(Jikan ninshiki to iu sakkaku)
Full Text ＆ Animation
by Norimichi Shuto
Japanese page
Prologue
The passage of time is very much a daily presence. We are all constantly aware of it as we live. We are aware of what time the movie starts, or when our deadline is, and kids sit in class being aware of what time class ends.
And while being a daily presence, it is also a very peculiar one. The famous theoretical physicist Albert Einstein said that the passage of time grows and shrinks. However, this statement is not limited to a specific field of study or discipline.
As a child, I remember looking up from totally being immersed in a book and noticing that the atmosphere surrounding me had changed. Even though it was supposed to be afternoon, the room had become dim, and the voices of the children that had been playing outside were gone. Looking up at the clock told me it was evening, and my mother was preparing dinner in the kitchen. When you are immersed in something, time passes in the blink of an eye. On the other hand, when you have no choice but to do something you have no interest in doing, time passes excruciatingly slow. Is this just a matter of how you feel? If that’s the case, the difference in how fast time seems to pass appears to be a bit extreme. Besides, what is a feeling anyway?
Many hypotheses will be discussed in this book, all of which are preceded by a specific one. And that hypothesis states that a mechanism in our brains actually generates time perception. To be exact, just by making us conscious of time by causing us to think a certain way, that mechanism makes it possible to interpret in rather simple terms the passage of time. And if this is fact, it then becomes possible to solve other mysteries related to time in other fields as well. Furthermore, it can give us clues on how to look into our own hearts and minds. By explaining how all this works in this book, I would like to question the authenticity and utility of this mechanism, and whether or not it actually exists.
It all started from the words of a Greek philosopher over 2500 years ago. The Arrow Paradox, one of Zeno’s paradoxes, is where it all began. The aim here was not to pursue every single statement made relating to time perception. The paradoxical “motionless flying arrow” is not sophistry nor is it reckless, because it hits the mark regarding the intrinsic qualities of our perceptions. It just so happens that conditions were never met in the last 2500 years to prove this — until now.
Every single relevant term used in this book is defined within. Accordingly, this book has been written so as to be understood even by those who have absolutely no prior background in this specific field of study. By the time the last page of this book has been read, you too should have the desire to quietly observe time as it passes right in front of you, the light and sounds that surround you, and each and every word within you.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1 The 2,500-yr.-old Mystery
1 Zeno's Paradox
- The Flying Arrow is Motionless -
2 An Afterimage of the Past
- Descartes' Fly is Blurry
3 The Past Does Not Disappear But Sinks
- Husser1's Theory of Time
Chapter 2 The Illusion of The Perception
1 The Fusion of the Present and the Past
- Stereograms and Time Perception
2 Why Does the Optical Illusion Graphic
"Rotating Snakes" Move?
3 The Spurious Duration of Time
- Loop Reaction of Neurons
Chapter 3 The Actual State of Consciousness
1 Why Are We Able to Have Thoughts
During Duration-less Time?
2 Music in the Shape of Words
- Sounds That Reverberate in Duration-less Time
3 The Entity of Conscience (1)
- The Mind is Born in an Ocean of Sounds
4 The EntityofConscience (2)
- Self-Consciousness Caned Time Perception
Chapter 4 The Essence of Time
1 Physical Time (1)
- Reality with No Observers
2 Physical Time (2)
Descartes' Fly is at Rest
3 Mathematical Time
- Achilles and the Tortoise -
Chapter 5 Seeking the Origin of the Arrow of Time
1 Quantum as a Spherical Wave
- Time as a Truly Independent Presence
2 The Identity of Gravity
- The Point of Contact Between Quantum Mechanics and the General Theory Of Relativity
3 What is Mass
- Matching Conditions for Inertial Mass and Gravitational Mass
4 Seeking the Origin of the Arrow of Time
- Perfect Symmetry
Chapter 6 What is Reality?
Epilogue
Additional Bibliography
Chapter 1 The 2,500-yr.-old Mystery
1. Zeno's Paradox -The FIying Arrow is Motionless-
Zeno’s paradoxes were first introduced by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in chapter six of his text Physics. These paradoxes were devised by fellow Greek philosopher Zeno. To be introduced in the following pages is one of the four paradoxes — the Arrow Paradox.
At any specific moment in time, a flying arrow is at rest. Moments have no dimensions, so the arrow would be at zero velocity. If the passage of time is made up of accumulated moments, then things at rest will always be at zero, no matter how many moments are stacked. Therefore, the arrow is actually at rest.
