Maslow's hierarchy of psychosocial needs

[AntonioLao]

Philosophically speaking, time does not exist. It is only an illusion of physical changes between states of matter, energy, and square of energy. It is more probable for squares of energy to change into energy or to matter than the other way around of changing matter and energy into squares of energy. This theory of existential probability has been proved time and time again by experiments in physics, chemistry, as well as in biology. For example: no one is capable of living for more than 200 years. That is there is a statistical mean value of life expectancy, and is different for different life forms.

[labelwench]

Philosophy of time is it to be? All right, Antonio, Game On!

My personal perception of time is presently under examination as nigh 5 years of night shift has definitely caused me to spend more time in my 'right mind' than at any time previously. Additionally, I may have finally reached the age of independent thinking, and am sorting through past conditioning, deciding which aspects are worth retaining and which only make me the vassal to other people's purposes.

My horses tell me that it is always 'NOW'. They also have photographic recall and can anticipate future events based on past experience, so 'NOW' is attached to 'THEN' and 'WHEN', based on observation.

Another philosophical problem about time concerns the two questions, “What is the present, and why does it move into the past?” If we know what the present is, then we ought to be able to answer the question, “How long does the present last?” And regarding the second question about the “movement” of the present into the past, many philosophers are suspicious of this notion of the flow of time, the march of time. They doubt whether it is a property of time as opposed to being some feature of human perception. Assuming time does flow, is the flow regular? Is it regular by definition, or can the flow of Friday afternoon time slow to a crawl?

http://www.iep.utm.edu/time/

[SteveA]

Philosophy of time is it to be? All right, Antonio, Game On!

My personal perception of time is presently under examination as nigh 5 years of night shift has definitely caused me to spend more time in my 'right mind' than at any time previously. Additionally, I may have finally reached the age of independent thinking, and am sorting through past conditioning, deciding which aspects are worth retaining and which only make me the vassal to other people's purposes.

My horses tell me that it is always 'NOW'. They also have photographic recall and can anticipate future events based on past experience, so 'NOW' is attached to 'THEN' and 'WHEN', based on observation.


http://www.iep.utm.edu/time/

If we assume cause and effect relationships exist over time, then from this extensive perspective of time, things that can appear to change over time represent a "single thing" that did not change in time and remained stationary the entire time. Because we can predict some properties of events into the future from current and past observations, this could be analogized as something being a straight line through time, in which those past and present conditions determine it's current position and direction in that space - similar to having a position and velocity (inertia or mass) in our space.

There's an easy to see reason why we can't learn what time is by looking at events within time because those events construct the learning itself and the learned thing effectively is the stationary object in time, but that learned stationary structure does not specifically tell us where we are presently in time (i.e. knowing that days are hot and nights are colder does not tell us whether or not it's currently hot or cold - if one is true, then the other is likely true, but this association does not tell us which is currently occuring. In a sense you could see these as two separate unchanging structures in time, but they aren't connected and don't tell us when one becomes the other).

Notice that if we tried to say that nights follow days and days follow nights, then there's nothing stopping one from occurring immediately after the other, over and over again, with nothing else occurring. If we try to say that it takes half a day for one to transition to the other, then we have to describe what "half a day" is (notice also the self reference - trying to define a day in terms of half of itself, that would imply a day is twice as long as it "really" is Now that paradox would be an interesting binary fractal structure to watch grow - and how can we define things like watching and growing?).

But anyway, if we learn the properties of things over some extent of time, then we're taking the equivalent of a collection of points or samples and turning them into a single line and calling it the same thing as the collection of points (well if they were the same, then why did we ever need to have points in the first place? In mathematics this paradox is present the (continual) debate over whether or not .999....=1. I don't think we can truly call anything identical in all ways to anything but itself and ignoring the differences simply creates confusion - there's plenty of stuff we already miss even trying to pay attention to the details)

Anyway, the learned structure is not the same as the points/samples/example from which it was learned. We could unite them though and say that those learned things are also points and they're all connected together in a straight line - the learning, events, experiences etc. are all points on a single line and do not even necessarily influence each other. Whether or not they do and if so, in what manner could be then associated with the properties of the space through this "line passes". That "projection" is similar having something else, that is unchanging, appear to be altered because you're changing.

In order to unify these two things as a single object then it appears the conflict between "things" (which appear to be implicitly unchanging) and "time"/"change"/"energy" etc. needs to be resolved and the 3 possible solutions appear to be, to me 1) nothing changes (hard for me to grasp that one - time and change seems obvious), 2) things both change and do not change (seems more possible, but still difficult to work with as it still seems to leave a disconnection between them) or 3) there is only change (now this seems possible if we have both things and the references by which they change being simultaineously altered, in a relative sense, there could appear to remain something stationary - for example, if the entire universe was twice as large and all the appropriate physical constants were changed, then we could have everything appear to be the same, yet have potentially left nothing unaltered - except for the possibility of needing to assume some fixed observational position and properties - though if we really unified everything, it might be that even that would be a problem).

