Subject Time is NOT Time!

Yesterday, I wrote about a quandry:

When I listen to an actual piano smash, and pick out, say, "Ode to Joy", that happens over time. I can effortlessly speed it up or slow it down (which I suspect is a clue!), but the experience doesn't download instantly; it plays out internally over time, just as if the notes were individually played rather than tuned/framed. And if time exists, then change does happen, which unravels the whole observation and re-burdens us with the kludge that is time. It's a problem!

Can subjective shifts be construed as taking place outside time? Is time necessarily object-related? I suspect I need real math and physics to pin this down (or, perhaps, another few years stewing on the issue).

Time passes while you're thinking, for sure. Cognition is a physical process, involving chemical reactions and energy. But perceptual framing happens behind cognition. It's deeper. There's no judgement or calculation or tabulation or taxonomy involved. It's an utterly neutral shifting of the focus of attention. Does it happen in time?

I was just being dumb (it happens a lot).

Perceptual framing is instant. It can expand from microbe to Milky Way without the slightest latency. Whenever there is latency (e.g. reframing from Depressed Rumination World back to Worldworld...or from Worldworld to Absolute Reality - aka enlightenment), it's just because certain framings/tunings become habitual, making alternatives slow-budging. But once we do make the flip, it always happens instantly.

The instant-on solidity of framing is seen by considering the optical illusion below. You can see either faces or a chalice, but not both simultaneously. A given framing is quite solid - the possible framings never interact with each other. Until we relax ("let go"!) enough to develop easier control of the reframing, one or the other image might stubbornly endure. But the transition, when it happens, is instant, no? No fade, no blur. If you'll pay careful attention, you'll notice that the reframing is positively otherworldly. It's not like thought, it's not like a movie edit...it's not quite like anything else.

The optical illusion is like a fragmentary piano smash. The options (in this case, only two) pre-exist, and perceptual framing "in here" makes a choice, yielding the impression of change "out there".

Since there's no latency, even at vast scale, perceptual framing happens faster than light speed. This means it's outside time - indeed, outside this universe, whose rules preclude anything faster than light. And this checks out. If framing "traverses" (for lack of a better term) the multiverse, it must occur beyond all worlds (for a personal sense of this beyond-ness, consider, once again, The Fan).

Reframing happens outside time, because time is a concept deduced from Worldworld in order to describe Worldworld. Framing is beyond concept, and beyond worlds. It's a neutral shutter, and shutter speed "in here" does not/can not correlate with time passage as we conceive it "out there" (which is, for instance, why we can effortlessly speed up or slow down the tempo of "Ode to Joy" within a piano smash).


Not perfect, but close....


A year later, I connected it to epiphany and inspiration.

Is Subject Time Still Time?

I'm badly stuck. The issue will only be intelligible for those who've slogged through The Visualization Fallacy, Visualization Fallacy Redux, and Visualization and Parallel Universes...


If the universe is a piano smash (defined here), with all possibilities presently available for perceptual framing, and the impression of change and movement is created by the tunings of attention ("in here") rather than by actual dynamic movements of things ("out there"), that means time is merely a kludge - just another Worldworld conceptualization. If nothing moves or changes, and all dynamism is an impression of shifting focus, then time doesn't exist. Things need to move/change along a time axis for time to exist, but a static piano smash is timeless.

So time is an artifact of confusing inner reframing with an impression of dynamism. Among other things, this solves the problem that no human has ever experienced the slightest taste of past or future. As countless sages have observed (in various phrasings), it's all a big "Now". The piano smash model embraces the primacy of present presence.

However, when I listen to an actual piano smash, and pick out, say, "Ode to Joy", that happens over time. I can effortlessly speed it up or slow it down (which I suspect is a clue!), but the experience doesn't download instantly; it plays out internally over time, just as if the notes were individually played rather than tuned/framed. And if time exists, then change does happen, which unravels the whole observation and re-burdens us with the kludge that is time. It's a problem!

Can subjective shifts be construed as taking place outside time? Is time necessarily object-related? I suspect I need real math and physics to pin this down (or, perhaps, another few years stewing on the issue).

Does anyone know? Does anyone know anyone (e.g. a theoretical physicist) who'd know?