Simply put, anybody can see that this is not true. This paradox states that moving objects actually are not moving. Obviously, this logic is not limited to arrows flying through the air, but even cars running through streets, and even your own hand that you flutter right before your eyes. No one would believe that all of these things are actually not moving. Furthermore, if all of these objects are at rest, then it would mean nothing other than the fact that time is not passing. In science fiction movies, sometimes we see inventions created by psychic-like genius scientists that are able to literally stop time. People walking streets, water from a fountain, birds flying in the air — everything in daily life stands still, while all we see moving around is the character him or herself who stopped time in the first place. Even though the question of whether anyone can say for certain that time actually stopped in this scenario is sure to arise, surely everyone has the same idea that the movement of objects and the passage of time are closely related. In other words, this means that Zeno ended up stopping even the passage of time. Anybody with common sense would not agree with this logic. But when whoever disagrees is told to explain what part of this logic is wrong, they will not be able to come up with anything. In fact, nobody has ever been able to truly solve the mystery of this paradox for over 2500 years.
Us contemporary humans live within a visual culture. Many of us are sure to have sat in front of our televisions, and thoroughly watched scenes from our favorite movies frame by frame. For example, someone may watch the knockout blow from a recorded boxing match frame by frame, so they can see how exactly the final punch connected. But frame-by-frame images are jerky, and not very enjoyable to watch. Frame-by-frame images are completely different from the smooth movements of real time. And when one tries to think of what these differences actually are, what immediately rises up is the question that has continued to mystify people’s minds for the last 2500 years. Nobody is saying that footage recorded on film is completely artificial. What is being recorded is light that actually approaches from up ahead during the moment of filming. This should essentially be no different from the retinas in our two eyes capturing the light coming at us from ahead and us recognizing that as reality. There exists something between the frames of film that have been shot. And there is no question that whatever that is is what creates the difference between images and reality. Whatever motion wasn’t captured lurks between the frames of film. That is why when high-speed cameras are brought out to capture those elusive movements in between the frames, all that results are similar photos of the exact same moments. The higher efficiency the camera, the photographed moving object looks sharper in each and every frame. The number of completely frozen moments in time will increase in proportion to the performance of the photo device. So, motion is just an accumulation of moments. So why are objects that should be still in moments look to be moving in reality? The more you struggle with this, the spell that was cast over 2500 years ago comes twining around.
However, there is something that exists that does not stop moving while in a moment, in a single frame. This is what is called an optical illusion illustration. The “Rotating Snakes” created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka from Ritsumeikan University is a representative of that. (Look to the color drawing reference.) Something nothing more than a single drawing spins round and round. What should be a still image is completely like a moving one. A fixed color pattern is arranged within numerous circles, which create spurious movement to the drawings that should be still. This color pattern hints at the structure of a certain mechanism that was mentioned in the prologue, but that will be explained in and after Chapter 2, and here I will continue discussing Zeno’s Paradox.
Zeno’s Paradox throws us the question of “What is motion?”. From 2500 years ago until the present day, the history of the development of mathematics has gone hand in hand with investigating the problem of “What is motion?” And essentially, no one has been able to solve this problem until now. Matters such as these are intelligibly explained by Joseph Mazur in his The Motion Paradox: The 2500-Year Old Puzzle Behind All the Mysteries of Time and Space (translated by Shun Matsuura/Hakuyosha). Joseph Mazur explains as follows:
“We measure time as a duration and think of motion as continuous. The best definition of motion we have is intricately tangled between the discrete and continuous impressions of time and space. Despite contributions by Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and many others, for over 2,000 years nobody offered better clues about motion’s deeper nature than Zeno.”
To describe movement, numbers were presented as distance traveled per unit of time. The kilometers in 60 kilometers per hour is a unit of distance. Furthermore, Newton and Leibniz took Descartes’ geometrical ideas and enciphered them, describing motion as the tangent of the trajectory of an object. It is differential. This made motion a predictable entity. It became possible to know when and where a specific object would arrive.
But the concept of speed is nothing more than a substitute for the anonymous and hard-to-describe entity called motion, replacing it with distance traveled in units of time. Also, because the essence of differentiation is a tangent, trajectory of an object becomes necessary. The tangent point is a specific point in the trajectory that has a fixed regularity. Consequently, moments called tangent points are indeed points, yet are themselves trajectories that possess infinitesimal time width, and are not moments in the real sense of the word. A real moment, a truly independent point with no temporal width, the single frame of film, so to speak. The mystery cast by Zeno of the object at rest that should be in motion, has essentially yet to be unlocked.
