We never see reality. It occurred to me today when someone dropped a bottle and I caught it. It was a lucky catch. The time taken for my eyes to tell my brain something is moving and then for my brain to tell my arm to move is not instantaneous. It takes time. Not very much time but a significant proportion of time when put against the acceleration due to gravity.
It led me to thinking. Always a dangerous path these days, especially when fuelled by whisky. Eyes take in images and pass information to the brain along nerves. The brain translates the impulses into a picture. It takes time – only milliseconds, but time – so nobody ever sees ‘now’. We see what happened a few milliseconds ago.
Hearing is even worse since sound travels slower than light.
If so, how did I catch the falling bottle? Does my brain anticipate and compensate for the time lapse, and therefore place my hand lower than my eyes would suggest it should go? How does my brain know that its perception of time is delayed since all it has to work with is the information it gets from nerves?
As far as time is concerned I should have been asleep hours ago but I have been at the espresso and the whisky and am well into the ‘talking utter shite’ stage.
So, I will retire and leave you with the article tipped by email from correspondent SB. Possibly the only article of the day that is not a candidate for an April Fool spoof.
Reality is the stuff of philosopy, but for the drones, reality is what they are told it should be.
And they will insist that reality conforms to their prejudices. It won’t.
Because it doesn’t exist. Pick the bones out of that one, Jung.
underdogs bite upwards 
I guess it’s how the Creator made us; the seeming discrepancies, chemically, are compensated for. I have very quick reaction times, so I catch most things before they crash to the floor. In a physics lesson at school, our reaction times were tested by pressing a button as soon as you saw a light bulb switch on which clocked your time and switched off the bulb. I astounded the class by pressing the button before they had even seen the filament start to glow. I think I might have mentioned before I was the fastest (price labelling) gun in the west (of Scotland) when I worked in a supermarket in olden times before barcodes. If only there had been national championships in it.
As for *reality*. The farther people remove themselves from the Almighty, the further from reality they stray. That’s why the great communist leaders thought it OK to have tens of millions of their own people rounded up and murdered and why it will probably happen again under the growth of socialism via the EU and UN. Agenda 21.
I’ve been reading about freemen-on-the-land and how much that “reality” for most people is actually an illusion, such as most laws and taxes and many aspects of life we consider ‘normal’. And it’ll keep getting worse the longer we remain in the mainstream ‘grid’.
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The line between ‘big bang’ and ‘creation’ is much more blurred than those on either side believe. I don’t have a definitive answer to the origin of everything but I think – I hope – I have something that will invoke rage from all sides.
Like dropping a tobacco flavoured stink bomb into an ASH meeting. Oh now there’s an idea!
It will take time to put into words but if this one doesn’t get me a nasty Daily Mail article thne I am doomed to obscurity forever.
Keep in mind – I am not interested in money, all this is just for fun.
Because life is limited and if you are right, this is all the fun I will ever have.
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A chap knocked a glass off a table in a pub once, and I caught it. Split second of a job.
It didn’t get me thinking though. At least not beyond, “How cool am I? Where’s the bar?”
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I was sober at the time. I’ve done it drunk and thought the same as you.
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You can gauge just how long it takes for your brain to get you moving. You watch at pedestrian crossings for the light to go red and then for you to move. It takes longer than you think.
I have quick reactions which I put down to riding motorbikes and driving cars swiftly.
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My fast reactions are probably because of microbiology. When you see a flask of something nasty toppling…
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“Does my brain anticipate and compensate for the time lapse, and therefore place my hand lower than my eyes would suggest it should go?”
Yes, that is learned behavior.
Probably did not happen the first time such an event occurred.
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Probably, the first time. I was drunk…;)
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XX It occurred to me today when someone dropped a bottle and I caught it. It was a lucky catch. XX
NEVER admit that!
Just tel them it is witchcraft, and they will never forget you.
(Granny Weatherwax. Headology. “Magic” in a nut shell.)
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You’re a wizard H!
BTW I lost that fecking horse and barrel/wagon thing. Just too damn small!
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I can’t make another one! But I am working on an N gauge phone box with a phone in it…
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I suspect that much of what we see is not really true.
http://dragon.uml.edu/psych/
Has this to say as well as many optical illusions.
