Consciousness Trilemma

[pocaracas]

In essence, there's something about neurons not processing stuff instantaneously. I agree.

-and there's something about experience that -does- seem that way.

 
But what is this stuff that neurons cannot do?

Actually present you with zero-time processing, as they seem to, in your conscious experience. Hell, you could easily say that consciousness presents itself as negative time processing, in that you seem to be making decisions -before- you do things...when, as Ham linked to before...that's very often the other way round so far as we can tell.

 
They can't process our awareness of the self at the same time as they process the fact they we are aware of the self?

Simply that it takes time..time which, in our conscious experience, is -not- experienced.  

I'd say they can, if such processing can be parallelized... and I'm sure lots of parallel activity is going on in the brain... but I can't say anything about that particular conundrum... it often seems that our conscious thought process is a single-thread affair, thus eliminating such simultaneity in two thought processes... but is it really single-threaded? How can we tell?

Then you'd be saying that they can do something that they cannot do.  All lines in a parallel construction take time, no amount of adding lines changes that.  Speaking of parallel construction...where is it that these many lines condense into one, singular product, like it seems to?

That would be one way to tell.  Find this place, and see how many lines are going in, as it were, and how many are coming out.

ah, so... it's only about it taking time, in spite the instantaneous appearance of the thought process... is that it?
Again, that instantaneous appearance is just what should be called "Real-Time"... it's fast enough for that thought process itself to not be aware of the passage of that time.

I think I once read about the fastest a person could react to some stimuli and the delay between stimulus and reaction was of the order of 100ms (IIRC)... that's 0.1 seconds. Look around for slow motion cameras and see how much of the world occurs in under 0.1s... 0.1s is an eternity. Heck, your computer is probably calculating stuff at about 2GHz... one clock cycle every 1/(2x10^9) = 0.5x10^-9 = 5x10^-10s = 0.0000000005 seconds. It does 200 million calculations in the time a human takes to react to something. And, if the computer has a multi-core CPU, that can be multiplied by the number of cores.

My point is, we're slow, but we're fast enough for our purposes.
0.1s seems instantaneous.

Can you imagine how excruciating life would be if we could feel the milliseconds tick by?