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Georgina,

"The question might be asked which scale of analysis has the greatest explanatory power for this particular phenomenon or scenario?"

I think this is a very important observation, in that it arises from the dynamics of observation. We are constantly expanding or narrowing our fields of view in many different ways to describe and explain various aspects of reality. The result is in itself a kind of wave action, because like a gravitational black hole, too much focus and we lose all contact and perspective with context. Conversely a too broad view and the result is a dissipation of perspective that becomes too generic and flat. So we are constantly having to modulate our perspective in a dynamic fashion that is not always accepted by an establishment that needs some agreed on framework to exist. These accepted frames are necessary, but go through their own wave-like lifecycle, as they first grow in explanatory effectiveness and then become institutionalized, defensive and eventually isolated from the context and so wither away.

I guess I should have phrased the coin analogy as that we can't be two sides of the coin at the same time. In the wave analogy, we can't be going both directions at once.

In Jill Tayler's talk she makes this observation, " And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy."

Simplistically, our left brain makes distinctions and our right brain makes connections. Obviously we need both, but while the distinctions are fundamentally necessary to have structure, the particular distinctions are subjective. The lines are like horizons; quite clear at a distance, but fade on examination. So the reality requires both sides of this coin and they are a larger whole, they still need to be separate, like polarities.

My brain is starting to go in several directions on this and I have to go to work,....

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Georgina,

I kind of wandered off into the multitude of dichotomies there.

I do think some of the implications of what Dr. Talyor is saying have to be taken into consideration, not just from a physics standpoint, but a in psychological context as well. Consider:

"when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another.... The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each hemisphere thinks about different things, they care about different things, and dare I say, they have very different personalities.

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like.

Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities.....But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you."

Think about that in the context of these paragraphs from the link I posted above:

""Good science" was therefore perceived as hypothesis testing and any theoretical statement is only valid if it can be empirically tested and verified (the verifiability principle). Karl Popper is reported as stating it was the wish to distinguish Einstein's theory from that of Freud, Adler and Marx, that led him to propose falsifiability as the criterion for separating science from pseudo-science. http://www.iep.utm.edu/cr-ratio/

This philosophical view of empirical testing was adopted by the Behaviourists such as B.F. Skinner, whilst psychoanalytic theories, amongst others, were dismissed as "untestable" or "unfalsifiable" and therefore without value. The logical positivist approach, whilst so widely adopted within scientific research, effectively dismissed all metaphysical and also theological statements as meaningless, along with phenomonology."

Now think of where the study of physics is now. It's all about information, measurement and statistics. The idea of the present as being physically real, as opposed to a relative point in a four dimensional geometry, is considered naive. Because energy cannot be completely defined, it is demoted to second order to information. Meanwhile math, the study of order and information, is effectively deified. Among the cognoscenti every variation of every concept is credited to whomever first espoused it and thus is differentiated. Any cross referencing of these ideas has to follow protocol. A recent example I have of trying to cross reference is a discussion I had with Lawrence on his thread, where I compared time and temperature to frequency and amplitude. Suffice to say, it was not an acceptable formulation. I've often had similar conflicts with Tom about very simple ideas, such as my observation about time. You might say the entire field has locked itself in the left brain and barred the door. Yet no matter how many 11 dimensional multiverses they spin out, it is perfectly ok, because there is a logical thread that can be drawn through all the steps. That the result might be a form of C.S. Escher sketch of stairs or waterfalls, isn't a problem, because if the math works, it must be real.

Which is to say this is not a situation which will succumb to reason. Something will have to happen, some observation or failed experiment that is so large it cannot be swept under the rug. Given all the dark energy, inflation, wormholes, multiworlds, etc. already under the rug, it will have to be huge. Then again, it might be just time. Future generations are not going to spend their careers worshiping at the alter of untestable theories and can only pick at the threads holding this picture together. We can only hope to give them something to think about.

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Dr. Taylor's experience demonstrates that the sensory input is very different from the structured and comprehensible output generated from it. The Image output of the brain is a product of the processing (of the inputs) not just passive amalgamation of inputs that are by themselves comprehensible. When the processing fails as it did during Dr. Taylor's stroke, the output can be indecipherable.

I wanted to put a link to a video I had seen about adults who had their sight restored learning to see. I can't remember what it was called- so I have found all sorts of other interesting things on You Tube instead, like a device called Brainport which transmits a signal from a camera to the tongue to give a kind of vision, but not what I was looking for!Brainport on You Tube

In order to recognise individual shapes, rather than a single composite shape or assumption that all overlapping portions are extra objects, the formerly blind learners had to see the different shapes moving separately from each other and learn that they were representing different separate objects.

