80 milliseconds

An entire life in 80 milliseconds.

Did you know a batter hits a ball before being consciously aware that it was even thrown? Is this flow? Does the world slow down for the batter? Does he zone out, not like an ADHD moment, the kind I go to when i day dream, (inattentive type,) but maybe like a zen monk? Is there a telepathic link established? Not like Spock and a mind meld, but- there are 'mirror' neurons, and our brains connect to others in pretty fascinating ways.

There is overwhelming evidence that people don't exist in real time. Consciousness lag real time anywhere from 80 milliseconds to three seconds. Maybe ten, by some estimates. Ten seconds is an eternity! 3 seconds is huge! Looking at your cell phone while driving, your eyes off the road for even a 1.5 seconds, is enough to look up and find yourself in a car accident. At 65 mph, looking away from the road for three seconds could kill you.

Every heard those stories where people in a car accident said they saw everything in slow motion? Is that because the brain filters that sort out 90 percent of the information drop the filters because, 'well, we're about to die, i don't need to sort shit anymore! I am out of here...' Lots of folks in crisis have reported a qualitative change in sense of time flow. Sports people talk about the zone, where everything just seems right, not quite timeless, but... Different. David Eagleman suggests, based on research, that the flow in time is not changing, just our subjective experience. Ingenious thing, putting people on roller coaster with special clock that showed change at a particular frequency. (He cited some ethical things about putting people in real crisis events. Ba humbug. What happened to the good old days where the scientist had to pull down on a level to connect the power. Buttons are so overrated!) Anyway, he states: “Although they consistently reported that the ride took about a third longer than it really did, this must have been a trick of memory; their hyperacuity was a mirage.”

Well, we do know memory is faulty. There is evidence for an interpreter module in the brain that invents, or confabulates a story so that we have a plausible explanation for doing something; the stories we tell ourselves are consistent with our paradigms, histories, and activities. And so, if the fMRI studies are right, we have a conscious experiences of making decisions after having already made the decision in the past, then even that conscious experience might be an illusion of having made a decision. If your in a dark room telling ghost stories and you hear a bump in the night, well, you were telling ghost stories!

Where am I going with this? Are you even still with me? Believe me, most people hear that they aren't consciously making decisions and tune out because it just doesn't fit with our everyday experience of reality. We believe we have choice.

Physicist: ‘reality requires an observer.’ There are arguments that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a conscious observer. Neuroscientist: ‘consciousness lags real-time.’ Back to the physicist, and the double slit experiment. Specifically, the Wheeler 's 'delayed choice' experiment, reveals that even when examining photons ejected from a source a billion light years in the past, when put through the 'test' appears that we, the observer, affected the past. The decision of whether or not we experience that as a particle or a wave was either retroactively determined, or... well, We don't have an 'or' yet. 

Or do we? Physicist want to get rid of the observer. The observer is messing up their experiments. They can  not do an experiment without interjecting some form of an observer, which, really argues against the scientific method, because reality should stand up on its own, consistently, regardless of whether or not it is appreciated in any qualitative way. It doesn't have to be 'conscious' observe, but there has to be something to collapse the wave front, or there is nothing. So what came first, the something that made nothing into something, or the nothing that made the something that needs something to make the nothing something? (Breathe...) Neural scientist would like to get rid of consciousness. It's messing with their world view. The world is material, and we don't need consciousness to explain biology. It's irritatingly in the way. And people refuse to give up their idea of self as being meaningful, even though we neural scientist know beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no self! (Want a piss off a neural scientist? Ask him about free will. Walk away, get some coffee, come back in a day or two, and he will still be rambling on about how it's an illusion. Zombie freaks!)

Unless, consciousness is fundamental. And though the fMRI looks like we made decisions before we consciously made decisions, what if we got it backwards. We consciously made the decisions, but the results of that decisions was determined retroactively! Wheeler's experiment throws causality out the window! Consciousness doesn't lag real time, real time lags consciousness!

Pre-cell phone, did you ever pick up a phone and answer, 'hello, sally,' before you had any information about who was actually on the other end of the line? This has happened enough that it's probably anecdotal in someone's family. Maybe it happened to you. Maybe it happened to a relative, frequently enough it kind of spooked you that every time you called this guy, he knew it was you. Maybe it was luck. Or maybe it the brain knew before the consciousness. (Are there studies that show mirror neurons aligning even outside of visual range?) OR, maybe consciousness knew and the other end of the line got collapsed into being who they needed it to be... Nature does like consistency!

Yeah, my explanations are probably bizarre and incorrect, but then again, we live in a bizarre universe that is increasingly defying logic. Maybe it's time to explore the absurd. Even if it's just for fun or jokes; there is also good evidence that when you lighten your mood and open your brain, sometimes the real answer presents itself out of nowhere. Maybe I won't solve the world's problem, but i do so love thinking about this stuff.

Do you?