The past, the present and the future

One gets fascinated with things big and small. Strange and routine.

Since the time the realization dawned, it has continued to have an almost mystic lure. When I look up at the night sky, I see stars twinkle. But what my eyes see, is not what is. For all I know the star could have died, gotten converted to a black-hole and stopped sending out any light. What I witness as my present is nothing but a past, distant one at that.

But the story ends not there, I witness all of the outside world as a past. Only when the world impinges upon my sense organs and sends up a signal to my brain which discerns it, do I witness the outside world.

Sense-organs are such illusionists. They give a perception of real-time. When the truth is, nothing that you get off the inputs from the senses can be real time. (Processing delay, however small it may be)

But it isn’t just that. The senses neatly cover up their own limitations, by persisting through with the input. Remember that experiment from school on persistence of vision? Have a bird drawn on one side of a cardboard and a cage drawn on the other and rotate through the middle, the bird would appear caged?

Remember the times you heard things that people never uttered and you were told – “We hear what we want to hear”? It was probably the brain applying some of it’s own predicting algorithms. Only it was biased towards a mental circuit that was already created by your imagination of hearing those words.

But you see the mind goes a step further. Sometimes we get lost in thoughts. If you notice, there is always a trigger. You get an input from the outside and then you are able to temporarily over-ride (minor) external stimuli with mental simulations that seem to just go on. They call it being lost in your own world. For a good reason! Dreaming is a lot like that too. Now external stimulus is not completely negated. Well alarms wouldn’t work otherwise, would they? Some similar such event happens inside of your dream. And the imaginations seems to blur and you are brought into consciousness of the real stimulation of the senses.

What is good reflex? It is the ability to react to a stimulus. If you are lost in thoughts, then these stimuli will just go unnoticed. It’s a lot like how the packets get dropped if the input buffer is full. But if you can notice the stimulus come to you, and see it clearly go up for processing, then I think one can make the mind go through the case switches as against the default. That probably is responding.

If one truly understands that so much is just stimulus and mindless reaction, then one is capable of re-wiring.

If I can truly understand how a past event that appears to me as present determines my future actions which will come about to someone only as their past, then I think I would bother myself more with the mystery of the present which seems to forgo my ability of conception than the trivial issue of who the hell hacked my account!