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I'm sure most of us know that time is variable depending on speed. I still find it amazing that satellite programmers have to account for and program for the fact that clocks onboard satellites tick slightly slower than those on earth, and that even a trip around the world on a jet means you age a tiny tiny bit less than the people on the ground.
When you speed up a simulation game, i.e. sim city ... you can witness 200 years of transformation in just a minute or so. But what if the avatars in that game were conscious ... would they notice the speed increase? What if the traffic, the weather, everything they could relate to was sped up ... wouldn't it seem like nothing had changed because they were all moving at the same rate proportionally. Yet from the game players point of view ... things were whizzing by at a phenomenal rate.
What if our 'game players' decided to do this to us? How would we know? Could this account for those days when everyone you meet says 'wow, today just flew by' or 'this year’s really dragged on'. Would it only take a small error in the slow down / speed up process to make us notice this?
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The CPU in my computer is working damn near 100%. Not idling as most are. Stanford's Folding at Home program (FAH) causes all my thermal sensitive fans to come on and a check of via Windows XP task manager, performance tab available for viewing by ctrl, alt, delete reveals 100% cycle usage. Folding at home is my judged best use of CPU cycles as it is most apt to aid in the battle against pain, suffering, and early death. LIGO looking for gravity waves? Naw. SETI looking for extra terrestrials. Hell no. They might be hungry. Those placards on our satellites telling how to get here could be mistaken for a menu flyer from a nearby restaurant. No way. Too late now on that one.
Now suppose an awareness of working capacity by the CPU. Working at partial capacity it does not exhibit 'completeness'. The clock is running, the cycles are present but an absence of full capacity cools the components. Is this not similar to the human in a situation that does not require full attention? And time seems to drag. Then pull pig tails on the little red haired girl in front of you to 'occupy your mind' till more channeled challenges present themselves. Of course running alone without a network connection it would be tough for a single CPU to break from the 'boredom' loop and re-engage FAH after the super duper master program (ME) pauses FAH. I suppose that too could be handled by a timed latch function. But I wouldn't have it on my subordinate computers. Yet.
The most merciful thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality... That we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.� - H. P. Lovecraft
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i think there might even be a post somewhere in the forum about this, but i can't seem to find it.
in any case, there is a great deal of speculation about the perception of the passing of time. does a fruit fly with a 24-hour lifespan feel that the duration of his life is just as long as we feel that the duration of our lives are? i read once an idea that the perception of the passing of time is related to the metabolism of the entity. the faster the metabolism, the more the perception of time is spread out.
another idea is that the perception of the passage of time is related to the number of events that occur in the consciousness of the subject. in other words, if nothing is happening, time moves slowly (which is why the clock seems to drag when you are bored) whereas when there is a great deal of activity in your life, time seems to pass faster. makes sense.
to quote some excerpts from my book...
"Mayan scholar Ian Xel Lungold believes that, in reality, “consciousness is speeding up.""
"The Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) is a nonprofit organization based in California that “explores the accelerating development of special domains in science and technology, and examines their impact on business and society.” They have developed a paradigm of human development in terms of various societal evolutionary ages or stages. Each successive stage appears to be equally advanced relative to the previous stage, so one might think that each stage should take as long to get through as all of the others. But, because of the fact that we build on all of the tools and knowledge acquired from the previous stages, each stage takes considerably less time than the previous one. In fact, these stages asymptotically are approaching a date this century that the ASF refers to as a “technological singularity”, around the year 2060."
so, the transhumanists think that time will continue to accelerate until we hit the singularity. i'm not so sure. maybe the perception of the acceleration (or "the quickening" as Art Bell calls it) is due to the crazy levels of technology that we have adopted. and the programmers will initiate a "course correction" at some point so that we don't all go insane.
good idea for a post!
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