consciousness precedes real time
- Thread starter scruffy
- Start date
I'm here to outsmart the people who are here trying to outsmart the people. Why are you here?
Dante
"The Libido for the Ugly"
I noticed you didn't say why you were here.
Really?
Really, is that what you tell yourself? You pathetic, lonely, old fool.
I'm 50 steps ahead of you.
- Thread starter
- #25
I suppose y'all didn't see the report from Riken today, about oscillations in the hippocampus. Confirms every bit of what I've been saying.
It's simple math. Nothing mystifying about it.
luiza
Diamond Member
That some cannot see the impossibility of the existence of Time without Consciousness is highly amusing .
You can make a reasoble claim that both terms have identical meaning . That is, one is logically impossible without the other .
Naturally this necessary start point ruins every piece of science that fails to acknoweledge this -- and that is something they do not want Sheeple to realise .
And is why Einsteinian Physics , for example , has stood still .
You can make a reasoble claim that both terms have identical meaning . That is, one is logically impossible without the other .
Naturally this necessary start point ruins every piece of science that fails to acknoweledge this -- and that is something they do not want Sheeple to realise .
And is why Einsteinian Physics , for example , has stood still .
It confirms that rocks are living?
- Thread starter
- #29
This is an interesting point.
There are physical processes that are truly irreversible, even at the quantum level. I'm starting to study them, as time permits.
Not just simply expensive to reverse, but truly mathematically irreversible. Some of it apparently has to do with non-Abelian symmetries.
The primary example of irreversibility is still a stochastic process. Once an outcome has been achieved it's cast in stone, there's no way to reverse a random process. Unless we want to argue there's no such thing as a random process, which would be a tough sell.
- Thread starter
- #30
This article nails it exactly correctly: "singularity of probability measure".
Nonequilibrium equalities in absolutely irreversible processes
We generalize nonequilibrium integral equalities to situations involving absolutely irreversible processes for which the forward-path probability vanishes and the entropy production diverges, rendering conventional integral fluctuation theorems inapplicable. We identify the mathematical origins...
link.aps.org
- Thread starter
- #31
No one knows what time is yet.
There are two prevailing theories in physics, one says it's reversible and the other says it isn't.
There is evidence for both, which means there's something deeper going on and we haven't figured it out yet.
My take is, information can be used as a measuring tool. In my view, every "outcome" is irreversible. If you roll the dice and get a 6, that's it, game over. You can roll again, and maybe get a similar outcome, but it won't be the "same" outcome, it'll be a different one.
All of dynamics is time dependent. Even stochastic dynamics. Because they're dealing with ensembles, trying to fit into a thermodynamics model. But there's something fundamentally wrong and unreal about that approach.
In Brownian motion, whenever you have a displacement you get a new starting point. The only way to "reverse" it is to "return" to the original starting point. Which is not a reversal, it's a return. Reversals and returns are two different animals, they're not the same.
- Thread starter
- #32
Awareness turns out to be pretty simple.
It's the ability to track the development of the filter before it's application.
For those of you who know about Kalman filtering, you have a loop that's basically a development in time.
Awareness is the self organizing process that learns the development faster than the next cycle.
Topology is an important tool in addressing this capability, because the embedding matters. The filter and the learning process are one and the same, they're embedded into each other.
It's the ability to track the development of the filter before it's application.
For those of you who know about Kalman filtering, you have a loop that's basically a development in time.
Awareness is the self organizing process that learns the development faster than the next cycle.
Topology is an important tool in addressing this capability, because the embedding matters. The filter and the learning process are one and the same, they're embedded into each other.
- Thread starter
- #33
Time resolution of human brain
It's easy to figure out. Using the asynchronous update paradigm, the Time resolution of a population of neurons is approximately the refractory period times 1/N, where N is the number of neurons.
In the cerebral cortex, refractory periods are typically in the 1 msec range. And, there are about 20 billion neurons, give or take. Therefore we have
R(t) = 1e(-3) x (1 / (2 e 10))
which gives us 5 e -14 ballpark.
That is about 50 femtoseconds.
Compare that with the time it takes for a visual signal from the retina, to get from one stage to the next, which is somewhere between 20 and 50 msec.
The short story is your brain can perform a billion calculations on a visual signal, before it gets out of your eye. With 4 orders of magnitude to spare.
This is how and why we are "aware". Because those calculations take place across the entire extent of the brain's timeline, which is about 2 sec long give or take.
