Time counts. by Thomas Howard Ray

Hi Eckard,

I wasn't one who mistook your argument as "merely minimalistic." I fully grasp your preference for the real domain and denial of any mathematical model that requires physical back-action to manifest observables. Really, I get it.

My argument, however, is based on principles of complex system self organization that necessitate feedback effects in which time boundaries are blurred. You will find a rigorous argument in my ICCS 2007 paper ("Time, change and self-organization")that positive feedback informs the future; negative feedback informs the present.

You write, "Are there really two different points, one in the past and one in the future? In reality, future points do not yet exist. If we create a model that is independent from the actual border between past and future, then we may shift the point of consideration at will. It is, however, impossible to consider something in advance of the considered point of view."

I appreciate that you hold this philosophy. However, there is no physics in it. Your boundary between past and future events is arbitrary, while it is demonstrable that future information shapes present events continuously--to take a simple example, the positive feedback between microphone and amplifier.

So agreement between you and me that "... the future cannot influence the past ..." is not the issue. We very well know that future events do influence the present. I take the conventional view of "the past" as frozen information. As such, the past is a product of dynamical interaction between present and future events.

Tom

Dear Tom,

Unfortunately the insights of you and me are not generally accepted. What you called my philosophy is the belief in reality independent of anything else. I do not see a reasonable alternative.

What about separation between past and future, I see this indeed sometimes difficult to handle in systems with prediction. For instance we are speaking in German of the shadows of events to come.

However, the clear separation is always possible and reasonable if we have a "pointlike" abstract point of view.

A spatially extended clock would also belong to an earlier local time at the more eastward located parts of it as compared to the more westward located parts. Such sophism is not helpful.

What about positive feedback, I cannot confirm that future acts back on the past in this case. Nimtz made similar mistakes.

Please do not feel offended. I would appreciate you looking at the consequences I tried to reveal. So far, nobody refuted my suspicions while the majority wonders why complex-valued theory does not perform better as compared with real-valued cepstrum, model of cochlea, coding of sound, etc.

Eckard

'lo Mr. Ray,

just duckin' in for a quick hello, glad to see you've found someone to chat with here. while not technically adept enough in math myself to converse here with great specificity, my eyes are good enough to see that there is some good stuff going on with your work here; one of only a handful of papers here actually employing hard data in support - a real world connection. yes! :-) after reading nearly 100 of these papers here, i remain enthusiastic about yours.

jumping into the fray re: "i", from my own perspective in consciousness exploration and cognitive science, there is indeed physical evidence in support of this notion. precognition happens. it's a bit off topic to get into great detail, but it's far from being a question of 'if' any longer, but 'how'. in addition to the implications of a space-like temporal quality, there seems to be no difference in time requirements for accessing targets close in time/space than there is for accessing much more distant time/space target coordinates. this strongly suggests that consciousness is "taking a short-cut through 'i'".

Lawrence, i've not yet gotten to your paper, but am looking forward to it after reading Masreliez' 'time as a cosmological component' and his use of scaling there (another one of the few here actually using data in support). realizing there may be vast differences, but looking forward to yours none-the-less.

regards,

:-)

matt kolasinski

Matt, you made my day. Thanks!

I'm glad that you dropped by, becasue I am reminded that I meant to comment on your essay, too, though I could not find a way to engage with your humanistic point of view. On rereading, I find profound the statenent:

"...the nature of time historically cannot adequately be considered in isolation as a discrete entity, but only in context of dynamic systems, of which our consciousness

happens to be a part. We see also that the concept of time is primarily derived, not from some absolute, but from comparison of relative cyclical intervals."

Primary to complex systems science is the notion that while the aggregation of time intervals in a system of self organizing nodes may look like a featureless timescape, at discrete short intervals, trajectories and the roles of individual nodes in the network may vary radically by time scale. (Google Braha & Bar-Yam, "From dynamic centrality to temporary fame.")

The principle of scale invariance, which both Lawrence and I support, theoretically guarantees smoothly analytical events at every scale. You could be right about the dynamic interaction of consciousness with the rest of the physical world, in terms of feedback effects and the scale of events under consideration.

My best,

Tom

Precognition happens?

Well, one can see a blast before the pressure wave arrives. However, nobody so far was in position to tell me a single case of non-causality in reality. Even a plan can already be something more or less real.

