Simultaneity

The following sections are included:

• FOREWORD

• PREFACE

• CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION

In order to describe a temporal observer perspective, we have to assume two mutually independent temporal dimensions: the depth and the length of time, which respectively correspond to simultaneity and succession. These define the degree of complexity a temporal observer perspective displays. Observer types may be distinguished in terms of their ability to create simultaneous contrasts or to resist contextualization. The setting of the interfacial cut between the observer participant and the rest of the world determines the structure of the fractal temporal observer perspective by assigning rhythms to the observer or to the rest of the world. Misattributions occur when the observer perspective becomes hard-wired and immune to external perturbations, i.e., if only the observer perspective but no external rhythms determine his interface reality.

The deductive biology of brain function is reviewed and brought in contact with recent neurobiological findings. Natural brains predictably possess two components: the force field generator (brain equation) and the Great Simulator (virtual-reality machine). The force field generator contains a preferred time direction, while the Great Simulator can in principle work in both directions of time. The "mirror neurons" discovered empirically by Rizzolatti are interpreted as a predictable manifestation of the Great Simulator. Artificial intelligences that share with us many aspects of the experience of time are possible. The notion of a "temporal fovea" is introduced. It implies a self-similar structure of time over a certain range. This finding confirms a proposal made by Susie Vrobel.

Belief in the totality of the present moment forms one of the fundamental tenets of Buddhist philosophy. According to Buddhist thought, the past is not real, because it no longer exists, and the future is not real because it has not yet come into existence. Only the present moment is real existence. Early Buddhist philosophers developed a theory of existence as a point-instant, and this view finds parallels in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The 13^th century monk/philosopher Dogen wrote extensively about our concept of time set against our experience of time. In his masterwork, Shobogenzo, he expounds on the nature of the Now in a stimulating essay rich in imagery and metaphor.

The observer problem is tackled from a systems-theoretical viewpoint: The observer and the interaction game between observer and world are regarded as two overlapping systems. This construction requires a foundation of systems theory in a holistic framework.

Non-local correlations between quantum events are not due to a causal interaction in the sense of one being the cause for the other. In principle, the correlated events can thus occur simultaneously. Generalized Quantum Theory (GQT) formalizes the idea that non-local phenomena are not exclusive to quantum mechanics, e.g. due to some specific properties of (sub)atomic particles, but that they instead arise as a consequence of the way such particles are arranged into systems. Non-local phenomena should hence occur in any system which fulfils the necessary systems-theoretical parameters. The two most important parameters with respect to non-local correlations seem to be a conserved global property of the system as a whole and sufficient degrees of freedom of the corresponding property of its subsystems. Both factors place severe limitations on experimental observability of the phenomena, especially in terms of replicability. It has been suggested that reported phenomena of a so-called synchronistic, parapsychological or paranormal kind could be understood as instances of systems-inherent non-local correlations. From a systems-theoretical perspective, their phenomenology (including the favorable conditions for their occurrence and their lack of replicability) displays substantial similarities to non-local correlations in quantum systems and matches well with systems-theoretical parameters, thus providing circumstantial evidence for this hypothesis.

The hemispheric paradigm verifies Kant's suggestion that time and space are our subjective modes of perceiving experience. Time and space are two modes of organizing the sensory input by the left- and right-hemispheric neural mechanisms, respectively. The neural structures of the left- and right-hemispheric mechanisms force our consciousness to perceive time as one-dimensional and propagating from the past towards the future, and space as a simultaneously perceived multidimensional structure. The introduction of temporal propagation from the future towards the past by Feynman and other physicists caused the transfer of the concept time from the left hemisphere (which cannot perceive this change of the temporal direction) to the right one. This transfer requires and allows for the introduction of additional temporal axes in order to solve paradoxes in physics.

Emotions are described as emergent states, which exist only to the extent that multiple affective reactions to the same object occur at the same time. Emotions are thus the confluence of thoughts, feelings, expressions, desires, and so on. They emerge as meta-cognitive representations of embodied affective reactions. Emotions may be initiated by low-level, automatic, unconscious affective reactions, which are then iteratively re-processed with ever greater cognitive involvement until they become elaborated into emotional states. Affective and emotional reactions act as information about the value of objects of judgment and of accessible cognitions and inclinations during tasks. They influence judgment and thought when they are experienced simultaneously with sensory data about the world. Affective influences thus depend on our inability to disentangle affective from descriptive perceptions. To the extent that affective reactions reflect different, incommensurate sources of value (e.g., utilitarian, moral, aesthetic), perceived persons or objects may be experienced as being transcendently good or evil. Experiments varying people's attributions for their affective experiences allow the separate roles of affective and descriptive information to be examined. However, it is the inability to parse everyday experience into its separate sources of evaluative and descriptive information that gives rise to a colourful and transcendent reality.