Neurons share their bandwidth between local processing and global memory. Every time a neuron fires, the meaning goes to both places.f A further interesting calculation takes us directly into the realm of physical relativity. The question is: how fast can a signal get from one end of the brain to the other?
The answer is pretty interesting. According to the asynchronous update paradigm, every time a neuron fires it influences the firing of all other neurons "instantly". Your brain is about 10 cm long from frontal pole to occipital pole. If you calculate the speed of light it would take a photon
10 cm / 3 e 10 cm/sec
which is about 3 nanoseconds, to traverse that distance.
But your brain can do it SIX ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE FASTER!
Now you understand why I showed you the light cone, and why we're interested in "the limit as dt => 0".
Because 1 million things can happen, before an E-M signal gets from one side of the brain to the other. This is what the "physical unfolding of time" means.
The topology says the mind's eye is a torus, not a cone. Or more precisely, it's a cone that's been bent into the shape of a torus, with the outer edges glued together. The requirement for reentrancy is that the radius of compactification is smaller than the shortest processing interval along the timeline. Which it is, by about six orders of magnitude.
It's easy to figure out. Using the asynchronous update paradigm, the Time resolution of a population of neurons is approximately the refractory period times 1/N, where N is the number of neurons.
In the cerebral cortex, refractory periods are typically in the 1 msec range. And, there are about 20 billion neurons, give or take. Therefore we have
R(t) = 1e(-3) x (1 / (2 e 10))
which gives us 5 e -14 ballpark.
That is about 50 femtoseconds.
Compare that with the time it takes for a visual signal from the retina, to get from one stage to the next, which is somewhere between 20 and 50 msec.
The short story is your brain can perform a billion calculations on a visual signal, before it gets out of your eye. With 4 orders of magnitude to spare.
This is how and why we are "aware". Because those calculations take place across the entire extent of the brain's timeline, which is about 2 sec long give or take.
Neurons share their bandwidth between local processing and global memory. Every time a neuron fires, the meaning goes to both places.f A further interesting calculation takes us directly into the realm of physical relativity. The question is: how fast can a signal get from one end of the brain to the other?
The answer is pretty interesting. According to the asynchronous update paradigm, every time a neuron fires it influences the firing of all other neurons "instantly". Your brain is about 10 cm long from frontal pole to occipital pole. If you calculate the speed of light it would take a photon
10 cm / 3 e 10 cm/sec
which is about 3 nanoseconds, to traverse that distance.
But your brain can do it SIX ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE FASTER!
Now you understand why I showed you the light cone, and why we're interested in "the limit as dt => 0".
Because 1 million things can happen, before an E-M signal gets from one side of the brain to the other. This is what the "physical unfolding of time" means.
The topology says the mind's eye is a torus, not a cone. Or more precisely, it's a cone that's been bent into the shape of a torus, with the outer edges glued together. The requirement for reentrancy is that the radius of compactification is smaller than the shortest processing interval along the timeline. Which it is, by about six orders of magnitude.
- Thread starter
- #34
How a neuron behaves
A neuron doesn't just fire. No, neurons are a lot smarter than that. Especially when they get together.
Some of you may be familiar with the Hodgkin-Huxley model, and the concept of the axon and the myelin sheath. But did you know, that when a neuron "fires", the action potential travels in both directions? In addition to traveling down the axon, it also travels backward into the dendritic tree.
This is why the FIRST spike is important. In the lab we measure "TTFS" which means "time to first spike".Most neuron populations have a lateral inhibition component, usually in the form of a small inhibitory interneuron that sits between adjacent primary neurons. The first spike that's generated will inhibit the neighboring neurons, and keep them from firing.
And the first spike is important for another reason too. When it travels backward into the dendritic tree, it defines the correlation component for self organization. For example Hebbian learning takes place when the pre- and post-synaptic neurons fire at the same time The presynaptic firing time is defined by the level of neurotransmitter at the synapse, whereas the postsynaptic firing time is defined by the invasion of the backward action potential into the dendritic tree.
Once a neuron fires, it can't fire again for a while. "A while" is called the refractory period and can be calculated using the Hodgkin-Huxley equation. But during this time, the synapses are learning. Essentially, the local activity levels are bring imprinted into the dendritic tree.