What we perceive doesn’t necessarily correspond with physical measurement of reality. Our actions are guided by what we perceive and not typically by what can be measured to exist or often by what we know.
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More stuff
http://www.planetperplex.com/en/subcategory/optical-illusions/color-illusions/l/
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Sometimes we do not see what is there.
How many Fs do you see in the text below?
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
How many did you count? 3?
Wrong, there were 6.
Our brains are trained to overlook the word OF.
If you saw all 6 Fs right away, you’re a genius.
Most people see only 3 Fs. Some people see 4.
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Perhaps we were looking for the soft F sound and ignoring OF as it is a V sound and therefore mentally filtered out.
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Easy to filter things out.
I do that all of the time when my wife is talking; but, I wonder how much else in our reality is there and unseen?
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Good one, gary. I have seen that sort of test on occasions before and so I read it slowly and carefully. I counted 3.
The good news is that it seems to put me in the class of ‘normal human being’.
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Me too
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FUCK! It took time, but I found the six. (On the third attempt).
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I got 4 three times running and just couldn’t see the two “of” s between RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC .
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I can’t comment – did this one (harrumph) years ago.
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I always wonder if the more we look across the universe and back in time towards or even past the big band, we’ll eventually see something we don’t like. Something that explains the origins of the universe a bit too simply.
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I always think that is back to front/inside out.
O.K, the older stars are further away, logic demands that. (According to “Big bang”/expanding universe)
BUT, if you are looking back in time, towards “the big bang” they should be closer together….surely….?
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As I hear tell, the ‘Big Bang’ is not an expansion in ‘time and space’; but, of ‘time and space’.
There is no defining point of origin.
The universe exists equally in all directions from us.
Makes zero sense to me.
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GREAT! I thought I was the ONLY one…. 🙂
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Here is more for you.
Some scientists think there are about 10 to the 100th other universes out there that are beyond or parallel to ours.
There ‘could’ be zillions of Leg Irons or Furor Teutonicus’s running around!!! 😦
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That would be great. I just want to meet one of me. There are a few things I would like to punch “me” in the nose for.. 😀 (Wife No 1, for example.)
Have you read any of lisa Randalls works? A Harvard/MIT proffessor, who wrote; “Warped passages. Unravelling the mysteries of the universe’s hidden dimensions?”
Quite good as a bed time read.
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We could all arange to meet up. Think of the plots and schemes we could hatch! It would have to take place in a universe entirely made of booze though, or there wouldn’t be enough for everyone.
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They would ban us as weapons of mass abstraction. Or should that be mass destraction?? “Confuse them all, let the Gods sort them out.”
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There cannot be a defining point of origin.
The universe was a dot. Everything was inside it. It did not explode, it expanded, like a balloon. So everything that was inside is still inside, just with moire wiggle room.
We can’t see the point of origin because we are still inside it and always will be.
Does that make sense? Hell, I passed the halfway point on tonight’s whisky bottle so everything makes sense now.
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Except government policy. I cannot get drunk enough to see any sense in that.
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I’ve only ever done anything like that one time; I reflexively caught a “frenemy” thrown head-high beer bottle midair, but I had no warning and no preparation, it just happened. The look on his face was priceless, and worth more than any threat or physical reaction.
One of the admitted side effects of drink…bad companions, bless their heart.
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Likewise, I once caught a punch thrown by a frenemy. There has never been anoither.
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I think genuine fear of losing the contents makes one speed up when catching a falling bottle. I know I would.
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Depends what’s in the bottle 😀
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I was in Holland last weekend. €4,80 for .3 of a liter of beer!!!
Tell you what, THAT is enough alone to speed up your reflexes if it drops!
(As a comparison, Germany, you can get a Half liter of beer for 47 Cents, and you get 8 of those back when you return the bottle!)
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“Godel Escher Bach” that taught me you/I/we only ever see a mediated version of reality (who knew “Through a glass darkly” was still relevant?) It also said clever things about some infinities being bigger than others, which is…mind-bending.
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“Bigger Infinities” couldn’t resist: If you have a square or infinitely long sides, how far is it from one corner to the other?
What’s bigger than Infinity? Answer: Infinity +1
🙂
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C². As in E=MC²
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