Reclusland

The morning of the 23rd, I was checking my bloglines, and found a new post by Rob over at the 10 Dimensions, explaining why (according to his system of intuitively visualizing the dimensions) time should properly be considered a space through which the third dimension moves, not a different kind of dimension (temporal) separate from other (spatial) dimensions.

Mainly to help get my head wrapped around the idea, I responded with a comment about how the 4th dimension might be thought of as a time plane through which our 3 dimensional space-point moves (similar to a 1 dimensional point moving in a line through a 2 dimensional plane), and like that one dimensional point, our movement through the (4D) time plane would seem to us to be a straight line, no matter how twisted that movement was through that plane (or a higher, 5D time-sphere).

I also added a thought about how holding our hand in one place, moving it away and then back to the same place might be though of as a way of traveling back in “time”, and how it’s just in our memory that the two spacial/temporal localities are different.  I’ve since rethought that, and will explain how my thinking has changed a bit later*.

The point, though, is that I checked Tim Boucher’s site immediately thereafter, and found basically a description of the same process:
The system, with over a hundred billion neurons, processed the information from input to output in just half a second. All your knowledge was evaluated. Walter Freeman, the famous neurobiologist, defined this amazing ability. “The cognitive guys think it’s just impossible to keep throwing everything you’ve got into the computation every time. But, that is exactly what the brain does. Consciousness is about bringing your entire history to bear on your next step, your next breath, your next moment.” The mind was holistic. It evaluated all its knowledge for the next activity. How could so much information be processed so quickly? Where could such knowledge be stored?”

“bringing your entire history to bear on your next step, your next breath, your next moment” is a perfect description of the process involved in making a straight line out of our twisting (and, I would guess, many-branched) travels through the time-space-information-sphere.   To think that the brain is somehow actually processing and storing an endless stream of information and then reprocessing it again every moment, in response to various stimuli is, in my opinion, like looking up a horses’ ass to find out whether it’s wearing a bit and harness.

Going about things from the wrong end, so to speak…

All that information is always there, floating around us, and it’s just our mind that moves through that information in a meaningful manner.  That is, nothing is moving except the mind, and time (as a line) is an illusion!  A linear sense of time just seems to be the best that we pull off, as of yet.  In the very least, our manner of moving through this information-sphere should be adjustable, if we could just figure out a way to convince our sense-of-having-a-self that it can come a long for the ride without being obliterated.

This little bit of synchronicity lead to a rather large bubbling up of other associated links (on what might or might not be considered the same topic), which was all captured on Tim’s site.  A great time was had by all.  Check here for the relative posts.

As for the possibility of an AI (or an AN) reaching this level of {no mind}, I’ll discuss my thoughts on that eventually as well.  Just not here.  That would take a much longer post…

**I later realized that moving my hand from one spot and then moving it away and back again to the same spot should not really be considered “traveling back in time”, since to think of it that way is to think of time as being only linear (which in my opinion is a mistake, or at least an over-simplification).

As everything changes together, merely repeating that one variable is not “going back in time”.  The hand itself does not really move through time at all, because that hand of two seconds ago is not the same as this hand of two seconds later.  Well, you might be able to consider it to be the same hand, depending on how you define “this hand” and “that hand”. And yet, on the other hand…

It is really only our awareness/consciousness that moves through information-space/time in such a way that we perceive our movement through time to be linear.  Our hand, as well as our body, is just a vehicle-form in which consciousness takes refuge, something inhabited and then discarded after a time.  And I guess what we all want to know is, “am I that consciousness, or am I just the body?”

Well, that depends of your definition of “I”.