Here is an interesting discussion about time from the Thunderbolts Project. It is partly philosophical but does delve into the question just what is time:
Fascinating discussion about time
- Thread starter Nicholas
- Start date
Thanks for posting this!
That's the first time I've managed to wrap my head around the idea of relative time in this particular sense.
What I gathered:
If all events are measured in terms of comparison to other events, like dripping faucets relative to ticking second hands, and both of those relative to vibrations in the atomic "particle" continuum.., then events such as human thoughts and actions can be similarly measured.
If it takes, say, a trillion pulses of the subatomic world for our brain mechanics to create a perception, and to turn that perception into a conscious thought and then into actions, "My body is telling me I am thirsty, so I'll pour a glass of water and take a sip", we might feel a minute has passed.
But if pulling an observer back to see this series of events to a point where from their perspective, each atomic pulse takes a year, then the trillion pulses needed for the thirsty person to sense thirst and sip from the glass would take a trillion years in their "time" frame. Yet the very perception of thirst being made up of pulses moving forward the engine of perception, from the thirsty person's perspective, it still only takes a about a minute of experiential "time". It can't be anything else.
That is, a brain run on synapses made of glaciers would still feel that it is running at the speed of thought. Which is to say, seemingly instantaneous. The speed of thought is the base speed from which all other activity in the universe is measured. We all start at "instantaneous", and proceed downward in speed from there as we create actions based on our decisions.
Any events which happen too quickly for our perceptive organs to process in noticeable moments, (birds flying over the Glacier brain, for instance), would effectively be invisible, too fast to notice; theoretical events which would have to be measured through devices designed to take that information and transmit it down through a series of "levers" to a point slow enough for the glacier brain to be able to work with. -Perhaps a long series of gears powered by bird wing flaps which gear down, and down to a point where a gear spoke would move only once per thousand years. Our own scientific instruments effectively do this as we try to measure very fast or very small events.
Another analogy: A computer with a clock speed of 2 Hertz will still be able to crunch through the same computational tasks as a computer with a 2 Gigahertz clock. If such a computer were to be conscious, and its thoughts formed from a series of such computations, each "Ah hah!" spark of self-awareness would seem instantaneous to itself, and its world view and experience of the universe would be limited to other events happening in that same speed spectrum.
That our brains, our consciousness machines, are running on atomic interactions which run at the same clock speed as the material universe, makes for a tidy, self-contained universal computer at this level of density.
Which fits with my attempts to understand what the C's mean when they use the word "Density". Density of what?
Perhaps the density of clock pulses?
That's the first time I've managed to wrap my head around the idea of relative time in this particular sense.
What I gathered:
If all events are measured in terms of comparison to other events, like dripping faucets relative to ticking second hands, and both of those relative to vibrations in the atomic "particle" continuum.., then events such as human thoughts and actions can be similarly measured.
If it takes, say, a trillion pulses of the subatomic world for our brain mechanics to create a perception, and to turn that perception into a conscious thought and then into actions, "My body is telling me I am thirsty, so I'll pour a glass of water and take a sip", we might feel a minute has passed.
But if pulling an observer back to see this series of events to a point where from their perspective, each atomic pulse takes a year, then the trillion pulses needed for the thirsty person to sense thirst and sip from the glass would take a trillion years in their "time" frame. Yet the very perception of thirst being made up of pulses moving forward the engine of perception, from the thirsty person's perspective, it still only takes a about a minute of experiential "time". It can't be anything else.
That is, a brain run on synapses made of glaciers would still feel that it is running at the speed of thought. Which is to say, seemingly instantaneous. The speed of thought is the base speed from which all other activity in the universe is measured. We all start at "instantaneous", and proceed downward in speed from there as we create actions based on our decisions.
Any events which happen too quickly for our perceptive organs to process in noticeable moments, (birds flying over the Glacier brain, for instance), would effectively be invisible, too fast to notice; theoretical events which would have to be measured through devices designed to take that information and transmit it down through a series of "levers" to a point slow enough for the glacier brain to be able to work with. -Perhaps a long series of gears powered by bird wing flaps which gear down, and down to a point where a gear spoke would move only once per thousand years. Our own scientific instruments effectively do this as we try to measure very fast or very small events.
Another analogy: A computer with a clock speed of 2 Hertz will still be able to crunch through the same computational tasks as a computer with a 2 Gigahertz clock. If such a computer were to be conscious, and its thoughts formed from a series of such computations, each "Ah hah!" spark of self-awareness would seem instantaneous to itself, and its world view and experience of the universe would be limited to other events happening in that same speed spectrum.
That our brains, our consciousness machines, are running on atomic interactions which run at the same clock speed as the material universe, makes for a tidy, self-contained universal computer at this level of density.
Which fits with my attempts to understand what the C's mean when they use the word "Density". Density of what?
Perhaps the density of clock pulses?
Thanks for sharing. I'm still trying to wrap my head around time, and don't fully understand it. It sounds like it's the progression of events. Or something that is between events. I've always thought that if everything stopped and was frozen, then there would be no time. So it is really just movement?
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