As something that points to the limits of physics and mathematics, the motion of double pendulums is often considered. An independent pendulum can even be used as a clock, with movements that are totally mathematically predictable. However, just by adding another pendulum ahead of it, the movements become entirely unpredictable. Even modern physics and mathematics cannot explain this. The framework of this book includes a suggested answer to the mystery of these movements, but that will be assigned to Chapter 4.
By mathematically analyzing the concepts of speed and differentiation, and turning the motion of objects into something that can be produced and controlled, the foundation for this modern scientific civilization was built, but it can also be said that all that has happened is that the outer shell phenomenon can now be described in words. In a sense, it is as if an arrangement was made out of convenience’s sake to collectively think about it a certain way, but whatever is inside the black box of motion is still surrounded by darkness.
2. An Afterimage of the Past — Descartes’ Fly is Blurry
Is Zeno’s paradox mere sophism? Or is it wordplay, where hidden in the logical structure is a crack, one unnoticed by even Zeno himself, that could solve everything if found? Zeno’s paradox has at the core of its mystery the decisive differences between the conclusion that his logic leads to and our common perceptions. Therefore, in order to even ponder the truth of the passage of time, it is necessary to separate our perspectives between physical mathematical time and our internal time. Of course, it is not necessarily so that Zeno’s logic correctly describes physical reality. Contrarily, it is not possible at this stage to assert that he has not been able to describe it. Evidence and judgements for this will be assigned to Chapter 4 and beyond, and here we will examine the latter — our internal time. In other words, before looking for cracks in Zeno’s logic, we will verify our own common sensibilities. All that is needed for that is the time that at this moment is passing by right before your eyes, and your own mind that recognizes that. Let us attempt to observe in our own minds, the present moment, defined by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno as when everything is still.
Earlier, an example was given of science fiction movies that show the stopping of time. The motion of objects and the passage of time may not be synonymous, but they obviously have a deep association. One can no longer say that time is passing when an object is completely at a standstill, and the space surrounding the observer even makes their mind stand still. Consequently, this book will discuss matters by correlating the passage of time and the motion of objects.
We all live in a moment called the present. A moment is literally that, a moment, and there should be no width. Nobody says, “I live in a reality that has one second of width.” Nevertheless, what state does something not having width specifically imply? We obviously do not just go about living simply by being stimulated by surrounding lights and sounds. We recognize reality by subconsciously getting a boost from our memories and wisdom from past experiences. That itself is human consciousness. But for now, why don’t we scrape off those type of residuals, and focus on our perceptions themselves that feel the passing of time in this very moment.
For example, let’s say that you carelessly dropped a cup fifteen minutes ago and broke it. Fifteen minutes later, the impression of this incident will still be clearly on your mind, accompanied by the sounds of the breaking glass. Of course, the cup dropped fifteen minutes earlier is not continuing to crack in the corner of the room. Impressions left in a person’s mind are those of the past and gone, and do not exist in the present. These can be excluded from all that are in a moment. An incident that occurred a minute ago or even a second ago are residuals that can likewise be scraped off from this moment. The realistic feeling of an incident will gradually increase the closer it is to the present moment, and will leave an impression as if it still exists, but the truth is that it has passed and is no longer present.
Let’s take a huge leap here. How about something that happened 0.0000000001 seconds ago? Theoretically, this should not factor into the constructing of the present moment. It has passed and no longer exists. But let’s take a look and observe the present, the one right before our very eyes. Can you believe that the flood of rich light and sounds are forming within a width-less 0.0000000001 seconds? The moment we turn our heads and observe the room we are in, a variety of colors come rushing in. Beautiful tunes coming out of earphones placed in our ears reverberate in our hearts. Fingers hitting the keys on a keyboard of a laptop flap around like waves.
However, these types of sensory images, just as the statement “living in the reality that has one second of width,” are impossible to prove. Let’s conduct a simple thought experiment.