I also found The McGurk effect on You Tube, which shows that visual data can override auditory data when they conflict. So again the brain 'decides what is happening' giving a comprehensible output rather than one which is confusing because of the conflicting inputs.

The distinction of the fabricated output reality, from the EM and other sensory data obtained from the environment is clearly demonstrated by these examples and many others, in particular the optical illusions. It is important to grasp that it is not material objects that are being manifested from the EM radiation. That overcomes the problem of the grandfather paradox and the barn pole paradox as what is seen is a fabrication formed from the data not actual independently existing objects. Though the output may have a time dimension due to data transmission delay there are not material objects spread through time and the way in which data is amalgamated can cause distortion of the object that is perceived.

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Georgina,

"The Image output of the brain is a product of the processing (of the inputs) not just passive amalgamation of inputs that are by themselves comprehensible. When the processing fails as it did during Dr. Taylor's stroke, the output can be indecipherable."

Consider that the input is inherently dynamic and the output is inherently static. What the processing does is edit the input to the degree the limited processing facilities of the human mind are not overloaded. Then it tries to organize the resulting into patterns.

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Hi John,

I've have considered your last message but don't think I can agree that the output is static. The visual input is made up from photons that reach the eye and that is happening continually if the eyes are open. When the input reaches the retina there is some filtering as some inputs have insufficient intensity to cause activation of specific receptor cells. There is also amalgamation of signals into the different channels which then proceed to further processing in the visual cortex, such as enhancement of edges. So the output is not a faithful representation of the data received but more of a 'distillation' and augmentation. That does not occur instantaneously so the updating of the observed output is (further) delayed and not as rapidly occurring as the input is being received. That delay is well illustrated by the ticking clock illusion that was mentioned on this site not so long ago.

The bit that confused me was when you said the output is static. Is it? I suppose there is a subjective element to this and that might therefore make this following observation sound strange. If I think about what I am seeing carefully, rather than just taking it as what it appears to be, I see that it is made up of many tiny flickering and moving dots. This is particularly obvious out of doors on a very bright day. Then some particularly bright dots can be seen following undulating or streaking paths across the visual field.I have spent time on a number of occasions watching this motion which looks a bit like weaving, though the paths are only short and then the bright dot vanishes, not like long threads. It is anything but a an image made of static pixels or static dots such as in a print image. Though if the image reality was a still photograph produced by a photographic film or digital camera sensor the output would be static because the chemical change or code on the memory chip, once the process is complete, is relatively stable.

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Georgina,

We live in a very dynamic reality and it's that reality we perceive. When we try to understand it, we create these conceptually static models, such as Julian's triangles. Or saying 1+1=2. Then because our most distilled and concentrated knowledge is impervious to change, or we wouldn't consider it fundamental if it was subject to change, then we assume reality must be also fundamentally static. It is a form of circular logic.

Your comments about those swirls and spots in your vision raise alot of my own experiences with examining reality. Yes, our eyes are little sacks of fluid, so it makes sense we see such eddies and waves. I find though that they are reflective of our consciousness. As I said earlier, our consciousness is a bit of a spring trap and lock on movement, even that in our eyes. Yet because awareness is a series of frames, we constantly have one replacing the previous. When you concentrate on an area of these forms, they freeze in there shape, because your eye is concentrating on them, yet they move about as you move your eyes. After a bit of practice, you can relax your vision enough to the forms don't freeze and yet are still affected by the movement of your vision. Then you will start to see them in three D, much as a camara will more clearly focus on different depths, with more aperture. After you really begin to explore this, the boundaries between what seems inside your eyes and what is outside, will start to mix. After a while the world outside your brain becomes part of your mind in ways you never dreamed possible.

On a personal note, my life is turned upsidedown. My semi-ex-wife, whom I've been separated from for about ten years, but having a daughter with, have developed a strong friendship, given we are both rather prickly people, managed to get hit by a car and killed. This has now left me with a very headstrong teenage daughter to raise and a riding school to attempt to sustain, for as long as possible. It is a bit like having a hunk of my heart ripped out and handed to me to fix and/or bury. Which is to say my participation in these conversations might be even more limited than it has been. I'm now staying in my old house with the dog, as the daughter is over at a friends, with other friend. I've never been good at sustaining friendships, since most people don't like to discuss the things I like to discuss. So even though I have no time for these conversations, I will do my best to keep them up. Life is a bitch, then you die.

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Some context on that last statement: It was something I used to say alot in younger days and some people think it means life is bad, but what it really means is to suck it up and keep moving forward, no matter what.

Also this computer is a microsoft and doesn't seem to have spell check I can find and the letters in this box are not very clear.

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John,

You: "Life is a bitch, then you die."

You, from your followup message: "Some context on that last statement: It was something I used to say alot in younger days and some people think it means life is bad, but what it really means is to suck it up and keep moving forward, no matter what."