Emotionality of subjective time experience in depressed patients is related to Michael Theunissen's concept concerning the dominance of the past in relation to the spontaneity of the subject within a present moment of time. Electrophysiological data using the event-related potential method point to the view that negative emotions cannot use a value-related cognitive/emotional blockade of valuation processes. In addition, the subjective time experience is substantiated by reports of patients with an affective disorder. Furthermore, the role of forgetting to overcome such memory-related impairments is discussed within the context of possible functions of consciousness.

Episodic memory functions are highly context-dependent. This is true for both experimental and autobiographical episodic memory. We here review neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence for effects of differential encoding and retrieval contexts on episodic memory performance as well as the underlying neurofunctional mechanisms. In studies of laboratory episodic memory, the influence of context parameters can be assessed by experimental manipulations. Such experiments suggest that contextual variables mainly affect prefrontal functions supporting executive processes involved in episodic learning and retrieval. Context parameters affecting episodic autobiographical memory are far more complex and cannot easily be controlled. Data support the view that not only prefrontal, but also further medial temporal and posterior parietal regions mediating the re-experience and emotional evaluation of personal memories are highly influenced by changing contextual variables of memory encoding and retrieval. Based on our review of available data, we thus suggest that experimental and autobiographical episodic memories are influenced by both overlapping and differential context parameters.

We describe the mechanisms of complex systems evolution and show how this both generates and is generated by a hierarchical spatio-temporal structure. The mechanisms behind "evolutionary drive" are described, together with the important role that temporal and spatial hierarchy plays – where the mitigation of selective forces by different levels of structure make creative evolution inevitable. Several examples in human systems are presented to illustrate the ideas.

The nesting of chemical concepts is used to categorize the dynamics of the emergence of life and reproductive developments within living systems. The nesting ground is the list of chemical elements. The nexus of the parts of atoms serve to ordinate the natural sciences in terms of the natural electrical progression. The order of the atomic numbers creates the natural order of the electrical progression of the perplex number system, a new form of diagrammatic logic (Chandler, in press).¹ The abstract nest of relations is constructed from ur-symbols by creating scientific grammars (synthetic symbol systems) to relate matter to time and space. The ordinate logics, that is, logics based on scientific ordering relations, are defined in terms of the nexus of rule-based ur-symbol systems. A hierarchical nesting scheme is used to visualize the emergence of biological dynamics from predicate, subordinate, ordinate and co-ordinate logics. Ordinate logic expresses the natural relations of chemical sciences as a diagrammatic logic of matter in space. Motion in space is coordinated by the real number system. The Binary Principle of Mutational Action, a source of composition of the nested dynamics of living systems, follows from the co-ordination of perplex and real number systems.

I discuss the thesis that the learning of each type of skill requires the brain to assemble and develop a processing ensemble whose integrated activity allows the individual to engage behaviorally to the extent of observed capability. If capability improves, the opportunities of the brain processing ensemble for engagement must improve as well. Three ways are discussed in which context during skill learning can influence the development of capability. These include context of use perceived by the learner, context of outside authority related to the learning, and context of relationship of processing to similar processing resources of use to other skill applications. I propose that learning connecting arts skill to other skill learning may be especially useful to the skill learner by fostering incorporation of forms of processing especially favored within brain evolution, and that the use of processing favored for other reasons by evolution can help to explain the appearance of the arts within human culture.

Linear concepts of time plus the modern capacity to track history emerged out of circular conceptions characteristic of ancient and traditional cultures. A fractal concept of time lies implicitly within the analog clock, where each moment is treated as unique. With fractal geometry the best descriptor of nature, qualities of self-similarity and scale invariance easily model her endless variety and recursive patterning, both in time and across space. To better manage temporal aspects of our lives, a fractal concept of time is non-reductive, based more on the fullness of being than on fragments of doing. By using a fractal concept of time, each activity or dimension of life is multiply and vertically nested. Each nested cycle remains simultaneously present, operating according to intrinsic dynamics and time scales. By adding the vertical axis of simultaneity to the horizontal axis of length, time is already full and never needs to be filled. To attend to time's vertical dimension is to tap into the imaginary potential for infinite depth. To switch from linear to fractal time allows us to relax into each moment while keeping in mind the whole.