Let’s say there exists a camera equipped with a shutter than can open and close in 0.0000000001 seconds. When I turn my handheld camera on to auto-mode and get it as close as I can to the fluorescent lamp on my desk, the shutter speed automatically switches to 0.001 seconds, or one thousandth of a second. That said, the speed of 0.0000000001 seconds is unduly extraordinary, and is a duration that cannot realistically exist within the camera’s capacity. But because we are all living within time that has no width, this means that we are perpetually living moments that are less than 0.0000000001 seconds long. Now, let’s observe reality through the lens of this camera. We can drape something over our heads so no light escapes from anywhere other than the shutter, and we can place the shutter right in front of ourselves, just like a pair of glasses. Throw an arrow onward and try observing it. Activate the shutter the moment the arrow passes in right in front of your face. Needless to conclude, no human being will be able to recognize the state of the flying arrow. This would be the case even if the moving object was not a flying arrow but a slow-rolling soccer ball. No one would even notice the shutter opening, let alone be able to observe the movement of an object.
But, all of us actually are living in width-less time of less than 0.0000000001 seconds. In a sense, it is as though even in this moment, we are observing reality through the high-speed shutter of our thought-experiment camera. Why is it that we are able to observe the movements of objects within such short moment of time? Why are we able to recognize unremitting passage of time?
This is where everyone might be reminded of an afterimage. We probably will realize that what makes us feel the movement of objects and connecting of sounds, and the passing of time itself, is the stimulation given to our retinas and eardrums, before they go down into our brains as memories and information, like embers before they fade away. If anything, this means that we are able to recognize as vivid reality the present moment of no physical width because of the presence of afterimages, and the majority of what we perceive as the present are for all practical purposes afterimages of the past left in our brains.
That being said, contemplating how specifically afterimages make up the present in width-less time, in the time of zero seconds, is no simple matter. Here is where we will conduct another thought experiment.
A single fly is buzzing across the room. It may be a descendant of the fly Descartes was friends with. Descartes is said to have come up with the concept of documenting the coordinates of the position of the fly by observing it flying around his room, and using the corners of his room as a reference. That fly is sure to give out clues to anyone aspiring to study science, philosophy, mathematics, and other fields of study. No matter how many times Zeno chops his logic that the fly is still, the fly is unquestionably flying. According to the logic up until now in this book, a moving fly has an afterimage. But when the fly’s manner of flying is observed, their appearance will not look overlapped twofold and threefold like an analogue broadcast television with bad reception. Descartes’ fly will be nimbly flying around the room, as a single body with clear-cut features.
However, afterimages themselves definitely do exist. Try pushing out your index finger right in front of you and wag it left to right. It’s that gesture when you deny something. Even without putting too much into it, you should be able to faintly see afterimages between the finger when wagged left to right. Likewise, if you were to hold the middle of a pencil with your index finger and your thumb and shook it rhythmically, while seeing afterimages you would also see the pencil bending limply. If that’s the case, the only reason we have the idea that the fly has clear-cut features is because we cannot follow the busily flying fly around with our eyes, and in reality, the flying fly may indeed have afterimages. This of course pertains to our retinas and within our brains.
I wrote earlier that moments are like a single frame of film. In old animation films, there are frames where an image of the object itself coexists with the afterimage of that object. When a picture with drastic movements is replayed in slow motion, you should notice frames such as these sandwiched in between here and there. When replaying at normal speed, the object’s movements are truly fluid, making it impossible to see that the actual image and the afterimage is dually projected. When it is thought of like that, even the fly that gracefully flies around the room may actually have an afterimage as well, just hard to notice like the replays. Not limited to flies, a lot of the movements of objects that we perceive may have afterimages stuck to them, like shadows, inside all of our brains.
During late autumn one year, I traveled to Hinatame Keikoku, famous for its autumn leaves, for a maple-viewing excursion. South of Takeda-shi in Oita Prefecture, Keikoku is located along the mountain roads on the way to Kumamoto. As beautiful as the autumn leaves were, Hakumizu no Taki, a waterfall in the deepest parts of Keikoku, was just as beautiful. It said on a sign that when water levels were high, the spray would reach a few hundred meters high, and it definitely had that much force. The mass of water that comes crashing down from a height of 38 meters breaks apart and continues to flow, without ever standing still. When a fixed point in a mass of water is stared at blankly, the water will appear blurry. But when you synchronize your line of sight with the movement of the water by moving it up and down, each of the masses of water will start to clearly define themselves. It will be as if the water stops moving in midair for each and every single moment. Instead, the numerous large rocks behind the waterfall, accompanied by blurriness, have started flowing on the other side of the spraying water.