Me: Life is worth living after the wound, or wounds, that hurt a lot and never go away. Those who hurt can, while enduring the hurt, take on responsibilities to try to make living better for others. Nothing takes the hurt away! Yet, life is a risk worth taking. Perhaps the dying takes the hurt away; however, I don't think that, in death, it matters whether or not the personal hurt ends so long as one's efforts for goodness survive. Lack of recognition by others does not change my opinion.

Your message is embraced.

James

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Dear John ,

I am sorry to hear about your loss and current difficulties. When my father died my mother in law, who was already herself a widow, advised my mother that there are only two choices. To sink or to swim. She said "I chose to swim and so must you". I think it was good advice because life goes on and choosing to sink is a dead end going nowhere. Swim, don't stop, and eventually you will find your feet again. If its hard to do it for yourself, do it for your daughter. Its nice to chat but its important to prioritize too (I also need that reminder).Take care of yourself and find the strength that you need to carry on. Georgina.

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James,

I don't think death takes all the pain away. I woke up with a horrible pounding headache and a massive cramp in one leg and it felt like her telling me she was not happy and not finished, but had to let go.

Georgina,

I know what you mean that I keep priorities in line, but it's a stop and go process, getting everything straight, so this is one way to keep focused. I often say life is like riding a bicycle. You keep moving forward, or you fall over. Sometimes it's uphill and sometimes it's downhill. Sometimes slow and sometimes fast, but never static. Unless it's electricity.

This is a part of my mind and thus part of me. Love all.

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John,

Your description of energy having a frequency of time and an amplitude of temperature is better than previous descriptions where you have equated time and temperature. Though related they are clearly not the same thing, as amounts of alteration happening can vary within the same chosen time interval. It is, as I think can be implied from your more recent description, that the amount of alteration happening, which includes ageing processes and heat, can vary without the passage of time being changed as a consequence of that.Similarly altering the time interval considered, will not affect the process that is occurring.I think that your change of description brings our viewpoints on passage of time much closer.

Ageing, though it has a relationship to passage of time, is not just directly proportional to it. There are numerous variables that can affect the amount of ageing taking place. Such as exposure to free radicals, stress levels, disease, inflammation, diet, exercise, exposure to chemicals that affect metabolism; for example inhibiting DNA repair processes, pattern of sunlight exposure, sleep. When I said to Andreas Boe that I wanted to septate time and ageing I meant it is helpful to consider them separately and not to regard the ageing as a kind of clock by which passage of time can be determined. I did not mean to imply that they are completely separate in nature.

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Georgina,

Yes, I hit on that relationship some weeks back. Knowedge naturally grows out of knocking heads together and gathering the sparks and flakes to start fires.

I would say though that altering the time interval would have effects on the process occuring, not only for the reasons of changing relationships between differnt processes, but if the same energy was stretched, it would lower the amplitude, as it is more distributed. Conversely, maintaining the same amplitude would require significantly more energy.

They are both measures of activity, not causes. In biology, there are multitudes of biorhythmns all working towards a larger symphony of life. Society is try to figure out how, in ever larger numbers. If life on this planet survives a few thousand more years and contiues to evolve, one wonders what it might look like.

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John,

you mentioned "stretching out the energy". I'm consider baking a cake: it can be made to take longer by having a lower oven temperature. The change in choice time interval between putting mixture in the oven and taking out cooked cake is affecting the process but only indirectly. It is the change in the way the heat is supplied to the process (turning the dial on the oven to make that happen) that is giving the slower baking not a change to the passage of time.

So I think you mean duration of the process for frequency and by 'temperature' you mean heat i.e. amount of activity, for amplitude. More intense activity completes a process in a shorter time and less activity completes the process in a longer time.

However to complicate matters two chemical reactions that have the same raw ingredients and temperature could occur at different rates one with a catalyst or enzyme and one without. The amount of activity is not increased but the reaction is optimised by allowing the ingredients to come together in a more efficacious way. I mean more of the interactions will result in product not there are more interactions. Considering also the ageing processes, a high level of damage might lead to greater rate of ageing but not necessarily. If the repair processes are also working at a higher than normal rate they might counteract the increased rate of damage.

So the relationship between duration of a process and -amount of activity- is not just a simple one. The efficiency of -accumulation of those changes under consideration- is the relevant issue. With the examples discussed:There is increased rate of accumulation of product due to efficient coming together of ingredients with a catalyst or enzyme and there is inefficient accumulation of deleterious changes due to ageing processes with active ongoing repair of damage.