When the neuron recovers from the first spike, it becomes hyperpolarized and the next thing we see is a (short) "burst", consisting of maybe 3-5 spikes.The timing of these secondary spikes is also important, especially when the population is being synchronized by an external oscillator, but even when it isn't. The short story is the early spikes determine where the hot spots are, for criticality - whereas the later spikes determine the flavor of the criticality. Critical behavior closely resembles a phase transition (like solid/liquid/gas), you can think of the hot spots like pockets of gas in a sea of liquid (kind of like bubbles in boiling water).
Neurons are smart, they're much smarter than McCulloch-Pitts neurons. They learn in short bursts, not "all the time", and they only keep as much information as is needed for the context. When they go critical, memory capacity expands by 1000%. From this description, you can see how signal processing is separated from the memory store. It happens at a different time in each neuron. But during criticality, neurons have direct access to the store, with a wide bandwidth. This is how the important features enter consciousness, and how the fluff gets left behind.
A neuron doesn't just fire. No, neurons are a lot smarter than that. Especially when they get together.
Some of you may be familiar with the Hodgkin-Huxley model, and the concept of the axon and the myelin sheath. But did you know, that when a neuron "fires", the action potential travels in both directions? In addition to traveling down the axon, it also travels backward into the dendritic tree.
This is why the FIRST spike is important. In the lab we measure "TTFS" which means "time to first spike".Most neuron populations have a lateral inhibition component, usually in the form of a small inhibitory interneuron that sits between adjacent primary neurons. The first spike that's generated will inhibit the neighboring neurons, and keep them from firing.
And the first spike is important for another reason too. When it travels backward into the dendritic tree, it defines the correlation component for self organization. For example Hebbian learning takes place when the pre- and post-synaptic neurons fire at the same time The presynaptic firing time is defined by the level of neurotransmitter at the synapse, whereas the postsynaptic firing time is defined by the invasion of the backward action potential into the dendritic tree.
Once a neuron fires, it can't fire again for a while. "A while" is called the refractory period and can be calculated using the Hodgkin-Huxley equation. But during this time, the synapses are learning. Essentially, the local activity levels are bring imprinted into the dendritic tree.
When the neuron recovers from the first spike, it becomes hyperpolarized and the next thing we see is a (short) "burst", consisting of maybe 3-5 spikes.The timing of these secondary spikes is also important, especially when the population is being synchronized by an external oscillator, but even when it isn't. The short story is the early spikes determine where the hot spots are, for criticality - whereas the later spikes determine the flavor of the criticality. Critical behavior closely resembles a phase transition (like solid/liquid/gas), you can think of the hot spots like pockets of gas in a sea of liquid (kind of like bubbles in boiling water).
Neurons are smart, they're much smarter than McCulloch-Pitts neurons. They learn in short bursts, not "all the time", and they only keep as much information as is needed for the context. When they go critical, memory capacity expands by 1000%. From this description, you can see how signal processing is separated from the memory store. It happens at a different time in each neuron. But during criticality, neurons have direct access to the store, with a wide bandwidth. This is how the important features enter consciousness, and how the fluff gets left behind.
- Thread starter
- #35
You can calculate the probability of any two neurons firing at the same time in the absence of synchronization.
Spontaneous firing of pyramidal cells in the cortex is in the 5 Hz range, and firing lasts about 1 msec.
Spontaneous firing is not regular, it is highly irregular. The distribution approximates a Poisson process. Given a Poisson process with independent and stationary increments, and 20 billion neurons with the same characteristics, the formula says "about a million" neurons will fire within the 1 msec refractory window.
Which is about 0.002%
For all practical purposes, neuron firing is completely asynchronous.
There are only two ways to achieve synchrony: through common input, and with internal (network) coupling.
Spontaneous firing of pyramidal cells in the cortex is in the 5 Hz range, and firing lasts about 1 msec.
Spontaneous firing is not regular, it is highly irregular. The distribution approximates a Poisson process. Given a Poisson process with independent and stationary increments, and 20 billion neurons with the same characteristics, the formula says "about a million" neurons will fire within the 1 msec refractory window.
Which is about 0.002%
For all practical purposes, neuron firing is completely asynchronous.
There are only two ways to achieve synchrony: through common input, and with internal (network) coupling.
para bellum
Diamond Member
As I understand it, time is just a dimension of the universe. Not unlike the spatial dimensions, and possibly temperature. That is to say, there is an origin point, and it varies only in scale.
The origin being the Big Bang. Before that, there was no time and space as we know it.
