8 ms·

That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality. There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "

• causi 3y ago
  That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality. Nonsense. Where's the thousand years of creative output? If my mind existed for a thousand years I'd be immediately filing patents and writing papers based off all the things I came up with during my eternity of thought. Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains? There is no difference between this and hypnotizing someone to believe they've lived an eternity.
  • carlmr 3y ago
    >Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains? Not OP, but I'd counter that evolution is doing an imperfect multivariate optimization over a pretty big state-space. Even if it might be easy to change one simple chemical and thus speed up processing, the question is whether the speed-up has other costs. E.g. the brain is already using a lot of energy, increasing processing speed which probably increases energy usage might not be optimal. We still don't understand sleep well, it could be that if you process faster more consistently you might need more sleep to organize your thoughts and memories, which is counterproductive if you don't want to be eaten. It's hard enough with our sleep requirements to keep up with nature. A third point is that evolution only needs to find good enough. We're already the apex predator due to our ability to think. Anything above what we currently have might just not be necessary so has no evolutionary pressure.
  • s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I think the relevant questions are how are the brain measures time and of what the brain is processing. What if the only thing it's capable of doing is perceiving the passage of time? If the biological clock is the only measure of perceived time, then it feels like more time is elapsing. If the brain measures and feels time as sand slowly falling into a bucket, what happens when you dump a truckload of sand into the bucket? That doesn't mean that you're necessarily capable of doing more work in that time, but maybe you still feel the additional passage of time.
• tuyiown 3y ago
  > There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real". Perception is always, always false, the same way that our internal reality is imperfect. The only way to trust perception is to go through repeatable experiment and see that results conforms to prediction, eg. science. Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists. The worst deceit from those heuristics being our conviction that there is any kind of truth in what we think, preventing the whole thing to fall appart.
  • s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I feel like the statement only holds true if you are trying to learn about shared reality. Perception Isn't false, it's subjective. It's real in its own domain, but that domain may not generalize or overlap with a shared physical reality or perceptions made by other people.
    • tuyiown 3y ago
      The perception as two sides: the signal, and how it's processed. The signal is real and true just by it's existence. Note that this also applies with self-generated signal such as phantom limbs. For the processing, the subjective part of the perception, lot of things falls appart, attaching any notion of reality and trustiness looks like a choice to enable some lines of reflection. A choice heavily oriented by our own experience of existence, nobody wants to see themselves as a bag of more or less working heuristics with conscience as meta processing and data acquisition for self-correction mechanism. But if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.
      • s1artibartfast 3y ago
        I think the point I was making is different. It was that perception and experiences are real, just not necessarily reflective of a shared reality. The state of consciousness is much more than just the processing of external signals. > if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested. The best example I can think of is a dream. Dreams are real experiences despite not being shared with any other human. It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people. The same holds true for thoughts and feelings. People don't get sent into an existential crisis because they feel happy while someone somewhere is unhappy. Having a feeling is a real experience, despite being personal and subjective.