Time is a path “through” space. In other words, change over space IS TIME. That is why they found “timekeeping” in the space brain. In a sense, they didn’t discover anything. They reaffirmed that time is an aspect of space (or of any n-manifold).
Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
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Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, however, people a long long time ago have used variations of the term. Why do you think deteriorated forms of Buddhism nowadays have attached themselves to the term ego? The term has got a certain characteristic which those who propagate deteriorated truth need to use. They talk about losing your ego for a reason. So, I wonder if you've done this exercise before... have you ever tried to come up with as concrete…
I'm finding your posts intriguing despite disagreeing with you. Do you have any sources for further reading? > Why do you think deteriorated forms of Buddhism nowadays have attached themselves to the term ego? Is it deterioration or just accepting new ideas? I don't think that 2000-year-old Buddhism had all the answers, or would even be useful to a Westerner (I do feel that we are mostly exposed to "deteriorated" for…
> I don't think that 2000-year-old Buddhism had all the answers
Buddha while alive only gave answers to the level of the questions people at that time were able to bring to him.
No one from modern times asked Buddha about gravity, or electromagnetism, or calculus, or about Bernoulli's principle, nor is he alive in modern times to inform us of what we ourselves can't recognize right in front of ourselves.
However, if, hypothetically, someone were to bring questions about black holes or dark matter to Gautama Buddha, then I feel very confident based on my understanding of philosophy that his reply would be to the effect or meaning of "if you can tell me or point out exactly what X from your question is, concretely, then I will be able to tell you whether it exists or not in reality, by placing that matter upon the formula that operates the world, and checking the result".
> would even be useful to a Westerner (I do feel that we are mostly exposed to "deteriorated" forms of Buddhism, but maybe it's for the better)
What is left is not helpful to us ordinary people for discerning or learning Buddha's teaching. We lost his truth through the process of it being handed down. His teaching is not meditation, four noble truths, eightfold path, nor precepts. It's not that you go to sleep, abandon yourself, stop suffering, and die forever. He taught people what exists, and how it exists, because he knew that was the way to enlighten people. Nevertheless he didn't explain about the steps to achieving enlightenment. First, falsehood must disappear (you must be free of lies). That means you have to open your eyes to the truth. Secondly, you have to be able to see 'what is'. You have to know where right and wrong exist: facts. Third, you need conscience and courage. You wouldn't go to people and teach them through terrible treatment without conscience and courage. Fourth, there must be endless love in yourself to go teach people 'what is' repeatedly. Through the process, you burn up the karma in your consciousness. Anyone who teaches enlightenment can be achieved without agony and love is telling a lie.
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#73> “In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.” This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not c…
Interestingly, where I'm from (BC, Canada), it's quite common to give distances between cities in terms of driving time. "Oh, Kelowna is about 5 hours away." Is this expression common anywhere else?
This is common both in the Southeast US (where I'm from; for example "about an hour up the road from here") and in LA (where I live; for example "like 20 minutes from downtown, 45 with traffic")
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#74> “In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.” This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not c…
Interestingly, where I'm from (BC, Canada), it's quite common to give distances between cities in terms of driving time. "Oh, Kelowna is about 5 hours away." Is this expression common anywhere else?
A friend of mine was trekking through a small village in the Amazon rainforest and got chatting to one of the locals. When he said he was from London he was asked "How many days up-stream is that?"
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#75> “In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.” This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not c…
I don't think we have any proof that time is steady. It may just appear as steady. Much like clock based games way back when. You could speed up or slow down the clock rate and the game would be run the same. Only a external observer out side of the system would be able to detect the change. Edit. But I guess you were talking about our perception of time.
Well, okay, but we can map different cause-and-effect relationships to other ones. Like for example, I can say that so many trillions of energy state transitions in a caesium atom will occur in the time in takes me to walk to the park down the street, or drive across the state I live in, and anyone with a caesium atom can, in principle, replicate that measurement. And you can replace the caesium atom with, for example, a spring and some gears, or literally any other periodic event generator. (I mean, we can get into what "periodic" means, as well, but I'll table it for the sake of brevity, for now.)
And, somewhere in our brain, we probably have just such a periodic event generator, although it's probably a bit flawed in the implementation like most things generated by evolution typically are, but it does the job well enough for us to arrive at a sense of time that very roughly agrees with more rigorously-derived measurement devices.
Ultimately time is a shorthand for cause and effect, and the fact that causes propagate to their effects at roughly the same speed (relative to a reference cause and effect) everywhere we measure them (relativistic effects notwithstanding). If you have evidence this is not the case, I would love to see it, because it implies some new physics. You would win a Nobel prize for this, easily, if you could prove it.
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#76This makes me wonder about a friend of mine who started taking seroquil....since starting this his awareness of both space and time seem to be nothing. He doesn't notice things around him anymore, can't navigate through a city he lived.in for years anymore, doesn't ever know what time of day it is and his perception of the flow of events seems wrong. He doesn't remember things happening in the correct order any more, his memory of how long things take is off now and seems to now lack a sense of how long ago different things are. He talks about stuff from 5 or 10 years ago like it was yesterday and recent things he talks about like a distant memory or just doesn't remember.
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#77> “In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.” This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not c…
The greatest masters in the history of the human world such as Gautama Buddha never taught or used the term "ego". That ought to tell humans something.
"Ego" is a European word so why would Buddha use it? Please try to stay on topic.
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was typing that I was thinking the hypothetical observer. I don't think there can actually be one with respect to actual time. But to be able to think about how maybe it does work you have to think as though there was a an ability to observe the universe in such a way. But you are right, if there was a outside observer the same stands, just for that observers observer -- hypothetically. > In a world where phys…
I think the interactions between "ticks" not being "observed" or "realized" by the universe is what gp means when they assert our [physical] world depends on time. If these between-tick interactions are not impacting our physical measurements then I am not sure it's possible for time to not be "steady" from a single frame of reference. I can of course imagine a scenario where different entities, even in the same univ…
I can see that point now. Yes, maybe how our observed physics and universe depends on constant time illusion.
Yes, the problem of how to test such things. That is why it is so fun to think about it.
For all we know between the seconds a trillion trillion tiny life forms that resemble ants slip out between the cracks of space time and take a untold amount of time (to their reference) to nudge each particle just so according to a small tattoo on their forearms. When they are all done they slip away just as mysteriously as they came. And each time they come back to arrange our universe it is done so by ancestors of many generations removed of the last workers who came to enforce our its will on our universe.
This also brings me back to Lawrence Krauss? with the notion of there is not really nothing in nothing and we can't truly ever have a "vacuum" void of all. I think it was in his book Something out of Nothing.
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#79> “In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.” This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not c…
Interestingly, where I'm from (BC, Canada), it's quite common to give distances between cities in terms of driving time. "Oh, Kelowna is about 5 hours away." Is this expression common anywhere else?
Yes, it's used in Polish (coś jest 2 godziny stąd = something is 2 hours away).
Btw, there's this joke about a soldier asking a sergeant "what is timespace", and the sergeant answers "get a shovel and dig from here till sunset".
Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time
#80Space is only noise that you can see.
Then sound is space that you can hear. Both are interesting ways of framing space and the senses, but I'm not sure what you mean by "only". To reduce space to "only noise", in my understanding of your statement, is to imply that it is something extraneous, something to be ignored, or at least given less significance, instead of it being actual, existent, a fundamental aspect of reality that we can describe in useful…
It's a song by a guy named Nicolas Jaar. I didn't mean anything by it, I just thought it sounded cool.