What is the true nature of the blur of the falling water and the rocks behind it? The blurred object will vary according to where the point of sight is placed. Objects where lines of sight are synchronized with will clearly define themselves, while backgrounds removed from lines of sight start to appear blurry in the observer’s field of view. The reason for this may be the same as when a camera is out of focus. But a camera’s focal point is supposed to be decided but the distance between the lens and the subject. Just letting your line of sight slip to the side, to an extent, is not going to make your focal point blurry. At the time, I was standing about 20 meters from the waterfall, and I kept comparing the falling water and the centrally protruding rocks by sliding my line of sight over and over again. The degree of blurriness of the masses of water and the rocks were never the same, not even for a moment. What determined the degree of blurriness was only the operation of synchronizing lines of sight with the movement, and either the rocks splitting up the flow of the water or the constantly moving water of the waterfall became blurry, while whichever was not obtained clear definition.
The cause of this blurriness has to be from afterimages in the brain. These are the same as the afterimages created when wagging your index finger side to side. Viewed in that way, the aforementioned Descartes’ fly should in fact also appear blurry. In other words, it is accompanied by an afterimage. It only means that comparisons of degrees of blurriness cannot be made visually just by observing an object in motion and an object at rest from an equal distance, and flies actually fly around right before our eyes while being blurry. Maybe someone blessed with visual acuity like Musashi Miyamoto can give a fly clearly defined features by synchronizing their lines of sight with its movements, but for normal people like us, accurately following the movements of a fly with our eyes would seem to be impossible.
And now a new question arises. Why does an object at rest have clearly defined features, while moving objects blur due to their afterimages? For example, cameras have what is called exposure time. By changing the shutter speed, the exposure time of the photo sensor (film) is shortened or lengthened. If it is short, the scene captured by the lens is not blurred, allowing for the scenic moment to be reproduced as an accurate image with clearly defined features. If the exposure time is long, features will be blurred and the resulting images will be obscure, but it will be able to reproduce as afterimages movements that are the subject of the duration corresponded to the shutter speed. This can be understood by actually taking photos with a camera, but shooting becomes easier when the exposure time is shorter. If the shooting mode is turned to manual, for example, and you tried to take a photo with an exposure time of more than a few seconds, there would just be no way to take a respectable photo like that, with your camera in your hand. The photo sensor would capture the few seconds worth of afterimages and reproduce them as they were right onto the film, resulting in the shaking of the camera causing the focus to be off. By fixing the camera onto the ground with the use of a tripod, still scenery will have their features highlighted, while objects in motion will result in expressive photos, lively in motion while accompanied by afterimages.
But what about scenes perceived by our brains? Our brains are not equipped with shutter speed. Even if there was an equivalent function inside the brain, it is hard to imagine that it would be used properly for objects in motion and objects at rest. For that reason, if moving objects have afterimages, then still objects should have them too. Afterimages are generated just by lightly wagging your own finger from side to side, it is natural to think that the artificial shutter inside the brain has an exposure time longer than that of a real camera.
I actually carried out an experiment with my own handheld digital camera. I brought my index finger as close to the fluorescent lamp on my desk and made it as bright as possible, while lightly pushing down on my camera’s shutter button to focus. I fixed the shutter speed manually to 1/1000. In other words, .001 seconds. When I wag my finger from side to side my eyes clearly see a blur. When I press down on the shutter button and take a photo, what shows on the camera’s LED screen is my clearly defined finger. Of course, in order to bring this to the level of a proper scientific experiment, it becomes necessary to have equipment that can always fix the conditions to be consistent, such as finger wagging speed, photo timing, and the degrees of focal distance and aperture. Consequently, this too is a type of thought experiment.
Apparently, our brains are like cameras with relatively slow exposure times. However, exposure times do not differ between objects in motion and objects at rest. And even when an object is said to be at rest, it is not as if our eyeballs that captured the scene are fixed on a tripod, they are constantly moving unsteadily in correspondence with the movement of our bodies. If objects in motion become blurry because they are accompanied by afterimages, then objects at rest should also come with afterimages, just like blurry photos taken with shaking cameras. And yet, even if you consciously swing your head or upper body in all directions, the object captured in your line of sight will continue to maintain clearly defined features, despite a little shakiness on the part of the observer.
There has to be a mechanism within our brains that processes the afterimages that we ought to be perceiving, that then makes us recognize them as a single image. If we are going through this life by constantly sensing afterimages from tenths or hundredths of a second ago, processing that information in our brains and as a result, able to recognize the differences between resting objects and moving objects, then it becomes possible to explain the question presented by Zeno if in the scope of internal time grasped by our brains. Namely. the flying arrow, the flying fly, only blurs as much as the afterimages from the past that exist in that moment. In other words, the moments that we recognize have artificial width only as much as there are afterimages of the past.
