Can a brother get a 77 invite?

To read more on acoleuthic sensations, use 'akoluthic'.

dammit i thought it was my fkn secret, there's even a band called 'thee akoluthic' and i want to call mine 'the acoleuthic sensation'...they will sue ;_;

acoleuthic is a way better spelling anyway

sry.

in a way i like it that i knew the alternative transliteration first...the dialectic of information's passage itself has undergone an acoleuthic slippage, with the result that I possess a form of the word corrupted into secret by rexroth's poetry

if i ever make a fap imma slap you just for that

Marvelous word. I like especially like the idea of a "specious present", in which we constantly hang on the transition between actual perception and the burst-fading of immediately past perception, likening our awareness of/existence in the perceptual present to the slow extinguishment of a flashbulb (or lightning strike) in the eye. Reminds me of Laurie Anderson's bit about walking as constantly arrested falling, the vanishing string of acoleuthic echoes that defines our "present" constantly refreshing itself with new signals before the old ones can fade. Think Stan M is 100% correct above, though, at least wr2 Russel's take on the concept. If our perception of the present were not acoleuthically blurred, if we were more clearly able to distinguish between the now and the recently-now, we would not be so easily fooled by the illusion of motion presented in film & television. When watching film and TV, we see not only what we are actually looking at in any given moment, but also what we were seeing only a moment or two ago, all these successive real nows blurred together into a larger, softer, smearier specious now in which we perceive not fragments but continuities. Analog vs. digital, etc.

Thinking it through, Russel must be correct (or his thinking must, at least, point toward the truth). "The Present", after all, is essentially fictional. Time as we conventionally understand it, is not quantized, has no fundamental unit. Rather, what we think of as "the present" is no more than the vanishingly fine (infinitesimal!) line that separates the past from the future - a thing with no dimension that is, perversely, all that actually exists. We cannot really be said to perceive it because it does not exist to any perceptible degree. We are aware of it only because we possess a fundamental sense of ourselves as existing in a forward-shifting now, and because we are aware that something must separate our anticipation of the next moment from our memory of the last. We therefore/thereby construct "the now" from the intersection of anticipation and memory, depending on the acoleuthic ghosts of what recently was to paper over the fundamental not-ness of the present.

... tumbleweeds, the whistling wind ...

Hmm, I think the implications of that 2nd post rebut one of the assumptions of the 1st. I said we perceive "all these successive real nows blurred together", which basically just restates Russel. But I'm not so sure that's possible.... If the present IS vanishingly small (and I think it must be, even if time is quantized), we never really perceive it. It is too small to perceive, if it can be said to exist at all. Instead, we only ever perceive its echoes, our memories of a thing we never quite perceived in the first place. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that we perceive the accumulating/cumulative changes in the contours of the recent past, and from this create a projective sense of an authoring "present" in which these changes must have occurred. I.e., we manufacture the present to explain the constant accumulation of new moments on the shores of the past -- something we're aware of without quite perceiving. We hold a burning instant of the just-past in mind to illuminate the nothing/void that is the present/future.

don't neurons fire in discrete bursts though

Yeah, that's a good point. The now we physically-into-consciously perceive isn't the "real now" (a vanishingly small no-thing that's maybe only tangentially relevant here), but rather a concrete series of sensory information-bursts. These information bursts DO exist to a perceptible degree. But the processes by which we gather information about the present are themselves dependent on something similar to the acoleuthic ghosting that allows us to construct our conscious awareness of the present from that sensory information. We aren't really perceiving the present, but rather a quickly fading flash of what the present was a moment or two ago* -- and it's only by stringing these flashes together that were able to cobble together a fluid sense of the now we occupy.

* And not even what THEE present was, but rather a smudgy, smeary approximation of the net results of a chunk of time - another shadow cast by something that doesn't seem to have been there in the first place.

I don't know that I'm making any sense here, so if it seems dubious to you, you're not alone...

That question does clarify my confusion about/criticism of Russel's point, though, Curt1s. He's not talking about our perception of the actual present (whatever that might be), but rather our perception of what we perceive of the present -- discrete bursts of information, as you say.

We're listening.

Heh. Yeah...

Was still pondering when I woke up this morning, and I'm bummed to discover that a lot of what I wrote yesterday was horse hockey. Three AM brane was so impressed by its own "deep thoughts" that it didn't notice how much of the forest was missing in favor of this one reaaaaally intersting tree. Like Curt1s' point about the quantized nature of perception, for one thing, but also the much more basic errors of assumption I was making about the relationship of human consciousness to time/the present. All that stuff about the "vanishingly fine" nature of the present only makes sense if one is perceiving time from outside its flow, in a godlike (Merlin-like) fashion. If one is IN time, is moving forward through time with the present (as we seem to be), then the present is not impossibly small, but rather infinitely large and ever-changing - maybe both infinitesimal and infinite, but certainly the latter.

Still stand by the basic/trivial observation that I was getting all jazzed about last night: while we may always be 100% in the present, our awareness lags behind, is perpetually catching up with the present, examining the fading bloom of recently expired moments and from them constructing a sense of now-ness that remains stranded (though just barely) in the past. Plus still excited about the "Walking and Falling" analogy, where these fading acoleuthic echoes are all we have to hold onto, a rope dangled from the present (existence) into the past (annihilation). We're sort of trapped between the two states, but pulled forward by the memory/perception of what recently was.

judderingly

smh

judderingly

jaggeringly

*sigh*

great, now we need a new 77 invite request thread

we don't, and I know one person never ever getting invited iiwutm

Might I? I heard 77 is a party!

In retrospect, I shoulda started an ILE thread for that, rather than mucking up the walls in here, but what's done is done. Mea culpa.

Invite?

ha...

this is not what MRF is for