Another interesting "plus" for that last option is that the past could remain unaltered as the present would be a continual recreation of something at least mimicking it in various ways (and the mismatches would then likely be due to the differences between discrete things and their infinite approximations on other scales - this would also add some close correlations with mathematical structures).

I don't know, but for me, the last option seems the most likely pathway to allow describing things. In a sense though it still has at least the appearance of paradox, if we both assumed some static method by which "everything" changes and left that static method out of the "everything changes" definition, but at least in physical terms we could still have the universe effectively recreated from scratch moment to moment according to an updating set of (whatever) rules (we believed there to be).

(Then again, fundamentally, there should still be some foundation that never changes - so it could be that the "everything changes" comes right before the "oops, nothing ever changed" insight - maybe #1 creates #3 which causes the confusion of #2? Or alternately #1 does not exist but it is simply a very convincing "illusion" that there exists some stability - but that would appear to create the paradox that we tried to use logic to show that #1, which should be the foundation of it, does not exist - no it seems the best route is that there exists change arising from a solid foundation, which would likely be described as an algorithmic seed of growth (in a sense, whether or not it was algorithmic, the components that we would algorithmically learn regarding it would themselves be algorithmic), and that we have the issue that just taking a finite segment of its growth as a sample, does not guarantee those traits remain continuous ... so there would still be the disclaimer that "past history does not guarantee future performance" ... I think that's a version of it I can work with, but that's me)

Anyway, those are spots on the road map that seem worth stopping by and checking out

[SteveA]

Oh, another interesting correlation popped up here with the idea of continual change approximating a previous state. The obvious question would appear to be over what/how such approximations are made - i.e. how can .999... of something physically appear the same as 1. Finite perceptions From one frame a change is made, but from another limited perspective, nothing appeared to change because multiple states appear to be the same thing and the differences are not distinguishable (though I don't think you could truly mask changes in all ways - a continual link to all the causes constructing the present would need to be retained and distinct in order that the presents exists as it does, so there should always be a "crack" in the framework somewhere - nothing's ever quite airtight, which could be a mixed bag of nuts). I forgot who posted this on the forum before, but this thought reminds me of this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e39UmEnqY8

There's still another question I've got and that's over why there should be a single state and, if so, what should it be? If not ... hmmm ... well there are lots of possibilities

[labelwench]

Steve, have you ever heard of an executive summary?

There is no satisfactory answer to what exactly constitutes time, as yet, and certainly no agreement. Considerable research has been done, and considering the angle one approaches the topic from, the more divergent the opinions.

As one who has been playing with circadian rhythms for nearly five years now, and since September venturing into some extreme time flips, I am comfortable in saying that those people who follow the prevalent 9-5 schedule, truly have no comprehension of the effects of graveyard shift on the human biology and psychology. As my small study group, I have a few others who have 'done graveyards' considerably longer.

Whatever 'time' may be, when we start moving away from natural cycles, or by the ingestion of food and substances affect our perception of same, it does seem apparent that as individuals we experience 'time' quite differently.

Clocks merely tell me when I am supposed to be where doing what, lol.....

It's always the same 'time' to me, merely different activities.

Speaking of which, unless you lads are any good with tools and a chainsaw, I have other activities still pending.

Later, Gents.....

[SteveA]

Steve, have you ever heard of an executive summary?

Apparently not, I had to look up the term!

In my defense, I'm getting around to writing it. There are just a few more volumes of so left before getting around to the summary.

There is no satisfactory answer to what exactly constitutes time, as yet, and certainly no agreement. Considerable research has been done, and considering the angle one approaches the topic from, the more divergent the opinions.

As one who has been playing with circadian rhythms for nearly five years now, and since September venturing into some extreme time flips, I am comfortable in saying that those people who follow the prevalent 9-5 schedule, truly have no comprehension of the effects of graveyard shift on the human biology and psychology. As my small study group, I have a few others who have 'done graveyards' considerably longer.

Whatever 'time' may be, when we start moving away from natural cycles, or by the ingestion of food and substances affect our perception of same, it does seem apparent that as individuals we experience 'time' quite differently.

Clocks merely tell me when I am supposed to be where doing what, lol.....

It's always the same 'time' to me, merely different activities.

That's an interesting view - fundamentally similar, and possibly functionally identical, but not the way I'd naturally express it. Yes, it's quite an interesting possibility that time is not experienced in the same way between people/things, though the statement "Clocks merely tell me when I am supposed to be where doing what" is a different, yet in many ways, very general way of describing time. I've described it similar to an energy "food chain" before - you can't do anything without it, but the power cord appears to always come from somewhere else.

It would be interesting if time was fundamentally a way that everything in the universe communicates and stays synchronized - that would agree also with some comments I've made regarding that where something is, is dependent upon the rules it plays by (and considering communication is bidirectional, you could also say it depends upon what "language" you assume someone else, or something else is using).

But yes, the birds sing the morning and I go to bed when I feel sleepy etc. and these could all be described as environmental cues/inputs for some response. In a sense, that structure does not change depending upon what time it is (and of course we could also say that it's always "Now" and we could always feel that it's "Now" but it's hard to describe what that is except something collectively influencing a large number of other properties of experiences).