The theory of scale relativity is an extension of the principle of relativity to scale transformations of the reference system, in a fractal geometry framework where coordinates become explicitly dependent on resolutions. Applied to an observer perspective, it means that the scales of length and of time, usually attributed to the observed object as being intrinsic to it, have actually no existence by themselves, since only the ratio between an external scale and an internal scale, which serves as unit, is meaningful. Oliver Sacks' observations on patients suffering from temporal and spatial distortions in Parkinson's and encephalitis lethargica disease offer a particularly relevant field of application for such a scale-relativistic view.

We take for granted that we know what an observer is. In actuality, there are many different kinds of observation that we employ, related to differing qualities of environment. These modes of observation include direct human observation; human observation that is augmented by differing tools and/or machines; computational models functioning as machinic observers, in which humans become super-observers; chemical observers where particular changes register particular qualities; and potential future observers - Neosentient machines. For each of these different kinds of observers, the notion of simultaneity is problematic in some manner. The definition is clear enough: simultaneous - existing, occurring, or operating at the same time; concurrent: simultaneous movements; simultaneous translation. Yet, notions of time are different on the micro and macro scale. Humans also have been observed to include up to a one half-second time buffer, adjusting for the body's distributed sensing functionality and potentially its embodied relation to memory and past thought. These facts throw off our concept of something happening at "the same time." Thus, time, spatial relations, the body, differing machines and chemical modalities each can be framed linguistically as having different perspectives in relation to the notion of simultaneity and/or the limits of registering simultaneous events.

In contemporary psychoanalysis, the true origin of the science seems to be put aside to get it in vogue with the rest of the scientific framework and psychoanalytical thinking. Although this is a defendable position from which to approach psychoanalysis, it robs it of its core. In this paper, we take the hard-core themes of psychoanalysis such as death and sex, to heart and show how they can be linked to the other sciences, such as the theory of complexity, without censoring or rephrasing the concepts or the language itself.

Flicker-Noise Spectroscopy (FNS), a general approach to the extraction and parameterization of resonant and stochastic components contained in medical time series, is presented. The basic idea of FNS is to treat as main information carriers the correlation links present in sequences of different irregularities, such as spikes, "jumps", and discontinuities in derivatives of different orders, on all levels of the spatiotemporal hierarchy of the system under study. The tools for extracting and analyzing the information are power spectra and difference moments (structural functions), which complement each other's information. The stochastic component derived from the structural function is formed exclusively by "jumps" of the dynamic variable while the stochastic component derived from the power spectrum is formed by both spikes and "jumps" on every level of the hierarchy. An application of this approach to the analysis of electroencephalogram signals is discussed.

This chapter summarizes recent work based on an approach to conscious observer perspectives that views the emergence of phenomenal experience as a kind of hidden biological pattern formation. Initially, models based on simple binary neuron-like elements were devised in order to contrive ways of producing hidden patterns, and these are summarized to develop the key ideas. New evidence for the natural production of hidden patterns using simulations of networks of integrate-and-fire model neurons is then presented.

This paper presents a methodology for efficient synthesis of dynamical model simulating a common-sense decision making process. The approach is based upon the extension of the physics' First Principles that includes behavior of living systems. The new architecture consists of motor dynamics simulating actual behavior of the object, and mental dynamics representing evolution of the corresponding knowledge-base and incorporating it in the form of information flows into the motor dynamics. The autonomy of the decision making process is achieved by a feedback from mental to motor dynamics. This feedback replaces unavailable external information by an internal knowledgebase stored in the mental model in the form of probability distributions.

Synchrony is a multi-faceted concept used in diverse domains such as physics, biology, and the social sciences. This chapter reviews some of the evidence of nonverbal synchrony in human communication, with a main focus on the role of synchrony in the psychotherapeutic setting. Nonverbal synchrony describes coordinated behavior of patient and therapist. Its association with empathy, rapport and the therapeutic relationship has been pointed out repeatedly, yet close evaluation of empirical studies suggests that the evidence remains inconclusive. Particularly in naturalistic studies, research with quantitative measures of synchrony is still lacking. We introduce a new empirical approach for the study of synchrony in psychotherapies under field conditions: Motion Energy Analysis (MEA). This is a video-based algorithm that quantifies the amount of movement in freely definable regions of interest. Our statistical analysis detects synchrony on a global level, irrespective of the specific body parts moving. Synchrony thus defined can be considered as a general measure of movement coordination between interacting individuals. Data from a sequence of N = 21 therapy sessions taken from one psychotherapy dyad shows a high positive relationship between synchrony and the therapeutic bond. Nonverbal synchrony can thus be considered a promising concept for research on the therapeutic alliance. Further areas of application are discussed.