If there is a "Big Crunch", will time reverse? It does not seem likely to me...
You need consciousness to experience time, but it's existence is not dependent on your consciousness- there are processes that take place over time that occur independent of the observer- atomic decay for example. The universe was evolving before we came along...
The light cone is a 3 dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional spacetime. It represents an expanding sphere. The past light cone is the portion of the universe that is observable to us, the future light cone is the portion of the universe where we are observable to someone else. If you were to take a slice of the light cone at a particular moment in time, you are freezing a dimension. The resultant disc is a two dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional sphere with a fixed radius.
There is a theoretical way information from outside our light cone could reach us. Imagine a civilization (or a network of civilizations) who exist outside our light cone, but whose light cones intersect ours- information from them could be transmitted to us even though it was not directly observable. Might be a good sci-fi story sometime...
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Dante
"The Libido for the Ugly"
In most time series analysis, past performance is used to predict the future.
Statistics is based on the idea of "stationary" generators (Markov processes being an example).
In probability theory, the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation describes two types of behaviors, one is smoothe an continuous like Brownian motion, the other is discontinuous and is called a "jump" process for that reason.
The economist Robert Merton proposed hybrid behavior for a stock ticker, where prices show large jumps but are approximately continuous in between.
But there is an entirely different way of looking at time series. Instead of using past behavior to predict the future, we use actual outcomes (models of future behavior) to interpret the recent past. This is equivalent under translation, to "selecting from possible futures", which is something quite different from determining historical mean and variance.
When we ask the system to generate possible outcomes we are looking for orthogonal results. Instead of predicting the most likely outcome we are looking for a set of distinctly different outcomes, where the differences are orthogonal. In essence we are asking what are the "factor" that are relevant for future outcomes.
We can thus create a "space" of possible outcomes, where each factor is like a dimension. This way, predicting the most likely outcome is like placing a point in the space, whereas assessing the range of outcomes is like drawing the coordinate axes.
In the brain there are two sources of information about sensory events, one is from the receptors and the other is from motor activity (usually modeled as efference copy). At some point the motor output becomes irreversible, it can no longer be stopped. At this point we can predict the future with near 100% accuracy, if everything else remains stable.
The salient feature of the irreversibility is it occurs "before" now. It actually occurs in the future, so to speak.
The only way to model this is with a system that continually generates the future, "in real time". It has to do the same thing as a room full of analysts at Goldman Sachs.
Is it acheivable with AI? Absolutely. Certainly. It can be done with the $50 AI hat from Raspberry Pi.
The interesting and important piece is the relationship between awareness and irreversibility. This is an entirely new concept, and we'll have to see how it plays out in the next few years.
Irreversible process - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Uhm, for decades I have been interested in temporal lobe epilepsy stuff. "Temporal" stuff ( stuff, being a highly technical term here), online usually gets my attention. "This is an entirely new concept." -- Is it? Entirely new? The link I post when combined with the AI connection here reminds me of when people will claim "memories/the brain, like files on a computer"
Temporal irreversibility of neural dynamics as a signature of consciousness
"Our results show that a preferred temporal direction is manifest in the neural activity evoked by conscious mentation and in the phenomenology of the passage of time, establishing common ground to tackle the relationship between brain and subjective experience."
Keywords: ECoG; consciousness; ketamine; sleep; time’s arrow.
- Thread starter
- #38
A preferred temporal direction is "induced" by real events. It is learned. This is one of the reasons babies aren't fully conscious, they haven't learned that yet.
Our brains use time in different ways. Sometimes it is reversible, sometimes not. I showed an example of the transition in my Hawaiian earring drawing. Compactification plays a key role. Sometimes it's very simple like an Alexandroff 1-point, other times it's more topological like a Cech-Stone.
Do you understand compactification? It means making a space (or a shape, a surface) compact. It means there are no gaps or holes. For example, "linear time" is not compact. Because it has two dangling ends, at + infinity and - infinity. Similarly, any interval of linear time (represented by a line segment on the real number line) is not compact either, for the same reason, it has two "end points".
However we can "embed" this non- compact space, into a compact space. In various ways. In Alexandroff 1-point, we simply join the ends, we "glue them together". This means our line segment becomes a circle. And, if you consider that time always moves from future to past, this defines an orientation, as you travel around the circle. HOWEVER, if you then project the circle back down into the original line segment, you'll find TWO directions of travel instead of just one. So in this example our original arrow of time has become bidirectional.