3. The Past Does Not Disappear But Sinks — Husserl’s Theory of Time
In the previous sections, we tried to approach the paradox, “At any specific moment in time, a flying arrow is at rest. Moments have no dimensions, so the arrow would be at zero velocity. If the passage of time is made up of accumulated moments, then things at rest will always be at zero, no matter how many moments are stacked. Therefore, the arrow is actually at rest,” presented by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, in terms of human perception. If the moments that we perceive as the present actually have width, then a flying arrow should be able to fly without stopping. Descartes’ fly is flying around the room clad in afterimages of its past.
Of course, all this is in the scope of our understanding of our internal time, and nothing has yet to be considered in regards to physical time or mathematical time. These points of view will be described further in Chapter 4, but here we will proceed with the analysis of our internal time. Sense of vision is what has been mostly explained up until the previous chapter, but here we will analyze our awareness of our internal time with a focus on our sense of hearing.
While inattentively listening to speakers talk during meetings and what not, I would often wonder, “Why do voices emitted from people have such distinct coherency?” The present is definitely the existence of a moment, and it exists within time that has no width. Time that has passed has definitely disappeared and no longer exists before our eyes. Why is it that sounds that fade away become words, turn into expressions, and with a distinct presence, manage to remain in our hearts? And I wondered while listening to music. Why do sounds that instantaneously pass by get recognized as a melody? Words and music, in the moment referred to as the present, should be made up of nothing but single sounds. Why are we able to sense the connections between different sounds?
Figuratively speaking, sounds that fade away get stored in the brain’s hard drive as memories, and it is conceivable that we recognize the connectedness of those sounds by extracting that data. The echoes of words that linger in our ears and melodies of beautiful songs sound so natural, considering. It is hard to imagine that this recognition is a result of a complicated process that involves referencing our memories each and every time.
Even in regards to our own thought processes, it is no easy task to consider how we retain context within time that fades away in an instant. There is a way of thinking that believes the mind and body are two separate entities, called mind-body dualism, and this is probably created from our day-to-day sensations. There is no way that we should be able to think in the moment, in a present that has no width. And in that case, our hearts exist separately from our bodies, watching as an outsider, our bodily movements, the movements of objects, and even the passing of time itself.
Within moments called the present of which there should be no width, there is a way to feel the flowing of sound. In the preceding section, an example was presented of a real-time image and afterimage from the past being burned side by side in a single frame of an animation film. An image double exposed in a single frame moves smoothly in successive frames. If lapping of the present and the past is what makes people
recognize in a visual sense the passage of time in this moment with no width, then the same should be said in the auditory sense. Sounds that should have faded away, continue to remain in our hearts, just the way they were.
Over 1000 years ago, there was a man who claimed that sounds do not fade away, but sink. The man is Edmund Husserl, the philosopher responsible for the foundation of phenomenology. The following diagram in Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness is easy to understand.
Time flows from A to E in the diagrams on the left. What we are able to sense as sound is the topmost straight line drawn from A to E. The sound that used to be A, gradually sinks deeper and deeper diagonally and to the right as time passes. Even the sound that was the present at point P starts sinking at the very next moment, just like A. All sounds that were the present, sink below the present of the very next moment, becoming the past. Husserl expresses this past sinking as retention. Husserl wrote the following in Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (KLUWE ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS):
“The duration is no longer actually present but past, and continuously sinking deeper into the past.” (pg. 30)
“An always new tone-now continuously relieves the one that has passed over into modification. But when the consciousness of the tone-now, the primal impression, passes over retention, this retention itself is a now in turn, something actually existing. (pg. 31)
“The tone now sounds, and it immediately sinks into the past — it, the same tone, sinks into the past. “ (pg. 66)
The past is grasped while sinking and vanishing, becoming a component of the present moment as a single now. Sounds that were the now at a certain moment all become grasped as the past, getting stratified and creating the present. Indeed, with this mechanism, the past can be referred to even during time with no width, making it possible to recognize the connectedness of sounds and the passage of time.