Time passes while you're thinking, for sure. Cognition is a physical process, involving chemical reactions and energy. But perceptual framing happens behind cognition. It's deeper. There's no judgement or calculation or tabulation or taxonomy involved. It's an utterly neutral shifting of the focus of attention. Does it happen in time?


Next in this series: "Subject Time is NOT Time!"

Visualization and Parallel Universes

This is a follow up to two recent postings: The Visualization Fallacy and Visualization Fallacy Redux.

It might seem like I use this Slog to explain things to readers. I do not. I use it to explain things to myself. As I write, connections are made and insights arise. It's discovery, not explication. I step out of the way.

I started my "Visualization Fallacy" posting to describe an interesting fallacy I'd noticed, and, as I wrote, it kept expanding until I realized it had become a sort of cosmology. I'm still rereading those postings to come more fully to terms with them.

Slog reader Paul Trapani kindly left some comments on the first installment, prompting me to expand and clarify. Our dialog deserves its own entry, so here's a lightly edited version. It will read like gobbledygook unless you quickly review the previous two postings first.

Take it away, Paul....


Paul Trapani said...
Some interesting and thought-provoking stuff. I'm still pondering the parallel universe aspect, though. As an analogy, I think it's great, but not sure about actually shifting to a parallel universe. Whenever I think of parallel worlds I'm OK on the theoretical aspect of it - in that these are all hypothetical worlds that could occur after a given point - but not sure about their "existence" in the same way that our world exists. Or maybe they do exist but are inaccessible to us. Of course I get the point that trying to say "our world" is also illusive, as there are billions of "our worlds".


Jim Leff said...
"Existence" is the trickiest word in all existence. In fact, my whole piece (at least the voluminous italicized digression) is an argument that we project even the world we consider the most existent of all. We project and inhabit this world of symbols, shortcuts, and generalizations, hardly investing the least attention/focus into what actually Is. Not one of us lives even 1% of our time in what we generally term "the real world". We languish in Worldworld!

(Extra snaky digression: we can't truly exist in any given World, anyway - not any of them. No one has ever lived in "A World". You're not in a world now; you're in a chair, reading a screen, and your world, for the moment, ends there - and even that chair, per previous argument, is a symbol, not an actual aggregation of matter. We only live in the slice of a given World that we frame our attention around. It's ALL framing! All the way down!)

Our world radically changes - qualitatively and quantitatively - depending on how we internally frame it. You can't say it doesn't. Sure, it's assumed by human beings that there's reality and then there's imagination, but I defy you to find any demarcation point in light of the above. All there is is framing. Attention pivots, zooms, and retracts in a highly creative infinity of moves (though we get stuck in a few habitual ones). That's what gives rise to the impression of movement, time, and rich manifestation amid what's actually a piano smash*. In other words, possibilities are apparent and available if you merely reframe your attention.

* - A "piano smash" is when you sit at a piano and use both forearms to mash down all the notes. If you do so, and keep holding all the keys down (or pushing the sustain pedal), you'll hear every note at once...and you can use your attention to pick out melodies. Any and every melody, really, and harmony, too. All of music is encoded and present in a piano smash, and you can create the illusion of dynamic movement by reframing your internal attention. It is my belief that the universe is a piano smash, with all possibilities present and available for framing, and that internal framing creates the impression of all dynamic movement and change.

Our infinite framing latitude obviously offers infinite universes. It's especially clear given that the universe you and I inhabit is almost entirely abstracted/symbolized/generalized, and so untethered in reality that computers (which are GOOD at working with symbols!) can't begin to parse it. We've framed this apparent universe, in a quite obvious way. Depressives, cut off from the world and infinitely mulling in their dark internal realms, create a different universe via different framing. Forgetting you're in a movie theater is yet another. This is what humans do: reframe and immerse in order to shift realities.

You have created Worldworld via your framing. And you've seen that the world (even what you think of as "external", which is merely signals registering through slits in your head) changes radically depending on your framing. Framing is obviously the paramount factor.

The fact that nobody talks about framing is a clue that it's paramount. They also never talk much about the non-moving part: the presence that's always peered out from your eyes (call it "True Nature" or "Pure Awareness" or "Witness", but shmancy terms are unnecessary). The things that matter are the least discussed.