It's not bidirectional "at once", it kind of oscillates back and forth, as we travel from one endpoint to the other. However you can MAKE it bidirectional "at once" by taking different size intervals. In my Hawaiian earring example I show how this works. If you take any two of the compactified intervals (circles) you'll find that there is a region of overlap when you project back down to the "time-line". If you do this enough times you'll find that every point in the line has become bidirectional.
Here is a discussion of gluing and what it means in topology, along with some pretty pictures that make the concept understandable.
Topology: Quotient Topology and Gluing
In topology, there’s the concept of gluing points or subspaces together. For example, take the closed interval X = [0, 1] and glue the endpoints 0 and 1 together. Pictorially, we get: That lo…
mathstrek.blog
These Wiki pages are also relevant (note the verbiage about the conformal group of spacetime).
Compactification (mathematics) - Wikipedia
Conformal group - Wikipedia
When we compactify an interval of time, the coordinate of a point on the line segment changes into an angle on the circle, IF we can define an origin in the circle's coordinate system. Conformal mappings are those that preserve angles.
The induced origin is obviously not a part of the compactification mapping. However it can still be projected back onto the timeline. When we do this, we discover that any and all such origins live at the same point, which we conveniently define to be t=0, or "now". Thus the compactification unfolds the point "now", it maps into a fiber bundle of compactification origins.
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Why should anyone take you seriously after reacting "I don't have time for any bullshit today" when someone proves to you that chaotic systems are deterministic when you insisted they were not? that's a huge misunderstanding on your part and shows you can't admit error like an adult.A preferred temporal direction is "induced" by real events. It is learned. This is one of the reasons babies aren't fully conscious, they haven't learned that yet.
Our brains use time in different ways. Sometimes it is reversible, sometimes not. I showed an example of the transition in my Hawaiian earring drawing. Compactification plays a key role. Sometimes it's very simple like an Alexandroff 1-point, other times it's more topological like a Cech-Stone.
Do you understand compactification? It means making a space (or a shape, a surface) compact. It means there are no gaps or holes. For example, "linear time" is not compact. Because it has two dangling ends, at + infinity and - infinity. Similarly, any interval of linear time (represented by a line segment on the real number line) is not compact either, for the same reason, it has two "end points".
However we can "embed" this non- compact space, into a compact space. In various ways. In Alexandroff 1-point, we simply join the ends, we "glue them together". This means our line segment becomes a circle. And, if you consider that time always moves from future to past, this defines an orientation, as you travel around the circle. HOWEVER, if you then project the circle back down into the original line segment, you'll find TWO directions of travel instead of just one. So in this example our original arrow of time has become bidirectional.
It's not bidirectional "at once", it kind of oscillates back and forth, as we travel from one endpoint to the other. However you can MAKE it bidirectional "at once" by taking different size intervals. In my Hawaiian earring example I show how this works. If you take any two of the compactified intervals (circles) you'll find that there is a region of overlap when you project back down to the "time-line". If you do this enough times you'll find that every point in the line has become bidirectional.
Here is a discussion of gluing and what it means in topology, along with some pretty pictures that make the concept understandable.
Topology: Quotient Topology and Gluing
In topology, there’s the concept of gluing points or subspaces together. For example, take the closed interval X = [0, 1] and glue the endpoints 0 and 1 together. Pictorially, we get: That lo…
These Wiki pages are also relevant (note the verbiage about the conformal group of spacetime).
Compactification (mathematics) - Wikipedia
Conformal group - Wikipedia
When we compactify an interval of time, the coordinate of a point on the line segment changes into an angle on the circle, IF we can define an origin in the circle's coordinate system. Conformal mappings are those that preserve angles.
The induced origin is obviously not a part of the compactification mapping. However it can still be projected back onto the timeline. When we do this, we discover that any and all such origins live at the same point, which we conveniently define to be t=0, or "now". Thus the compactification unfolds the point "now", it maps into a fiber bundle of compactification origins.
I'd like an answer please, you make lofty claims here regularly to the point of insinuating you are a superior intellect, so please explain why you can't simply say "OK I was wrong to say that, what I meant was..." or something like that?
Being wrong and admitting it earns respect, being wrong and berating someone who points that out to you makes you look like an arrogant blowhard.
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You can now leverage .Net and therefore C# on an MPU board, take a look here.
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