However, there is an obvious flaw in this way of thinking. If, as Husserl says, the present that is gone in an instant that is grasped and layered multifold, then all the sounds that reach our ears should sound overlapped, like an echo. This definitively differs from our common perceptions. Husserl says as much in his Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness:
“When a melody sounds, for example, the individual tone does not utterly disappear with the cessation of the stimulus or the neural movement it excites. When the new tone is sounding, the preceding tone has not disappeared without leaving a trace. If it had, we would be quite incapable of noticing the relations among the successive tones; in each moment we would have a tone, or perhaps an empty pass in the interval between the sounding of two tones, but never the representation of a melody. On the other hand, the abiding of the tone-representations in consciousness does not settle the matter. If they were to remain unmodified, then instead of a melody we would have a chord of simultaneous tones, or rather a disharmonious tangle of sounds, as if we had struck simultaneously all the notes that had previously sounded. (p9 11)
From just looking at Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Husserl has not been able to clearly resolve this issue.
And this issue makes the same point of view as what has been presented up until now. That is, if our brains are perpetually recognizing afterimages, then why is it that we are able to recognize distinctly as visual information even the details of books or laptops right in front of us, without them getting blurred from afterimages? Why are words that are spoken to us, and music that pleasantly echoes in our ears come pouring in our hearts accompanied by such clear impressions of each and every sound?
If our brains are equipped with a mechanism that can process the shifted and overlapped visual and auditory information of present and past as a single occurrence, then at least in regards to our perceptions, we should be able to solve the mystery presented in Zeno’s paradox of 2500 years ago. And the reasons we are able to recognize the movement of objects and the passing of time itself within time that has no duration are about to become clear.
Chapter 2 The Illusion of Time Perception
1. The Fusion of the Present and the Past – Stereograms and Time Perception –
We all live our lives while being aware of the passing of time on a daily basis. However, we ourselves exist within the passing of time. If we sit on a riverbank, we should be able to objectively observe the water flow downriver from upriver. But in actuality, we are right smack in the middle of this river flow called time, and are being swept away, along with time itself. How is it that the observer who is being swept away in synchronicity with whatever is being swept is able to objectively observe anything?
If we simultaneously recognize in our brains the actual image of the present moment and the after-image of what has just passed, then this would mean that we possess the information necessary to reproduce the original passage of time in our brains as well. It can be said that even the observer who themselves is being swept away is observing the flow spuriously away from the river itself.
As presented in Chapter 1, the question becomes if we are indeed simultaneously recognizing an actual present image and and after-image of the past, then how come objects before our eyes aren’t seen doubled and redoubled, why are surrounding sounds we hear not accompanied by echoes? If there exists a function in our brains that can recognize as one the overlapping information from our sensory organs, the mystery can be solved. And that function exists.
3D movies have become very popular in the last few years. We are handed peculiar glasses at the theater entrance. When we watch a movie wearing these, characters and cars that drive around appear to be three-dimensional and jumping out of the screen. When we watch the screen with the glasses off, the picture looks blurry and duplicated. Apparently, with the use of a special camera, two frames of film are used to shoot from a position that corresponds with the right and left eye, which are then turned into a single frame of film. And in phase with that film, the crystalline liquid shutters embedded in our glasses are activated, left and right, alternately. In this way, conditions similar to those where people recognize the sights around themselves are reproduced.
It is pretty basic, we recognize differing visual information from both eyes as a specific reality.
Close one eye, one after another, and look at the reality in front of you. There is not much of a difference. After all, even if the information from both eyes differs, the only difference is a slight change in the angle that the same object is being seen from, so it probably is just a margin of error. There is apparently a program that is pre-installed in operating systems of personal computers that ignore discrepancies in information, at least to a certain degree. So, it is quite possible that a similar mechanism exists in our brains, allowing us to recognize a sharp reality by preferentially processing information that comes from either of the eyes. Maybe seeing three-dimensionally has nothing to do with the differences in visual information of both eyes, but is brought about by a different mechanism in our brains.
However, there is an example that clearly shows how visual information that should be out of alignment is composited in the brain. A stereogram is one kind of optical illusion graphic. In a broad sense, a three-dimensional photo is also a stereogram. I remember seeing two identical-looking aerial photographs placed side by side in a high school geography textbook. These two photos were shot in the same place, albeit the angles at which they were shot were a little bit out of alignment. When capturing each photo with both the left and right eye, respectively, the two photos get superimposed as if you were looking at a single photo. Thereupon, the two-dimensional photo on the paper brilliantly rises up and looks to be clearly three-dimensional. The 3D pictures mentioned earlier are also a kind of stereogram, and basically these are the type of photos consecutively projected on a screen.