Scale invariance?

I agree for the scale of past events, no matter whether or not it is known. Future events are mere predictions, no matter how likely they will become true. Any tenable objections?

Eckard Blumschein

Hello Eckard,

with 'Precognition happens?'

you appear to be addressing me. this is not the time or place to get into that topic, but there is at least one relatively simple protocol which was developed back in the 70s, which produces verifiable positive results. it has been independently replicated time and again. you most likely would also be able to experience at least some degree of success in this yourself. it has some profound implications for our concept of time.

i wouldn't argue for 'non-causality' in this. i wouldn't argue against it either. there's presently no working model for this.

future predictions are future predictions. no argument. what gets interesting is the odds against chance of the extent of details in predictions manifesting.

a little over a year ago now, a relatively famous adventurer named Fossett failed to return from a solo flight in which he was supposed to be scouting for a test site for a land speed trial of a vehicle he was supposed to pilot. he disappeared. a massive search was conducted, unsuccessfully.

i belong to a little e-group of persons who use the above mentioned protocol, and the topic came up there. where is he?

i wasn't terribly interested, but the prattle drew my attention which elicited some impressions. i posted them to the group at the time. they're still in the archives with the date and time stamp.

i had him impacting a mountainside nearly head on, sparse pine trees, a rounded weathered boulder, dead on impact.

all that could be relatively easy to guess. but people were looking everywhere, including flat desert areas.

what did kind of stand out was that i had said in my post that there was something about the crash which made it particularly difficult to spot from the air and that he would be found in a couple of years by hikers.

he was found one year later by one hiker. the plane was so badly damaged, it couldn't be recognized as a plane from the air. within a couple of weeks, winter weather moved in in the Mammoth Lakes area and further investigation of the crash site was curtailed until next summer - effectively pushing it to two years.

there were a couple of items i was off on - i had a light colored boulder, and the most of the plane was found on a dark colored boulder. i had 'a couple of hikers' - there was only one in the news, but i do not know that he was actually alone when he made the initial find of some personal items which lead to the locating of the crash site. i had 'will be found in a couple of years' - technically only one year. but he -was- found. what was left of him. positive id from a small bone fragment.

some further details about the specific point of impact are as yet unavailable from the news feedback.

over all, the degree of correspondence between the 'prediction' and the future event wasn't too shabby. that's quite a bit of 'good guessing'. and it was just a quick look, i hadn't really hung out with it. it may not look like much, at least not until you start comparing it to some of the other 'guessing' that was being done.

i have done a bit of volunteer work along these lines for one major metropolitan police department and for the equivalent of the coast guard of a friendly foreign nation. in both instances on their initiation, their request.

this is typical of what it looks like. i've hit 100% with more detail on occasion (similarly recorded in time/date stamped emails). sometimes i don't do as well as this. i'm far from the best at this, far from 'world class'.

there are thousands of people who do this, many of them much better than i am. like all physical performance things, individual 'talent' may vary. there are a lot of factors which are known by this time to influence these perceptions. degree of energy content of an event would appear to be one of them. if a target is terribly technical, some familiarity with that technology is helpful if one wishes to describe it (making tasking future technologies we don't presently understand challenging) there's a curious spike around 13:30 sidereal time. precognition may be a capability for only a portion of the population (appx 60%) - it apparently is a physical trait.

no idea how it happens. an assertion that it is not merely 'guessing' is based on statistical results.

Tom, my apologies for taking up space here on your forum on this. hopefully it may be of interest/relevance to you as well. it's why i'm interested in 'i' - thinking consciousness may be taking a shortcut...

:-)

matt kolasinski

Hi Matt,

You write, "Tom, my apologies for taking up space here on your forum on this. hopefully it may be of interest/relevance to you as well. it's why i'm interested in 'i' - thinking consciousness may be taking a shortcut..."

While I'm not opposed to a little side excursion into the speculative, let me make it clear that my paper isn't about precognition and that I have no scientific opinion on the subject.

I have heard, however, that "remote viewing" of the kind you describe is a research subject of interest, even if not well founded in physical theory.

To keep this thread on topic, let us return to your previous statement "...the nature of time historically cannot adequately be considered in isolation as a discrete entity, but only in context of dynamic systems, of which our consciousness happens to be a part."

