Speed of Consciousness?

This is a questions thats been itching at me for months.
Can we measure the speed of Consciousness, is thier a speed. It may sound a bit robust, but this is ATS!

Also, Iv been doing some reading on peter russels.
I came across the question,

"How can something so material as matter conjur something so unmaterialistic as counsciousness?"

Does anyone have any insights?

Deep

[Edited on 18-1-2004 by ZeroDeep]

Originally posted by ZeroDeep
This is a questions thats been itching at me for months.
Can we measure the speed of Consciousness, is thier a speed. It may sound a bit robust, but this is ATS!

Also, Iv been doing some reading on peter russels.
I came across the question,

"How can something so material as matter conjur something so unmaterialistic as counsciousness?"

Does anyone have any insights?

Deep

[Edited on 18-1-2004 by ZeroDeep]

we all have insight on this, i surmise.
i theorize that the speed of conciousness doesn't exist. i surmise it exists outside of the material reality matrix.
we can with a thought, travel from the farthest star we can see in one direction to the farthest in the opposite, for example. we can go from the distant past to the distant future in an instant. we can encompass all of reaity and surround it with our consciousness in one instant, and then 'see' from the perspective of a gluon the next.
i say the chemical reactions in the brain are a result of thought, and not the other way around.

The speed of Consciousness, is a variable rate mechanism in the human brain.

This can be demonstrated by the events that a high-speed sports personality will exibit in reaction and responce.

For example, a race car driver driving in a race at talladega for example, will be travelling at almost 200 mph.

Even though his body is at rest, adrenaline is elevated. This is a phsycological responce to stress. Heart rates can climb to 200 during a race. All related to a hunt/fight/flight reflex built into the human system.

It has been reported that during this time, a racer actually can 'think faster' without the perception of thinking fast.

A driver will find he has a normal amount of time to think out a reaction if necessary, before a critical point-of-no-return. From the outside it will appear to an observer that this was a split second reaction and probubly just got lucky.

While this still could be true,.. the human mind has the ability to block out or ignore the irrelevent, and focus more clearly on the directive. When under extreme stress, the mind will apear to the observer to be thinking faster, but is actually just focused, and not processing the unnecessary.

To the observed person though, the mind is able to process more data related to the directive at the 'normal' rate, or the event experienced will appear to be in 'slow-motion'.

What am I suggesting?...the Consciousness is a variable rate thought process, that appears to be a constant rate to the affected, and appearing variable-rate to the observer, and is self-biased by the hunt/fight/flight adrenaline mechanism in the human mind.


[Edited on 18-1-2004 by smirkley]

Smirkley, I love your signature!

In general I think that consciousness is the indicator of the interconnectedness of everything and the organization of all is the intelligence aspect. That which recognizes order in itself, order increasing...

When I first read this thread I though it a bit non-sensical but then it did make sense to me.

Good questions ZeroDeep.

Thanks neo, and thanks smirkly and billybob.

That does help me actaully. I should really hit the books again and read up, I kinda left half way and arose with this question.

Deep

Smirkley's right, jsut about. I sorta stumbled out of this lecture (Was feeling very, very sick and tired). If you want know th exact speed of consciousness, figure out the speed at which a neuron fires. I think it's like 5 miliseconds or something...don't quote me, but that's the speed thought moves.

DE

Yes it is measureable.

Yes it has been measured.

It is the speed that the currents actually travel throughout your body. As well, of course, as the speed which they are fired from the brain.

I'm fairly sure its 60-70 metres per second. No idea in yards or anything imperial. That's in the normal body, but in the brain its around 120 mps... it could be kmps, I really should check..

Consciousness has no speed. Just as there is no such thing as time, consciousness isn't affected by time either.

You can hypnotise someone into having a dream for 3 minutes, a vivid dream for 3 minutes here in reality, but in their heads they have dreampt for 3 days. They willbe bored by the time they wake up, because to them it feels like they have dreampt they were at some place for 3 days doing 3 full days worth of activity, but really only 3 minutes has gone past. Yet in their drea theywere there for 3 full days doing things, and becoming bored for being there that long.

