The living organism, and consciousness arising out of it, is different from thought. Thought cannot conceive of the possibility of anything happening outside the field of ‘time.’
A bit cryptic. Can you say more?
The living activity of the sense of sight alone does not tell you anything about what is happening unless thought comes in and makes a separation between what is there stimulating the retina and what is inside you knowing what it is as a response. That separation resulting from projected knowledge onto objects creates you as a subject. If there is no object, there is no subject.
When thought is there, you are there (thought being the use of knowledge). As long as you know what is there in a continuity of short events, then what is perceived by linking up these events is what is conceived of as motion over which we superimpose the notion of time when we become (in consciousness) deliberately aware of a point and in reference to that point we measure.
I think I agree.
Brain studies have shown that there are specific neurons whose function it is to detect motion. When these brain areas are damaged, we get what doctors call “motion blindness”. People who suffer from motion blindness don’t see motion as a smooth displacement of an object through space; they see what might be described as a rapid series of ‘stills’ that go by in a flash. They can only detect motion by a mode of rational deduction: that is, by thinking “The object was over there a second ago, now it’s here. It must be moving”. The rest of us don’t need to do this. Motion, for us, is its own independent subjective experience (akin to seeing red or hearing a sound) made possible by the motion detection neurons in our brains.
I would therefore say we do experience motion, though I would also say motion qua experience might be different from motion qua physical phenomena. We only experience what our brains are built to experience.
I also think time as we experience it can be reduced to the experience of motion (or change in general), to memory, and to conditioning. Motion is how we experience time going by in the present, memory the past, and conditioning the future (i.e. conditioning is what permits us a quick glimpse into the immediate future, of what is about to happen).
Interesting. I confess I don’t know much about it!
you, at any given time, have in your consciousness the past, what is happening, and what you assume is about to happen
in that slice of a moment when you are viewing a car your brain knows that it has just moved and that it will continue to do so
Yes, unsuper, you are correct, but my point is that the present, as we experience it subjectively, is not a ‘slice’ of time. It is a very small, but non-zero, interval.
My guess is when we see a car we feel it as a red block - several frames drawing ontop of each other. We feel it as a red block, but our vision forces us to clear the buffer - we see it is a car.
Our lives would just be a blob from past to future - it is consciousness which clears the buffer, makes us feel like we are a sharp edge in the now. my 3 cents anyway.
We feel like a sharp edge because the “blob” in which past and future are meshed is so small–that is, in comparison with the long stretch of time that our memories allow us to remember and the similarly long stretch of time that we project into the future.
With phyllo’s addendum, I wouldn’t argue with that. But realize that ALL processes require a passage of time. Being conscious is merely a process [of recognizing or identifying remote existence].
Yes, all processes require a passage of time, but I’m saying a little more than this. I’m saying that for a very small interval of time, we experience more than an instant in time; we experience a few milliseconds of the past and a few milliseconds of the future–all at once; and not in the sense that we remember the past or that we predict the future, but that we experience this small interval in the “now”.
Now, you can label the ends of this interval as “past” and “present” or “present” and “future” or “past” and “future” or whatever else you like–the point is, it’s not an instant.
Other than the “future” issue (with which I completely agree with phyllo), I don’t see that anyone disagrees that consciousness requires a little time passage and thus a little past and a little not so past (aka “present”). What we call “an instant” is merely an imaginary frozen moment in the flow. Who would argue?
Would you agree that right now you’re experience what happened 1/2 a second ago?