Relativity is that the local ongoing "now" of each entity is physically interconnected with those of others in a complex web, along their respective light-cones, rather than on a single simultaneous hyperplane.

You might look at this thread if you haven't already seen it --

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=309445"

So it seems to me we experience the present so strongly -- in fact that's all anyone ever experiences -- because that's what does exist, physically: a web of real-time interaction-events.

We're more used to a picture of the universe "from outside" -- as a vast object extended through all space that's been in existence for billions of years. I don't think that picture is wrong. But I think there's also more to be learned about physics by exploring the structure we see "from inside", in real time. These are complementary rather than contradictory views of the world.

Hope that's of some interest, or at least somewhat intelligible.

-- Conrad

 

[SDetection]

I want to ask a question about our concept of time:
Does time go faster for a system that consumes more energy relative to another system that consumes less energy?.
I mean, for example:
When we are mentally active, time seems to go faster than when we are doing nothing. Also when we sleep, time stops for our conscious mind, and when we wake up, we find ourselves suddenly in the future. Can this be considered time travel?.
The same thing seems to apply to chemical reactions.