Paul Trapani said...
Thanks that was helpful, particularly "piano smash." I was considering parallel universes to be like isolated parallel lines never touching, so I looked at it as if I was in World X and then somehow would move to World Y. It makes more sense as a cacophony of possibilities, with attention reframing onto a specific one.


Jim Leff said...
========
"I was considering parallel universes like isolated parallel lines never touching"

========
You may be experiencing the visualization fallacy I was discussing in the first place! :)

But, really, the "isolated parallel lines" thing works just as well. It's as good a metaphor as any. It isn't incompatible with piano smash.

With a piano smash, you tune your attention here or there. Nobody has bandwidth to experience the entirety at once (remember how the world contracts into your screen and, maybe, your partial, mostly abstract chair). This "tuning" is what I'm calling reframing.

You can describe the tuning as attention directed to isolated parallel lines, or to elements within a disorganized cacophony. The structure doesn't matter. We're talking about infinity, so any manifestation is not only possible but compulsory. The tuning itself is the interesting part, the rest is just the infinitude of yadda-yadda. The important thing is the scanner, not the scanned.

Resist the impulse to pay attention to the sexier, more dynamic, objects. What's way more interesting (though utterly un-verbalizable) is subject. The Tuner.

The thing that doesn't make sense in multiverses is the notion of "going somewhere". "Traveling to a new world", etc. It's pretty juvenile. Sure, we're talking about worlds, which we associate with a round globe thing. But whatever heaven and hell are, or Earth/Paul-23398 is, you sure as heck don't travel to get there. Nor do we pack our lunch and venture to Worldworld, nor to our dream world, nor to Depressive Obsession World nor to the town of Deadwood. It's a flip of one's attention; a tuning to a different note. That's the sweet spot. The crux is the subjectivity of it.

So, cacophony or parallel lines or whatever...it doesn't matter. But the one element you can absolutely rule out is the thing most people can't shake (due to Visualization Fallacy): of it being about GOING somewhere. Of a PLACE. There's no place but "here" (or, per the cliche, "Wherever you go, there you are"). Our here-ness is the only solidity amid the kaleidoscope of infinite manifestation.

For a helpful metaphor of the banal simplicity of the actual point of tuning - the eternally here-present pole star around which the infinitude of manifestation roils, and the nowhere/everywhere from which disembodied Subject selects, frames, identifies itself with, and inhabits Object - see "The Fan"


Next in this series: Is Subject Time Still Time?

If you enjoyed this discussion of cosmology, you might want to consider my theology.

Visualization Fallacy Redux

For the two or three of you who actually slogged through that last posting, congratulations and my sympathies. To push patience still further, here are some cleanup items, followed by an extra bonus confusion multiplier!

I'm a big fan of buried ledes. In fact, at one point I considered renaming this Slog "Jim's Buried Ledes". Most of the ideas in "The Visualization Fallacy" were non-original, albeit freshly expressed. But two original thoughts were strewn at the bottom: The part about why time seems to speed up as we age (which I'd tackled once before, here, though I hadn't tied it into a larger picture), and a fresh (to my knowledge) speculation about traversing parallel universes via internal shifts of our perceptual framing.

I'd previously touched on perceptual framing here, and I'll be writing much more about it in future. It's something I've been aware of since childhood, and assumed everyone else knew about. It was decades before I realized, to my surprise, that most people mistakenly assume the world shifts their framing for them. They think perceptual shifts aren't directly available to - and perpetrated by - them. The most telling example of this misunderstanding is the construct "You're making me angry". Obviously, that anger is initiated by you. You may be responding to a person or situation, but the external world has no lever of control over your internal framing (in fact, recognition of this is, itself, a reframing). You can be inspired to make shifts, but it's certainly not common to say "You're inspiring me to make myself angry!"

The grossest area of the grossest town transforms into paradise upon a first kiss there with someone deeply loved. And the most gorgeous place will become a bleak hellscape if your beloved dumps you there. Neither the kisser nor the dumper enact this transformation (though we naturally project it back to them). But we've clearly shifted, and the world has shifted with us. It's all different.

