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August 6 - November 26, 2023
Is science unable to grasp a fundamental quality of time that the human mind embraces as readily as the lungs take in air, or does the human mind impose on time a quality of its own making, one that is artificial and that hence does not show up in the laws of physics? If you were to ask me this question during the working day, I’d side with the latter perspective, but by nightfall, when critical thought eases into the ordinary routines of life, it’s hard to maintain full resistance to the former viewpoint.25
One of the first studies to ask this question revealed that when the lights were 8, 16, and 32 inches apart (always flashed 8 seconds apart), the mean time estimates between the flashes was 6.5, 7.15, and 8.05 seconds, respectively.12 So the answer is yes, space (the distance between the lights) does influence our perception of time. This so-called kappa effect has been demonstrated many times and in many ways.
Increasing the time delay between two flashes that are always the same distance from each other causes people to progressively increase their estimates of the spatial distance between them (this illusion is called the tau effect).
Special relativity imposes a trade-off between space and time: traveling at very high speeds through space brings time to a crawl, while standing still is the “quickest” way to travel along the time axis.
One of the most astounding consequences of special relativity is that two simultaneous events from my perspective are not simultaneous from the perspective of someone in motion relative to me—that is, simultaneity is relative.
This illusion is a consequence of the fact that from the day you were born, your visual system has been sampling the statistics of the world: light generally comes from above, so a bump on the wall will cast a shadow on its lower half, whereas a hole will produce a shadow along its upper lip. Just as your brain uses prior information about sources of light to infer three-dimensional shape, your brain uses its past experiences to make inferences about time and space. We all have a vast database of observations about objects and animals moving through space and time—generally at a fairly
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Semantic memory refers to knowledge, such as the name of the park, and that the park is located in the city of Providence, which in turn is located in Rhode Island. Semantic memory also encompasses knowledge of the even more fundamental facts needed to make sense of this story, such as that water can turn into ice, and that icy water is cold. Episodic memory refers to my ability to mentally re-experience the episode, see the ice in my mind’s eye, invoke the emotional content of being cold, and recall that the shallow water made it fairly easy to pull myself back onto the edge.
Temporal discounting refers to the fact that the subjective value of something decreases with time.
Receiving $1,000 today is in some very real sense more “valuable” than receiving the same amount a year from now. There is a chance that I will not be alive a year from now, so receiving $1,000 a year from now may be of zero value to me.
Delaying gratification and making optimal intertemporal decisions is a process that benefits immensely from practice, education, deliberation, and simply stopping to think about the future.
But as emphasized in Eastern philosophies, traveling to the past or future can preclude us from embracing the here and now as a primary source of happiness and joy.33
“The Pirahã simply make the immediate their focus of concentration, and thereby, at a single stroke, they eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.”
at best what we experience is correlated with the external physical world. The colors we see, for example, are simply an interpretation of the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, as arbitrary as the link between the letters in the alphabet and the sounds we have assigned them. At worst, we see a fiction imposed upon the mind from within: from the visions of someone suffering from schizophrenia, to drug-induced hallucinations, to the dreams we experience every night. And there is so much we don’t see: the bacteria living on our skin, the invisible galaxies in the sky, the muon particles
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we perceive waves crashing and birds diving into the water because time is actually flowing—these events are unfolding in a universe in which only the present is real.
According to one estimate, between saccades and blinks, a full hour of visual information is lost throughout the course of a day, without any perceived blanks in our visual stream of consciousness.2
With practice, people can detect delays of around 20 ms between the onset of two tones of different frequencies.
The reason we do not consciously register the delay between visual and auditory signals is that the unconscious brain does its best to deliver an integrated interpretation of events. The time span during which the brain integrates visual and auditory information into a single unified percept is called, appropriately enough, the temporal window of integration.
But the window is asymmetric—that is, if the auditory signal precedes the visual signal by 50 milliseconds, subjects may notice something is awry, but not if the auditory follows the visual signal by 50 milliseconds.
by consistently exposing people to artificially long visual-auditory delays, it is possible to shift or expand people’s temporal window of integration—thus, subjective simultaneity is relative.
example of this backward editing in time comes from the so-called cutaneous rabbit illusion. Imagine someone taps your forearm twice near your wrist, and then in rapid succession, taps two times again near your elbow. What people often report to have happened is not what actually happened. The perception is not of two taps near the wrist and then two more near the elbow, but rather of four taps hopping along your arm: starting from the wrist to the elbow with two points in between.7 If someone taps you twice on the wrist, and leaves it at that, you’d correctly report feeling two taps on the
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unconscious brain is continuously processing the input stream, but waits for critical junctures before sending a polished narrative into consciousness.8
French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene: “Not only do we consciously perceive only a very small proportion of the sensory signals that bombard us, but when we do, it is with a time lag of at least one-third of a second. . . . the information that we attribute to the conscious ‘present’ is outdated by at least one-third of a second.
The duration of this blind period may even exceed half a second when the input is so faint that it calls for a slow accumulation of evidence before crossing the threshold for conscious perception.”11
The brain cuts, pauses, and pastes the reel of reality before feeding the mind a convenient narrative of the events unfolding in the world around us. Yet unless we stop to think about it, we are left with the impression that our conscious experiences reflect an instantaneous play-by-play account of reality.
quote Saint Augustine again: “I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
free will “is merely a feeling that occurs to a person. It is to action as the experience of pain is to the bodily changes that result from painful stimulation.”
We are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-abused term.”21
Patrick Haggard, it is becoming increasingly accepted that “although we may experience that our conscious decisions and thoughts cause our actions, these experiences are in fact based on readouts of brain activity in a network of brain areas that control voluntary action.”24 What we consciously perceive as free will is presumably preceded by unconscious neural computations that are responsible for making decisions.
Indeed, it has been argued that if this were the case, then consciousness would be useless, “the proverbial backseat driver, a useless observer of actions that forever lie beyond its control.”
But even if consciousness, along with the feeling of free will, is an after-the-fact mental creation, it doesn’t follow that consciousness doesn’t play a role in decision making!
perhaps it is the feeling of free will that provides the conviction that we are in control of our destiny, and thus the impetus to take charge and make the long-term, future-oriented, actions necessary for survival.
“If we are just machines living out a future that has already been set, then Adolph Hitler had no choice to do other than what he did. . . .
cryptodualism—
free will is the conscious feeling associated with the neural processes underlying our decisions, decisions that we are fully responsible for because each and everyone of us is the sum of our unconscious and conscious selves.
If one were to unwisely attempt to summarize the function of the brain in three words, those words might be anticipate the future.
Telling time is a skill we share with all animals, but what makes Homo sapiens unique is the ability to transcend nature’s capricious ways by peering into the future and shaping it to meet our needs. But mental time travel is a gift and a curse. In peering into the future our ancestors must have foreseen more than they were prepared to cope with: their own inevitable death. This disturbing vision perhaps led them even farther into the future, and to the invention of extreme mental time travel: they envisioned an afterlife.
Mehrdad Jazayeri,
