aporia:
[b]And once again, naive realism raises its ugly head. Where has this (that experience has been clocked at faster than one per second but slower than one per nanaosecond) been observed or tested? Do we have watches that track nanoseconds, and are these watches used to race the verbal report of a subject who states that he or she has had this or that experience? Do we use the watch to time OUR change in experience, if so, how do we simultaneously observe the watch (which measures nanoseconds, for God’s sake) and introspectively mark the passage of personal experience?
I’m being facetious here, but you get the point (I hope).[/b]
The pot calling the kettle black, eh? This sounds like idle speculation, too.
[b]REALLY? Then given that our consciousness is supposed to be in the business of keeping up with the currently appearance and disposition of the external world (if one accepts psychophysicalism and Facsimile Realism), it would seem that the “nanoscopic electrical processes taking place in our brains” surpasses representation of the real-time dispositions of the external world itself. Consider:
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The external world shoots “pool” with the “pool balls” of the neural processes themselves (if one buys psychophysicalism)—our brains supposedly grant visual perception that more or less accurately represents the current real-time appearance and behavior of the external world.
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If experience is keeping track with the external world (which presumably also includes processes at the nanoscopic level and lower), and if this temporal isomorphism is slower than neural process, then neural process is moving faster than the external world.
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This is a logical contradiction, unless we’re talking about fanciful subdivisions of universal dimension in which Einsteinian relativism yields differences of speed between “micro-neural” passage of time, subjective passage of time, and external world passage of time (when the three should be logically inseparable). And if one is desperate enough to go so far as to propose this, then—quoting your question to me above: "How could you ever test that? What evidence could possibly be brought to bear? "
(Disparity in speed notwithstanding, one must also explain the uncanny accuracy that “nanoscopic electrical processes moving 10,000,000 times fast than currently perceived experience” captures the likeness of an external world that cannot be experienced—but this is another story)
Remember, the life of the brain (and the life of its conceivable connection to consciousness) is the[/b] action potential[b]. Charles Yanofsky states that there’s a lot that must go on before the action potential of just one neuron fires, and this is contingent at best. Neurons and their action potentials are supra-nanoscopic in size. An individual neuron is, at the end of the day, a cell, and it is (according to Yanofsky) not that different from every other cell save in it’s dendritic and axonal processes and its specialized communicative function (passing electrical charge from one neuron to another and to muscle and glandular tissue)—unless you wish to say that cells are themselves nanoscopic in size, and that the size of nanotechnology begins at the size of the cell.
Action potentials themselves are “macro” electric charges: they are not sub-molecular electrical events taking place in some tiny microscopic corner of a neuron. Even if they were, unless they were summated to form one BIG action potential, it seems odd for a neuroscientist to assume that a micro-pulse of electrical energy in a part of a neuron a little larger than a protein molecule is somehow, all by itself, responsible for a subject’s current experience of happiness. The action potential is a “macro” event that occurs throughout and among long lines of whole neurons before final deactivation and repolarization. Experience is believed to depend, in turn, upon many such action potentials coursing through thousands of neurons synaptically linked a particular pattern or chain in some part of the brain: anything below this “macroscopic” scope is merely a mirco-gradient of the action potential needed for experience.
Are you attempting to claim that the thousands of neurons and thousands of pulses of action potential per neuron, ALL of which summates to form just ONE experience—given their supra-nanoscopic size and restriction to Newton’s laws, etc.—perform their “waterwheel”-like contraption of mechanization 10,000,000 times faster than rapid-fire subjective experience? Wouldn’t this outstrip the experience itself, the RESULT of the neural processing? If such super-fast processing is setting up for the next experience, what, besides random chance, enables accurate representation of the far-slower-moving external world?
I think you’re simply hashing out speculative “speeds” to neural processing (that one must unthinkingly accept) in order to save psychophysicalism.[/b]
J.