"What am I suggesting?...the Consciousness is a variable rate thought process, that appears to be a constant rate to the affected, and appearing variable-rate to the observer, and is self-biased by the hunt/fight/flight adrenaline mechanism in the human mind."

Maybe with regards to this, Thought exists outside of "normal" space/time boundaries. Anyone who has had an accident (car crash is perfect as an example) will know how time seems to slow down. This also happens to extreme sports people., when they are in the "zone"
so with this in mind, maybe our "concious" thought has the ability to ajust its speed to whatever is needed by the actions being performed at that time, irrespective of normal time as we percieve it.

[Edited on 22-1-2004 by feygan]

Originally posted by feygan Anyone who has had an accident (car crash is perfect as an example) will know how time seems to slow down. This also happens to extreme sports people., when they are in the "zone"

Could you expand more on this topic?

I was never in any car accident and I am not planning to have one in the near future, so I have no idea what you are talking except that it sounds interesting.

Ok well if you talk to people who have been in accidents, many of the talk about how "their life flashes before their eyes" also they can remember the accident quite often in startlingly accurate detail. When we consider the majority of these incidents happen normally in less than 5 seconds "real" time, and yet all that takes place in your head, it just makes me wonder if concious thought is in someway linked to one of the other dimensions. (I'm a personal beliver in string theories 11 dimensions)
So maybe these other dimensions aren't bound by the same time/space laws as our own, thus enabling the mind to perform incredible things in an apparently minute space of time.

[Edited on 21-1-2004 by feygan]

Lets say you are driving around..

anywhere...thinking about school, work, girlfreinds, or family, the radio is on, you are watching the traffic and pedestrians, ..

life is just normal.


Suddenly a truck comes from nowhere....all you know is that everything in your life you were thinking about is gone from your thoughts...

the truck is going to hit my car!... I can see it coming...I know , dammit, I cannot avoid it. This guy is really going to piss me off. You see the truck impact, interesting how the glass shattered in a particular pattern,..the feeling of floating or sliding, unusual,...funny I am not really hearing the noises....whats that...another car coming in?,..or am I sliding to it?....my wife is going to be pissed....'flashback to wife holding kids in yard'...BAMM....damn I hit the car....now I hear the final grinding slow to a stop.....(long pause to gather thoughts again)...it sure seems quiet again,...notice the dust floating in slowly where the winshield was.....thought I heard a siren.....Oh Man now my insurance is screwed,...what am I going to do about a car. ...I wonder if that guy is OK?

I must be alright I guess...maybe I should get out of the car....wow, I am not in my seat,...WOW what was that pain.....DAMN.. I am bleeding from somewhere!


About that time the ambulance shows up, and everything seems to be moving faster now. People moving around me,...now in the gurney, ..hearing ambulance wailing down the street with me in it. These people arnt listening to me, I'm trying to tell them something.....


I am trying to verbally visually express what my mind would be experiencing in a car wreck on a street, whereas if the experience would be somewhat new to me. (I have had experience by being involved in several accidents over time.)

You see how the whole world outside your car suddenly disappeared from your brain,...short of a mid-motion flashback or two...and you became wholly focused on the reality very close to you....It provides you with opportunity to see much, to think much about what you see,...all while your brain has shut down much of your other sensory perception, excluding what the brain currently relies on for 'sincere input', the eye's.

And notice, even though I may have left out much thoughts that occur in the duration of the event, so much info can be processed, when the brain regulated the data input flow, and blocks the inputs that are not as relevent in this hunt/fight/flight stress induced adrenaline enhanced moment.

Although the event to the witness, only took less than 30 seconds start to finish, you might actually process and 'think' a quantity that normally would take several minuts to think out.





[Edited on 21-1-2004 by smirkley]

IMHO, it would be the same as the "speed of thought"....almost instantaneous, I would haphazard a guess but you members knowing how I am....I did the 'search' and ran across these interesting articles and theories:

"psychoceramics: HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS BEYOND THE SPEED OF LIGHT
Link:
dev.null.org...

"5. The Mystery of Light"
Link:
www.peterussell.com...

"Higher Vibrations"
Link:
home22.inet.tele.dk...

