(November 18, 2018 at 11:48 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Which brings me to another digression. How do we have a sense of time? We think of ourselves as living in the moment, but somehow we're able to stitch together the relations between moments to construct a sense of time passing, such that we can, roughly, say when a minute has passed, as opposed to five minutes, as opposed to an hour. Surely we don't have timers in our heads which alert us to the passage of time, but how does that happen? Why aren't we more like the person with no long term memory for whom every moment is new?
This question poses special fuckery for me this year. I went in for gastro and endoscopy procedures, and the doctor told me, "You'll be able to respond to commands, but you won't remember anything." Eh, what's that now? I'll be conscious, or not? Turns out, I vaguely dreamed about watching a video monitor, and that this really happened.
When I woke up, I felt something like a rubber dildo going in and out of my mouth and throat about five times. I definitely, 100% had the experience of that happening, just like that. Bloopadoopadoopadoop, I had a clear sensation of it, as clear as anything else.
Right away, I opened my eyes. Nobody there, even though I knew for sure (gnostic, as in "I know, and no fucking way I could be getting this wrong.") that it just happened moments earlier.
The physical reality is that they did insert and take out the scope a few times, over the course of an hour or so, and that when I woke up, nobody had been there for about ten minutes. That thing I knew from direct and self-validating experience to be absolutely true-- I had it wrong.
I've done drugs before, in reasonably copious quantities even, but never before has my sense of the steady flow of time been so egregiously contradicted. I mean. . . I don't know what a second means anymore, or an entire lifetime.
