I have been blogging here at Everything Rum since 2007. My first posting was a Consciousness Riff. I used to blog at Outside Walls, mostly on Kosovo, but closed that down a while ago. In the Everything Rum space I've blogged on quantum physics, cosmology & space/time, biking, the state of the world, capitalism, the Articles of Confederation and sometimes on politics. State Department cables (cleared through FOIA) and other related material from my time serving as a US diplomat can be found at Real Diplomacy. Since 2009, I was writing on international issues at TransConflict.
Now I am branching out. I've tried Twitter and Facebook in the past but didn't stay with them. I'm now returning to Twitter to connect and to accompany my expanded blogging here. I'll be commenting as I see useful and perhaps will find others who if not in agreement at least have some reason to stop and reflect. My first effort will follow shortly on the US and Russia.
Showing posts with label ghosts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ghosts. Show all posts
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Moments in Time and Consciousness
Attended the symphony today. Instrumental music does not hold my attention as well as a play -- especially Shakespeare -- would. I enjoyed the program but without words (lyrics), it didn't pin down my thoughts. So they just wandered.
I wondered about exactly why I could not focus on the assembly of notes as I would on an assembly of words. That made me think about just how these notes add up to music anyway. The basic length of time in a conscious moment must be long enough for a series of notes to be assembled in the mind into a bit of music. If we only perceived note by note -- or word by word for that matter -- we'd never make sense of anything. The basic unit of conscious perception apparently is 2-3 seconds. Our now is this long. Short term memory -- what is held in consciousness readily available as context for each moment -- is some 10-15 seconds. We can perceive a much denser reality in each moment than simply one "thing." Events can enter our consciousness that linger only some 40 milliseconds. Indeed, each note is made up from a number of vibrations in the air and a symphony has lots of instruments making each note. So each conscious moment is a highly sampled chunk of passing time. The point is, however, not this but the apparent fact that our consciousness grasps this moment in its entirety. It spans the stream of quantized time. (The smallest unit of time is the Planck time, 5.39x10 to the -44th seconds.) Consciousness seems to exist outside the flow of time. We do not observe, think, exist in time but somehow alongside it. The "ghost" in our machine provides a stage large enough for an assembly of actors to play their parts so that we can experience each moment of the world.
I wondered about exactly why I could not focus on the assembly of notes as I would on an assembly of words. That made me think about just how these notes add up to music anyway. The basic length of time in a conscious moment must be long enough for a series of notes to be assembled in the mind into a bit of music. If we only perceived note by note -- or word by word for that matter -- we'd never make sense of anything. The basic unit of conscious perception apparently is 2-3 seconds. Our now is this long. Short term memory -- what is held in consciousness readily available as context for each moment -- is some 10-15 seconds. We can perceive a much denser reality in each moment than simply one "thing." Events can enter our consciousness that linger only some 40 milliseconds. Indeed, each note is made up from a number of vibrations in the air and a symphony has lots of instruments making each note. So each conscious moment is a highly sampled chunk of passing time. The point is, however, not this but the apparent fact that our consciousness grasps this moment in its entirety. It spans the stream of quantized time. (The smallest unit of time is the Planck time, 5.39x10 to the -44th seconds.) Consciousness seems to exist outside the flow of time. We do not observe, think, exist in time but somehow alongside it. The "ghost" in our machine provides a stage large enough for an assembly of actors to play their parts so that we can experience each moment of the world.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Gods, Monsters and Americans
Was reading a book putting forward the theory of monistic idealism. The author notes an observation attributed to Mother Theresa that Americans are the most materialistically blessed but impoverished in spirit people on earth. This could actually be said about most of the people in the Western world but maybe of Americans the most.
The author (Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe) attributes this to America’s unquestioned materialism. We have lost connection with the world of enchantment in which we felt connected to something greater and more mysterious. I won’t gainsay this. But it may not be the whole picture. To judge from American popular culture – especially in the movies and TV that we export to the whole world – we seem to yearn for what we are missing. Living far from the US for the past few years, I see the reflections of this American preoccupation with particular clarity. We flood the ether with vampires, superheroes, ghosts, wizards and witches, psychics, aliens, magic, lost dimensions, time travelers, alternate realities, undead, formerly dead, demons, angels, devils, gods, mythical beasts and monsters. And I have no doubt left some out. We seem to have an utter fascination with things and beings which we in our day-today life know do not – cannot – really exist. What are these if not expressions of something deep inside of us that we feel the loss of, something beyond what science and modernity have left us? (There are other manifestations of this as well that lay at the root of the various forms of fundamentalism, including the political ones.) Some seek this missing dimension in religion, many look for it on the Sci-Fi network and Beyond.
Freud called this sort of thing the return of the repressed. For Nietzsche, it was the eternal return. It almost certainly is a return, a deep echo, of the pagan gods buried in our walls so long ago. And those gods themselves a kind of short-hand for that sense of horror and magic human beings first experienced when, a few hundred thousand years ago, we woke into conscious awareness of who and where we were. Americans are not materialistic as much as just a long way from home and very unsure of how to get back. And from the appeal of what we broadcast to the rest of the world, we are not the only ones.
The author (Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe) attributes this to America’s unquestioned materialism. We have lost connection with the world of enchantment in which we felt connected to something greater and more mysterious. I won’t gainsay this. But it may not be the whole picture. To judge from American popular culture – especially in the movies and TV that we export to the whole world – we seem to yearn for what we are missing. Living far from the US for the past few years, I see the reflections of this American preoccupation with particular clarity. We flood the ether with vampires, superheroes, ghosts, wizards and witches, psychics, aliens, magic, lost dimensions, time travelers, alternate realities, undead, formerly dead, demons, angels, devils, gods, mythical beasts and monsters. And I have no doubt left some out. We seem to have an utter fascination with things and beings which we in our day-today life know do not – cannot – really exist. What are these if not expressions of something deep inside of us that we feel the loss of, something beyond what science and modernity have left us? (There are other manifestations of this as well that lay at the root of the various forms of fundamentalism, including the political ones.) Some seek this missing dimension in religion, many look for it on the Sci-Fi network and Beyond.
Freud called this sort of thing the return of the repressed. For Nietzsche, it was the eternal return. It almost certainly is a return, a deep echo, of the pagan gods buried in our walls so long ago. And those gods themselves a kind of short-hand for that sense of horror and magic human beings first experienced when, a few hundred thousand years ago, we woke into conscious awareness of who and where we were. Americans are not materialistic as much as just a long way from home and very unsure of how to get back. And from the appeal of what we broadcast to the rest of the world, we are not the only ones.
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