Dynamically complex diseases with distributed and multi-scale interacting physiological rhythms require a more refined temporal perspective of the scientific observer than is currently provided by visual displays of physiological data. We argue that sonification, the auditory inspection of experimental data, provides a unique approach to the representation of the temporal aspects of the data as it addresses the human sense of listening. The ear's capacity to detect temporal patterns of sameness and differences, of coincidence and coordination – widely exploited in listening to music and spoken language – creates a new temporal perspective in the scientific observer. We briefly describe some examples of sonifications of biomedical data and discuss their value in recovering the temporality of complex physiological processes. Auditory Gestalt formation can be exploited for the classification and differentiation of diseases. Finally, we stress the complementarity of auditory and visual representations and argue for combined audio-visual displays in order to adequately deal with complex phenomena, as in the case of dynamical diseases.

Based on a model of pluralistic music, we may approach an aesthetic concept of music, which employs dichotic listening situations. The concept of dichotic listening stems from neuropsychological test conditions in lateralization experiments on brain hemispheres, in which each ear is exposed to a different auditory content. In the framework of such sound experiments, the question which primarily arises concerns a new kind of hearing, which is also conceivable without earphones as a spatial composition, and which may superficially be linked to its degree of complexity. From a psychological perspective, the degree of complexity is correlated with the degree of attention given, with the listener's musical or listening experience and the level of his appreciation. Therefore, we may possibly also expect a measurable increase in physical activity. Furthermore, a dialectic interpretation of such "dualistic" music presents itself.

Computer simulations are used to investigate epidemics, social phenomena, decision-making, supply networks, and physical and chemical processes among other things. This chapter examines how time is incorporated into such simulations. This method is criticized by showing why it is inadequate, leading to potentially erroneous conclusions. The concepts of "time-ecology," and "heterochrony", and J.T. Fraser's theory of the nested hierarchy of time are used to propose solutions.

A new damping method for the rational exploitation of flaring-type economic phenomena is proposed. The steering parameter for Anti-Flaring is called the Livermore Indicator. The approach in general is described as endonomics.

A new attractor in economics is identified. It is ultimately based on the Godet Correlation (matrix of interdependencies), which originally was introduced intuitively in a sociological context. Here, for the first time, a purely observational, quantitative and multitime version is introduced. It amazingly reveals the existence of an organizing force vector in complex dissipative systems such as the economy and, presumably, other living and non-living systems.

An interface is presented that was not visible before we had developed the new software I-Matrix, which allows us to look behind the economic curtain. Forces that no economist can predict are found to be present. We studied economic developments from 1931 to 2007 with the Livermore Indicator solely, taking only the inflation rate into account. Relative price movements are the hidden forces responsible for the up and down turns in the economy. Even in a deflation, consumer prices can fall more slowly in relation to the economic downturn, which means there is an inflation even when the prices fall in absolute terms. We therefore propose that there is an "economic relativity theory" based on relative prices changes.

The Wheeler-Feynman transactional "absorber" approach was proposed originally to account for anomalous resonance coupling between spatio-temporally distant measurement partners in entangled quantum states of so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradoxes, e.g. of spatio-temporal non-locality, quantum teleportation, etc. Applied to quantum brain dynamics, however, this view provides an anticipative resonance coupling model for aspects of cortical synchronization and recurrent visual action control. It is proposed to consider the registered activation patterns of neuronal loops in so-called synfire chains not as a result of retarded brain communication processes, but rather as surface effects of a system of standing waves generated in the depth of visual processing. According to this view, they arise from a counterbalance between the actual input's delayed bottom-up data streams and top-down recurrent information-processing of advanced anticipative signals in a Wheeler-Feynman-type absorber mode. In the framework of a "time-loop" model, findings about mirror neurons in the brain cortex are suggested to be at least partially associated with temporal rather than spatial mirror functions of visual processing, similar to phase conjugate adaptive resonance-coupling in nonlinear optics.

The cells in our body all synchronise their action 1) on the basis of their common origin and 2) in correspondence with changes in our context; of which we form an integral part. The Time Fractal helps us to better understand this interaction, and helps understand Time Base diseases.

The following sections are included:

• AUTHOR INDEX

• SUBJECT INDEX