One has to allow "consciousness" a rigorously physical definition a la Damasio, et al, for that statement to cohere. And then, one must make a physical link (a very long stretch) between that individuated consciousness and the structure of all matter in the universe. Getting past the barrier of quantum decoherence is a formidable theoretical obstacle.

Nevertheless, I reason that if time is an independent phenomenon continuous in n dimensions (n > 4), and given a physical definition of time, as I have given in previous papers--"n-dimensional infinitely orientable metric on self avodiding random walk"--it is not implausible that information from any block of time is available to any other block.

Not implausible, but I stress: unlikely to be incorporated into physical theory in a mathematically precise model. Why? It has to do with the relation between mathematics and time, and by implication the relation between time and all language. Information is a physical thing, measured in bits and qubits, and I have identified time with information; however, _meaning_ is independent of language and information. So for mathematics to have meaning, i.e., for language to have meaning, the order we impose is limited by what time we have available (i.e., the language we have available). We can maniipulate available information, but we can't create it. The permutations are infinite--we are hard pressed to differentiate information in the "real" collapsed wave function from what we imagine.

So getting to your point about "i" (and I assume you mean the imaginary number, square root of -1) and consciousness "taking a short cut" (through the complex plane)--well, there's more room to do so, with a four-dimensional analysis rather then two. Can one be sure that the path leads to where one wished to go?--complex plane results are not ordered. See the problem? The only way one validates the prediction is to compare it with real events in the future, and there's no way in principle to differentiate coincidence from correlation except statistically, where we assume a high number of correct predictions are more or less correlated with "real" events.

Unless predictions are as accurate as those of quantum mechanics, there will always be tension between those who claim coincidence and those who claim correlation.

If there is metaphysical meaning, it may be--as certain mystics claim--not communicable in the structure of our time dependent physical language. Obviously, my interest lies with physical meaning, where termz are well behaved and time is demonstrably real.

And that's as philosophical as you are likely to see me, in this forum. Fair enough? :-)

Tom

Hi Tom,

taken me a little while to get back here, a little longer to respond.

re:

To keep this thread on topic, let us return to your previous statement "...the nature of time historically cannot adequately be considered in isolation as a discrete entity, but only in context of dynamic systems, of which our consciousness happens to be a part."

"One has to allow "consciousness" a rigorously physical definition a la Damasio, et al, for that statement to cohere."

well, yes, there is some indication of a physicality of what we typically refer to as consciousness in that it appears that, under certain circumstances, it is possible for consciousness to function not only with a reasonably accurate predictive capability but to also, on occasion, radically impact with something known as intentionality the outcome of future physical events. this would either suggest a physicality to consciousness or an instance of something from nothing, a dynamics typically associated with the miraculous and generally relegated to mystical/religious realms. still short of a physics accounting for 'consciousness', take your pick.

re:

"So getting to your point about "i" (and I assume you mean the imaginary number, square root of -1) and consciousness "taking a short cut" (through the complex plane)--well, there's more room to do so, with a four-dimensional analysis rather then two."

my interest in imaginal space for a peculiar function of consciousness, it is not without some consideration. it appears that it takes consciousness no longer or shorter 'time' to reach any time-space coordinate. with a conventional 4-D model, this presents a problem with signal strength dissipation in geometric proportion to distance.

actually, one dimension appears to work even better. see:

www.espresearch.com/espgeneral/doc-SpeedOfThought.pdf

re:

"Can one be sure that the path leads to where one wished to go?--complex plane results are not ordered. See the problem?"

yes, indeed i do see. the only answer i can suggest is that we appear to have the ability to direct our thoughts to what we wish to think about - there's the first residence you had when you first left home. perhaps you went away to college or into the military. you can direct your thoughts to that time/space and bring up a fairly vivid recollection of that specific environment. there are no particular physical coordinates for that memory. you don't retrace personal history to get to that memory. we don't seem to have too much trouble with a lack of any paths or maps in getting to such information. there appears to be a strong similarity to this function in accessing information remote in time/space. in any direction. merely the intent to go there would seem to serve. we ascribe a unique identity to any space/time coordinate, akin to your "self-avoiding random walk" - this "slef-avoiding" leads to a uniqueness of any 'moment'. that unique ID appears to be sufficient 'directions' for getting there.

thanks for your comments.

matt.