Excerpt:

"In view of the theory of subjective time quantum, the 16 bits/sec, one could suggest that in altered states of mind the speed of consciousness has entered into another octave or another world.

One thing I have realized about consciousness is its connection with being and reality. It might seem obvious but one can not change one�s consciousness without having one�s being changed and hereby one's reality altered. The concept of reality is to my understanding not solid but is modified and altered by the level of one�s consciousness. The phrase "Your being attracts your life" has puzzled me for decades until I had the understanding of how attached ones whole thought patterns are connected to ones reality."

"Chapter 33: The Universal Spectrum of Consciousness"
Link:
www.theodynamics.com...

Chart showing "consciousness" ie: universal, cosmic, individual consciousness.
www.theodynamics.com...


Maybe this will help or confuse a bit more but should generate more conversation and thought on this subject.


regards
seekerof

[Edited on 21-1-2004 by Seekerof]

Those links sparked my memory and also possibly helped to raise more questions.

I've never really looked into relativity too much before now, but I was intrigued how light always has it's constant speed to us. Regardless of our "relative" speed, which got me to wondering if light is closly related to thought in substance? Yet also when mentioning photons we see that they don't really travel from point A to B as such, and therefore don't have a speed from their perspective.

So if a photon travels "instantanously" from our perspective, yet doesn't travel at all from its own. It strikes me as having similarities to the concious thought when in a crisis situation. While to the outside world something may take 30 seconds, on the inside it has taken minutes, hours or longer. Knowing that relative time and size both slows and decreases the closer you approach the speed of light. (which is also zero prom the photons point of view) I was intrigued by this statement from the third link.

"With practice one can begin to see the current of thoughts and the ego attachments and recognize that no thought is more or less important than any other. One can come to distinguish that there is actually "space" between thoughts. This space between thoughts is the original unobstructed nature of mind. To experience this space is to taste the essence of now-ness. In the space of now there is no history, no ordinary time, no ego, no beginning and no end. Because one learns to see without concepts, cultivating this space is called cultivating clear seeing."

The author talks of a "nowness" where there is no history, so time is irrelavent in this place. Since time and space are linked this would also seem logical that space/distance is irrelavent also. (oddly very similar to a photons life)

So do we think at the speed of light, which has no speed as it doesn't move, but appears from point A to B with no travel. In which case, what is light and photons if they act in such similar ways to thought?

What about the speed of consciousness going only as fast as the neurons on the brain can fire. I would think that the speed of consciousness would only be as fast as this firing, which is probably about the speed of electricity and light.

Originally posted by IMMORTAL
What about the speed of consciousness going only as fast as the neurons on the brain can fire. I would think that the speed of consciousness would only be as fast as this firing, which is probably about the speed of electricity and light.

However since light is made from photons, it has a speed of zero? so does this mean our neurons also have a speed of zero? Since we only percieve light to have a speed, in relation to us, and our surrounding dimensional universe.

[Edited on 21-1-2004 by feygan]

"Since we only percieve light to have a speed, in relation to us, and our surrounding dimensional universe."

As you mentioned above in a latter post feygan, perhaps thought, consciousness deals with absolutes, and the one mentioned absolute would be the "here and now (ie: "nowness")

If one is a believer in God, the concept of thought has no perceiving of time, per se'....example....prayer. If thought and consciousness is relative to "now", and one was to put a quantitive 'figure' on "prayer", would it not be instantaneous or as the old sayings mention: "faster than the blink of an eye"? Again, thats if we are dealing with "absolutes".



regards
seekerof

Originally posted by smirkley
Lets say you are driving around..

anywhere...thinking about school, work, girlfreinds, or family, the radio is on, you are watching the traffic and pedestrians, ..

life is just normal.