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I'll consider baking a cake! : )

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first steps towards a truly immersive virtual reality

Which makes me think it should be possible to feel something in a completely different part of the house, or even the world. If sensors are used to ascertain the feedback that would be generated by touching an object, that can then be transmitted to the remote observer who could then feel that input safely via the virtual hand. The virtual hand could feel anywhere there is a proxy to provide feedback.

The controller can still use their own manual dexterity within the virtual simulation but in doing so function in the real world via a remote robot proxy. That's so cool though I think it would be better without the brain implant as I don't think people would want that. It would be really useful for working for example in hazardous environments. It could even be used eventually to operate on people who are at a distant location. A top surgeon would not have to be confined to working in one hospital but wherever in the world his/her talent is required.

Just using the information from remote sensors it should be possible to have first person experience of extreme sports (as a nice example) by having sensors attached to an athlete give information to the body of the couch potato who then shares the "real time" experience.If simple touch, sound and visual data is augmented by muscle stimulation the passive recipient could even get a physical work out. Muscle stimulation set according to fitness level or level of realism required. That would be such a cool way to exercise as it could be a different sport in a different location in the world each day, without years of practice to get good at them.

Several people could share the same experience simultaneously by sharing the same data to create their simulations. That could be useful in a hazardous situation, as several different minds can evaluate what is happening without having to put all of those people into the dangerous situation in real life. If advice is needed it would not be necessary to describe what is happening but only to have the advisers plug into the virtual experience recreated from all of the remote sensory inputs.

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Georgina

I was writing a response earlier when power went out. Be a long hurricane. In agreement on your points but the phone is not the way to carry on a conversation. Later.

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This may be useful background context, which may assist readers to gain better understanding the relationships shown on the explanatory framework diagram;The relationship between Object reality and Image reality has some similarity to the description of implicate and explicate orders decribed in this paper -

ALGEBRAS, QUANTUM THEORY AND PRE-SPACE by F. A. M. FRESCURA and B. J. HILEY, Department of Physics, Birkbeck College, London WC1E 7HX UK (Received In February, 22, 1984)the following is excepts from that paper:

Quote:"In the traditional view, it is assumed that there exists a reality in space-time and that this reality is a given thing, all of whose aspects can be viewed or articulated at any given moment. Bohr was the first to point out that quantum mechanics called this traditional outlook into question. To him the "indivisibility of the quantum of action'', which was his way of describing the uncertainty principle, implied that not all aspects of a system can be viewed simultaneously.

Quote:"The Cartesian view was thus limited and had to be replaced by a very different outlook which was to be justified by the principle of complementarity in which complementary views, which at a classical level are contradictory, enter the description of nature in a necessary and essential way.For many, this implied a limitation to any further intuitive development in physics. But for Bohm, such a view seemed too restrictive and the introduction of the implicate order suggested a way forward without the need for classically contradictory statements. For him the manifestation of outward appearances involved forming explicate orders so that these orders emerged from the implicate order in a well defined way. What then becomes a fundamental form of description is the relation between the implicate and the explicate orders. In this view, space-time itself must be part of an explicate order. When this order is in its implicate form, it is called pre-space (Bohm and Hi1ey [6]). In this view, the space-time manifold is not a priori given. Rather it is to be abstracted from a deeper prespace."

Quote"In this pre-space, the notion of locality is not primary but is a relationship in prespace which, in an appropriate explicate order, becomes a local order in the explicate space-time....."

Quote:"Whatever the precise nature of these processes we see that the appearance of non-locality arises from the implicate pre-space through relationships that cannot be made local. Thus we see the possibility of the non-locality in quantum mechanics arising in a new and subtle way.Clearly a description of the implicate order cannot be based upon particles or fields acting locally in an a priori given space-time. We prefer to consider a view more akin to that of Whitehead, which regards process as the primary form. He used the more neutral term activity. In this view, an object will arise as an abstraction from a quasi-stable relatively invariant feature of the basic underlying activity." End quote

6. Bohm D. and Hiley B., Generalisation of the Twistor to Clifford Algebras as a Basis for Geometry, Revista Brasileira de Physica, Volume Especial, Os 70 anos de Mario Schonberg, 1-26, 1984.

***Note, It was said in that paper "In this pre-space, the notion of locality is not primary but is a relationship in prespace which, in an appropriate explicate order, becomes a local order in the explicate space-time."***

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Georgina,

Well, I'm back on line, momentarily at least. Funeral today. The hurricane delayed it two days. My daughter gave the eulogy. Had us all crying. She is 17.

Input is the indeterminate factor, even if the laws are deterministic.

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I want express my condolences to John.

These words are nothing, this is not my language, but the feelings is profoundly true.

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John, your daughter is so brave, be proud of her. The sadness may come and go, like waves, but will gradually diminish in intensity. It has been a grim time for you and your country. Time for you to help each other now so that healing and recovery can happen-and it will.