There are definitely some interesting possibilities on how various time lines could interact in synergy, yet not be following the same pathways in time or be interacting via. the same set of "rules", but these can be interleaved over time.

Consider the way a DVD player shows a movie. Initially we have something happening in 3 dimension which is then recorded as a 2 dimensional image. But the 2 dimensional image is then processed to extract significant features (for data compression) into separate 2 dimensional structures and then these are interleaved into a 1 dimension stream of information (fundamentally we also have "time" interleaved between those symbols) and this is recorded on the DVD and reconstructed via. an inverse operation into different frames.

In a sense, all these formats are just representations of the same sequence of events, but from different manners of viewing them. There would probably be a way in which you could describe the entire thing as some complex interactions in 1 dimension of time instead. The conversions to 2 and 3 dimensions (or 4 if we call it a 4-D space time) or even 10 or 11 dimensions (for String Theories) etc. are really rather arbitrary - it's the inherent diversity in properties of the data itself that determines what dimensionality of space it should "naturally" exist in (and that's probably a lot more than 10 (how many unique qualities does it take to describe a tree?), but the difference is that all those other dimensions are quantized and finite - they have perceptual boundaries whereas time doesn't have those finite properties).

As another example, imagine driving along a road with other cars. Each person could accelerate or deccelerate differently and this changes the position they will be in the future, but consider also that the motions of those cars could be seen from a different perspective of time and that instead the various positions and motions of a car could arise from "time slices" of different possible outcomes in which someone had changed their velocity at different times (in other words, let's say a car moves 10 feet - well there are many ways that a car might have reached any of those positions and with many possible velocities, but depending upon which samples of those are viewed and at which times, an entirely different pathway, trajectory or set of velocities could appear to have occurred by rearranging those moments in time differently, similar to the way a 2 dimensional image can still be represented as a collection of 1 dimensional segments. In order to do that though, it would appear distinct "endpoints" would be required - well the universe already has quanta around and is quantized, so those discrete units aren't hard to find).

Anyway, these are just more ramblings ... oh, yes, the executive summary ... forgot about that one. Alright, I'm working toward that ... just a few more volumes or so to go.

Speaking of which, unless you lads are any good with tools and a chainsaw, I have other activities still pending.

Later, Gents.....

And ditto here ... I'm suppose to be working on something else but yes, I'm a sucker for a good puzzle and have a hard time putting one down to do the chores

Alright, break time - (a.k.a. back to work)

*insert intermission sequence here*

(To be continued ... as usual )

[labelwench]

Intermission Sequence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZqka...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6Wh...eature=related

[SteveA]

Another unrelated "random" selection.

How to "correctly" shuffle a deck of cards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE4hUTUCn5U

[labelwench]

The following ia a 'patchwork post' of things I found while strolling the net, and have interspersed with a few of my own observations and comments. LW

Symbolic uses

Unlike most other methods of measuring time, the hourglass concretely represents the present as being between the past and the future, and this has made it an enduring symbol of time itself.

The hourglass, sometimes with the addition of metaphorical wings, is often depicted as a symbol that human existence is fleeting, and that the "sands of time" will run out for every human life. It was used thus on pirate flags, to strike fear into the hearts of the pirates' victims. In England, hourglasses were sometimes placed in coffins, and they have graced gravestones for centuries.


The hourglass remains a symbol of time, and there are still some in use, as in the Time Wheel at this link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timewheel

Some other simple devices were used for measuring time indoors, as follows:

Other simple measurement devices were used to mark the duration of time. Four basic types could be used indoors and regardless of the weather or time of day. The candle clock is a candle with lines drawn around it to mark units of time, usually hours. By observing how much of the length of a candle burned in one hour, a candle made of the same material was marked with lines showing one-hour intervals. An eight-hour candle showed that four hours had passed when it had burned down beyond four marks. The clock candle had the disadvantages that any changes in the wick or wax would alter burning properties, and it was highly subject to drafts. The Chinese also used a kind of candle clock with threads used to mark the time intervals. As the candle burned, the threads with metal balls on their ends fell so those in the room could hear the passage of the hours as the balls pinged on the tray holding the candle.

The oil lamp clock that was used through the eighteenth century was a variation and improvement on the candle clock. The oil lamp clock had divisions marked on a metal mount that encircled the glass reservoir containing the oil. As the level of oil fell in the reservoir, the passage of time was read from the markings on the mount. Like the candle clock, the oil lamp clock also provided light, but it was less prone to inaccuracies in materials or those caused by drafty rooms.

Water clocks were also used to mark the passage of time by allowing water to drip from one container into another. The marks of the sun's motion were made on the first container, and, as water dripped out of it and into another basin, the drop in water level showed the passage of the hours. The second container was not always used to collect and recycle the water; some water clocks simply allowed the water to drip on the ground. When the eight-hour water clock was empty, eight hours had passed. The water clock is also known as the clepsydra.

[AntonioLao]

Game On!

A game of computer chess without time limit can last forever. Once one side made a move then the waiting game begins. Without time limit, it is possible that the waiting can last forever. In a certain sense, life is simply a waiting game and for those who are impatient it becomes a crying game.