There are countless perceptual shifts that can reframe our attention - and thus our world and ourselves. Look very carefully at your cuticle. Then remember we're floating in endless space on an insignificant dust moat. Then return to your cuticle. Do it a few times, like a toddler playing with a light switch, to verify your control. Now try another. Sit quietly and observe that everything's perfect in this moment. But notice your brain scanning to find something to complain about (physical discomfort, hunger, temperature, memories or worries, a mental alarm set to go off soon...or simply the immense buzzing burden of the millions of previously set mental alarms that never quite faded to zero). Then refocus on how it's all perfect....and watch your mind once again spread out its tentacles, a princess perpetually scanning for mattress peas. Toggle between the two fast. 

This mundane-seeming faculty is actually a superpower, and one that can be practiced and developed (I'm working on a book about this), however rusty your shifter may have grown from disuse. It's worth the trouble. Framing is everything. Heaven is a frame, as is Hell. Did you really imagine they were places one goes after death? That's nuts! Do you think a hell could be devised that's worse than most people's day-to-day lives (entirely a function of their framing)? Or a heaven more salubrious than modern-day America actually is (if only we'd stop scanning for increasingly insignificant mattress peas)? Spiritual enlightenment, too, is a reframing.

An infinity of alternative yous, existing in an infinity of alternative worlds, can be visited/inhabited by simply reframing in any moment. It's not magic; we've had this ability the whole time. It's like a smartphone feature you didn't realize you had!

If I wrote yesterday's posting correctly, it should have offered a small, tasty cookie to those who struggled through. It should have inspired a reframing toward expansiveness. It explained how we project a world, and then live within that projection. So we're world builders. Gods! The step backward that's necessary to see this is, itself, a mighty perceptual reframing. But there's another step to be taken.

But before I ask you to stoically plow through the extra bonus confusion, enjoy an intermission via this spectacular adrenalin-pumping short film, which has absolutely nothing to do with any of this...but which, coincidentally, will coax you to reframe. We love movies because they're the slickest reframing aid short of a screaming boot camp sergeant three inches from your face:



The ancient Indians, bless 'em, coughed up a terribly advanced idea a few millennia ago. The Sanskrit term "akasha" is a humble-seeming word with the most cosmic of meanings: "it's all space."

Not in the I-just-smoked-pot-and-think-I-can-levitate sense of space, but they meant it in a legit 21st century physics sense. We now know that an atom is 99.9999999999996% empty space. So everything is almost entirely space. The Earth is space. Even, say, granite is way, way more space-filled than we'd imagine, say, a tissue to be. It's all extraordinarily spacious and light.

However spacious you might imagine it all to be, you're still vastly understating the spaciousness. In a neutron star, matter has imploded on itself to become inconceivably dense. A handful of neutron star material has the mass of Mt. Everest. And even that stuff is permeated with space (the atoms have been broken and compressed, but the component quarks are, you won't be surprised to learn, mostly space). I once asked some astronomers (and astronomy buffs) how much denser matter could get, beyond neutron star density (here's that discussion, if this is of interest to you). They didn't like the question; digressing while I annoyingly tried to wrangle them back on track. Finally I got the answer I was looking for:

"There is only space".

Akasha!

So....remember how I wrote this:

"You've only interacted with a tiny fraction of the molecules in your house, yet you've convinced yourself you have a perceptual and conceptual grip on the chaotic mass of matter you associate with 'home.'"

Now patch in the fact that it's all space. That unfamiliar materiality is actually space. It's nothing! Ferns are space. The marauding tigers are space. The aliens are space. And we are space. Is it now easier to imagine that we can create, project, and inhabit parallel worlds (such as Worldworld, which is so strange that even computers can't make sense of it)? And, just as importantly, has your sensation of expansiveness just grown? Have you reframed? Is this now a slightly different world?

Read the links (both here as well as in the posting this refers to)! I don't include them pro-forma!


I wrote this follow-up posting clarifying and explaining some points.

The Visualization Fallacy

A seldom-observed cognitive problem: We visualize concepts, and then we falsely associate the made-up visualization with the concept (usually with the help of movies and TV).

For instance, aliens travel in saucer-shaped ships, right? If you ever spot a saucer flying around at night in the desert, you'd certainly know how to explain it. That's an alien! We "know" this from movies and TV. Some random visualization caught on, creating a false consensus that's utterly non-meaningful.

