Peter Wilson:
... the idea that we are "conscious" of just one instantaneous slice of time is just plain wrong. How could we perceive motion at all without constantly comparing an object's present position with its position in the recent past?
SH:
Short term memory? I think there is an "envelope" of awareness
(I like Michael Baggott's "oscilloscope retentivity disanalogy"),
but that each instantaneous conscious moment includes the recent past.
(Although Libet's work suggests the brain somehow finagles temporal events,
and the paper by Bergenheim et al in the Tucson I book shows the brain
does indeed adjust temporally disparate inputs).
In our recent JCS article, we comment: Support for consciousness consisting of sequences of individual, discrete "now" events is found in Buddhism; trained meditators describe distinct "flickerings" in their experience of reality (Tart, 1995). Buddhist texts portray consciousness as "momentary collections of mental phenomena", and as "distinct, unconnected and impermanent moments which perish as soon as they arise". Each conscious moment successively becomes, exists, and disappears - its existence is instantaneous, with no duration in time, as a point has no length. Our normal perceptions, of course, are seemingly continuous, presumably as we perceive "movies" as continuous despite their actual makeup being a series of frames. Some Buddhist writings even quantify the frequency of conscious moments. For example the Sarvaastivaadins (von Rospatt, 1995) described 6,480,000 "moments" in 24 hours (an average of one "moment" per 13.3 msec), while other Buddhist writings decribe one moment per 0.13 msec (Conze, 1988), and some Chinese Buddhism as one "thought" per 20 msec. These accounts, including variations in frequency, are consistent with our proposed Orch OR events. For example a 13.3 msec pre-conscious interval would correspond with an Orch OR involving 4 x 10^10 coherent tubulins, a 0.13 msec interval would correspond with 4 x 10^12 coherent tubulins, and a 20 msec interval with 2.5 x 10^10coherent tubulins (and a repeating 25 msec interval with 2 x 10^10 tubulins: 40 Hz!). Thus Buddhist "moments of experience", Whitehead "occasions of experience", and our proposed Orch OR events may be more or less equivalent.
When the supreme basketball player Michael Jordan is playing well, flying to the hoop, contorting his body in numerous, seemingly impossible maneuvers to get through traffic, he has stated he is able to do this because, to him, "time slows down". This is consistent with consciousness being a series of discrete events whose occurrences (frequency) can change. If Michael Jordan has many more conscious events per objective time measurement, his subjective time would slow down.
Patients who are deeply anesthetized have no sense of time transpiring while they are "under" (unlike normal sleep, in which reasonable guesses can be made). The anesthetized patient is not having any conscious events, so for him/her, time does not pass.
Huw Price:
In a recent posting Stuart Hameroff recommends "The Arrow of Time" by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield. ....it confuses the issue of determinism/indeterminism with that of time asymmetry. (Its Brussels School approach to the problem of time-asymmetry is partly to blame, I think.) ....Hameroff also mentions Penrose's view of the issue as to whether time's arrow would reverse in a recollapsing universe....[see] my "Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time", OUP, NY, 1996 (jacket blurb, table of contents and chapter 1 available at http://plato.stanford.edu/price/TAAP.html). My book also offers a very different perspective from that of Hameroff and Penrose on the relationship between time-asymmetry and the interpretation of QM, which may be of interest to some readers of this list.
SH: Thanks. I'll check it out. But just to clarify, Penrose does not concur that time's arrow would reverse in a collapsing universe. However his reasons are quite different from those of the Brussels School.
Stuart Hameroff srh@ccit.arizona.edu
Bergenheim M, Johansson H, Granlund B, Pedersen J. Experimental evidence for a synchronization of sensory information to conscious experience. (1996) In. Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. Eds. S Hameroff, A Kaszniak, A Scott. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. pp303-310.
Conze, E., (1988) Buddhist Thought in India, Louis de La Vallee Poussin (trans.), Abhidharmako"sabhaa.syam: English translation by Leo M. Pruden, 4 vols (Berkeley) pp 85-90.
Hameroff S, Penrose R. (1996) Conscious events as orchestrated space-time selections. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1)36-53
Tart, C.T., (1995) personal communication and information gathered from "Buddha-1 newsnet"
von Rospatt, A., (1995) The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A survey of the origins and early phase of this doctrine up to Vasubandhu (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag).
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