OFFTOPIC: physics question

[Steven Schear]

The area of consciousness studies suffers from clarity of definition which
is a major constraint on research outside the mainstream narratives. A good
example is the widespread dismissal of Jaynes', "The origin of
consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind", mostly due to
reviewers failing to even read in detail this work and understand how he
defines a particular aspect of consciousness.

On Fri, May 17, 2019, 1:52 PM Douglas Lucas <dal at riseup.net> wrote:

> Hey cypherpunks / nerdcoin hoarders,
>
> On 5/12/19 6:59 PM, \0xDynamite wrote:
> > If light travels at a. different speed for different colors in order
> > to account for the rainbow of a prism, how fast is the. speed of light
> > then?  Is there real physics to optics?  How can light know what
> > direction to bend after it leaves the lens?
>
> Tangent, but there's a somewhat similar question in philosophy of mind.
> People sometimes imagine human consciousness to be a kind of
> "theater"[1]: all the sensory input is arriving from behind the curtain
> (optic nerves etc. transmitting inbound info), then that traveling
> sensory input crosses some sort of finish line, and then is presented,
> entirely bundled up together (audio, video, etc.), on some some of inner
> theater, to some inner self, who then makes a rational decision about
> the display on the theater, and consequently sends output ("strike
> keyboard with finger") to the body, etc., until new sensory input
> arrives on the internal movie screen, triggering more decisions from the
> inner self/captain of the ship/homonculus...
>
> An interesting complication to the above is, like the different colors
> of light going through the prism at minutely different speeds, thereby
> introducing confusing complexity to a model generally taken as
> straightforward, well, the sensory input traveling through the body, the
> brain neurons, etc., do not always perform properly, do not all operate
> at the same speed, etc. So there's lag among these different inbound,
> command, and outbound signals, and perhaps the theater is dishonestly
> representing the various confusing input as straightforwardly bound
> together. Maybe one optic nerve is slightly longer than the other due to
> some congenital reason. So on and so forth.
>
> I'm not sure what the implications of the above would be for, e.g.,
> neuro-surgeons performing operations, athletes trying to master their
> mind-bodies, Libet and free will[2], etc. Sometimes I think the above is
> just well-off people with copious spare time flapping their jaws --
> elementary school lunch table shit ("How do I know you see green when I
> see green?") just with bigger words and longer sentences, while everyone
> else suffers, does the jaw-flappers' unpaid domestic labor, disappears
> into ICE prisons, etc., their views and insights on the above never
> recorded to history.
>
> Doug
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
> [2]
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of_Libet%27s_experiments
>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 3713 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20190517/a7cd7981/attachment.txt>