Alien visitors may or may not be real, but the flying saucer trope almost certainly isn't. We couldn't begin to imagine alien tech, yet most people feel they could identify an alien spaceship because they've been conditioned by some random visualization. It's a form of tail-wagging.

If you walk around an old, dark house at night and encounter a hovering gauzy white presence, your brain will likely tell you - based on movies and TV - that this may be a ghost. Yet, for all you or I know, disembodied spirits look like manicotti, and are delicious, and we've been eating them for years.

When abstract concepts (or concrete concepts with no observable examples) become visualized, we easily become tied to that visualization.

It works at subtler levels, as well. We think we know a few things about how parallel universes work, but for most of us, that's entirely been forged by treatment in fiction. And it's a hindrance. Modeling and conjecture have their uses, but when we unconsciously lock in to a certain conjecture, that's conceptual kludge which must be cleared out before we can really understand. It's an intellectual detour; active miscomprehension dragging us further from the truth than mere non-comprehension ever could. But we can't help ourselves. I'm not sure even the most objective-minded scientist can avoid this trap.

Spiritual teacher Adyashanti (who I consider the only 100% non-bullshit living speaker on the subject) observes that no one ever experiences ultimate reality and reports back that "it was exactly what I'd thought!" Everyone hoping for such an experience shoots for some imaginary canned fluffy-fluff (usually something they read in a book). The folly of seeking after some errant visualization lures them further and further away from the truth.


As with most cognitive failings, this evolved as a feature, not a bug. There is no such thing as a table, or a tree, or a toenail beyond the human brain. Such categories are entirely abstract. That's clear from observing the enormous trouble computers have in distinguishing between classes of objects (a tree from a bush from a telephone pole from a totem pole). This might seem like a computational deficiency, but it's not them; it's us. Our diverse universe does not really divide in this way, so we've been sloppily kludging it all along. Our taxonomies are fuzzy, arbitrary, even irrational. That's why it vexes the bejesus out of computers.

Yet our human flair for generalization serves a purpose. If we allowed ourselves to remain freshly aware of every ant, or taxi, or eyelash - as unique expressions - we'd never get anything done. Preoccupied with each and every fern, we'd miss the tiger dashing out of the underbrush. It is evolutionarily adaptive to dismiss the mundane and key in on the surprising.

In time, nearly everything becomes mundane as more and more becomes patterned. We disconnect from the Actual as it's subsumed by overarching generalization. You don't even perceive the chair you're sitting in because its individuality has been lost to the category. It's not real, it's been reduced to a concept. Not a unique and constantly (subtly) changing arrangement of matter, but merely "a chair". Similarly, you've only interacted with a tiny fraction of the molecules in your living quarters, yet you've convinced yourself you have a perceptual and conceptual grip on the chaotic mass of matter you associate with home. It all stands on the flimsy proposition that we know perfectly well what a "home" is. We abstract it, then we exist in the abstraction (much as we imagine ghosts to be gauzy things, then pattern our world to that visualization).

We create and inhabit Worldworld, a universe of symbols and categories. By adulthood, we barely register anything freshly unless we are surprised. Things which fit poorly within their apparent category blink back into our awareness, becoming real and individual until we manage to reclassify them (that's a necktie, not a snake) or make it fit better into its category (adding a missing fourth leg to a table).

(Note: this is why time seems to speed up as we age. Babies live in the Real World of fresh perception, but as we age we replace Real World with Worldworld, losing the moment-by-moment experience of full reality (an experience babies have, and that we envy) making time appear to fly.)

Living in abstract Worldworld, we forget that labels are mere labels, and that the approximation we've swapped in for reality is a cheat - a vast simplification. Worldworld is not the real world, just a model thereof. In the real world, there's no such thing as ferns. A fern is only distinct from the ground it grows out of and the surrounding air if we've drawn those dichotomies intellectually. Ultimately, it's all fresh and unique and interdependent. It all just Is.

So when we associate aliens with flying saucers, or ghosts with gauzy white presences, it's no different from the expedient means we use to model our entire conceptual world. In the parallel universe of Worldworld (I think parallel universes are subjective frames of perspective; whenever we reframe our attention, we shift into another reality), the aliens really do arrive in flying saucers!


Read the follow-up posting, Visualization Fallacy Redux

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