Suddenly a truck comes from nowhere....all you know is that everything in your life you were thinking about is gone from your thoughts...

the truck is going to hit my car!... I can see it coming...I know , dammit, I cannot avoid it. This guy is really going to piss me off. You see the truck impact, interesting how the glass shattered in a particular pattern,..the feeling of floating or sliding, unusual,...funny I am not really hearing the noises....whats that...another car coming in?,..or am I sliding to it?....my wife is going to be pissed....'flashback to wife holding kids in yard'...BAMM....damn I hit the car....now I hear the final grinding slow to a stop.....(long pause to gather thoughts again)...it sure seems quiet again,...notice the dust floating in slowly where the winshield was.....thought I heard a siren.....Oh Man now my insurance is screwed,...what am I going to do about a car. ...I wonder if that guy is OK?

I must be alright I guess...maybe I should get out of the car....wow, I am not in my seat,...WOW what was that pain.....DAMN.. I am bleeding from somewhere!


About that time the ambulance shows up, and everything seems to be moving faster now. People moving around me,...now in the gurney, ..hearing ambulance wailing down the street with me in it. These people arnt listening to me, I'm trying to tell them something.....


I am trying to verbally visually express what my mind would be experiencing in a car wreck on a street, whereas if the experience would be somewhat new to me. (I have had experience by being involved in several accidents over time.)

You see how the whole world outside your car suddenly disappeared from your brain,...short of a mid-motion flashback or two...and you became wholly focused on the reality very close to you....It provides you with opportunity to see much, to think much about what you see,...all while your brain has shut down much of your other sensory perception, excluding what the brain currently relies on for 'sincere input', the eye's.

And notice, even though I may have left out much thoughts that occur in the duration of the event, so much info can be processed, when the brain regulated the data input flow, and blocks the inputs that are not as relevent in this hunt/fight/flight stress induced adrenaline enhanced moment.

Although the event to the witness, only took less than 30 seconds start to finish, you might actually process and 'think' a quantity that normally would take several minuts to think out.





[Edited on 21-1-2004 by smirkley]

This is too true.
I've never been in a car accident, but was very close on the way to school when I was young.

My Mum was driving the car, on a very foggy day, we turned around a sharp bend only to see that there was a parked car in front of us, my mum slammed on the brakes, I thought we were going to hit the car. Being in the front passenger seat and only young, I put my feet out in front of me onto the dash board, so that if we hit the other car in front i wasn't going to be hurt as much/at all, I just remember getting my body into position so quickly and in such a good position that I was very comfortable and in a much better position as to not recieve harm, And we stopped about 30 cm's away from the car in front of us. I was thinking to myself finally i'm going to experience a car crash, awesome.

Everyone else in the car # bricks.

It was as if I knew perfectly what was going on, what was happening, what I needed to do, how to react so quickly. Everything was so clear to me. And yes after wards it did feel as if time during the lead up to the near accident did slow down.

There have been scientifically sound experiments (mentionned in Roger Penrose's book Shadows of the Mind, which I highly recommend for people who have some kind of mathematical background) that showed that people often react a fraction of a second before they are showed particular pictures (something shocking for example). This seems to indicate that consciousness is not time bound and certainly not space bound.

The consciousness must be bound to space, though, for we can only understand space since that is our being. Can anyone on this forum guess what infinity looks like? We cannot because our consciousness does not work on that scale. Maybe it works outside time, though. Or maybe (using the car crash example) we just get a 'slow down boost' when we need it - kind of like NOS in a car, or when you're in a life-threatening situation and you get more blood pumped through your system in case you need it. Maybe the consciousness gives you more time as you need it. It could also be said, though, that we use our left side of our brain more in these situations - time is counted on the right side of the brain, which is why when you're doing something like art, which uses the left side of the brain, you seem to lose concept of time.

As for the speed of consciousness it is probably bound by the restrictions of electricity, but may be able to work on various levels. Maybe our consciousness has a certain speed, but I think that our uncosnsciousness works on an extremely higher level - much faster. Take catching a ball for example. In those few seconds we unconsciously calculate the arc of the ball, its speed and where to hold out our hand. We do this with enough time left over to catch the ball. Also take for example subliminal advertising (when someone slips a single frame into a movie of, say a coke bottle). The image goes past so quickly that the conscious mind does not see it, but the unconscious sees it perfectly, which is why you then want a coke after the movie.

It may be possible that the unconscious is outside space/time, for it seems to fire up reactions a lot faster than the conscious mind could.