What 3D movies and three-dimensional photos have in common is that they reproduce something that is three-dimensional in the first place. However, Magic Eye, which was popular in the 1990s, is a two-dimensional figure with a simple pattern, with three-dimensional shapes embedded in a single drawing. Just by shifting the line of sight of both eyes –– patterns like rugs, or designs that resemble the sandstorm-like pictures on television screens after broadcasts, will look as though three-dimensional shapes have emerged within them. There are instances where doing so will make a two-dimensional picture look three-dimensional, and other times a completely different object can seem to jump out of the picture, as if in resistance.
The strength in the impact of Magic Eye lies in the fact that the original flat surface and the three-dimensional shape can be compared instantaneously. To a certain degree, all of us are able to obtain three-dimensionality with the use of just one of our eyes. Something simply being seen as a three-dimensional shape means no more than it being an approximate reproduction of reality. However, in the case of Magic Eye, because the original flat picture pattern and the stereoscopic image can be compared on the spot, there is a strong impression of just how extraordinary the phenomenon is. What becomes an important point of view, especially in regards to this book, is that what originally should be an irregular pattern turns into a single image with distinct outlines. It is as if the computated stereoscopic image that emerges from the pattern we hold in our hands has turned into a completely different reality from the one around it. The outlines here do not show any blurriness or overlapping, despite the discrepancies in visual information.
There actually exists a mechanism in our brains that collects differing information from our sensory organs and recognizes them as one. On a daily basis, our brains are constantly generating single images with distinct outlines out of differing visual information from both of our eyes. With this, we have collected another key to solving Zeno’s 2500-year-old mystery. In this moment called the present, we simultaneously recognize the actual image of the current moment and the after-image from an instant ago. The mechanism in our brains that generates differing information as one processes this as reality, of which we think as having continuity and stability.
As mentioned earlier, special glasses alternately shut the left eye and right eye with a crystalline liquid shutter, per each frame of film, in the case of images in 3D movies. Because 24 frames per second are consecutively projected onto the screen in movies, each frame has 0.04 seconds screen-time. Consequently, the information from both the left eye and right eye are not simultaneously managed, but done so one after another, alternately for the 0.4 seconds of the past and the present. As long as we recognize this as a stereoscopic image, it is for certain that the information that should have shifted in time has been stereogram-generated within our brains. 3D movies have become proof for the simultaneous existence in our brains of the sunken past and the present that has come into being.
How about our daily perceptions? For example, take a look at the desk in front of you. Husserl states in his Ideen I - I as follows:
“Let’s say that I constantly watch this desk. Except as I watch, I walk around it, always changing my position within the space, no matter how I do. When I do this, I should continuously be aware of the present existence of this same desk. In the meantime, the desk continues to exist as the same desk, remaining totally unchanged in itself. However, the perception of the desk is a perception that is constantly changing, one of consecutive fluctuations.” (pg.177)
The desk before us is showing us various forms of itself. If the observer’s head is fixed against something like a wall, the same precise visual information should be able to continuously be received. But obviously in reality, we move our eyeballs and shake our heads, and at times walk around while observing the desk. Therefore, while this desk is a continuum of changing various perceptions for us, it also is continuously being the same thing. The changing various perceptions are processed into a single object called a desk, by the mechanism in our brains that generate differing sensory information as one.
Each perception in every moment is like a single frame in a roll of film. In that one frame, the actual desk of the present moment and an after-image of the desk from a moment ago is stored. These are stereogram-generated in the that present moment, causing it to be recognized as a single “desk.” Because after-images disappear in the blink of an eye, actual images and after-images replace each other one after another, transitioning into new moments. A certain moment will include the moment right before as an after-image, and the next moment will also include that “certain moment” as another after-image, being continuously constructed into a desk within our brains, like a baton being handed from one person to another.
For example, even when looking at a bare white wall, the image in our brains and the wall itself do not exist as the same thing. The successive visual information that comes from our eyeballs remains in our brains for a split second, but will disappear in an instant, with this happening repeatedly. The reason we are able to be aware of the passing of time even while observing a white wall that seems to not got through any changes is because the image of the white wall constructed in our brains is constantly changing. A spring that copiously gushes water may look the same, but in its essence is continuously replacing its water. And while we are aware of that fact as we watch what is happening, we should also be feeling it. When one object’s after-image and the actual image coexist in our brains simultaneously, it is as if two vectors with differing polarity and energy are at conflict within our brains. The deviation between those vectors is what makes us recognize the movement of objects and the passing of time. Those vectors themselves interchange with new vectors, one after another, continuously maintaining a certain deviation. Unless it is thought of that way, there is no way to explain how the passage of time gives us the impression that it is constantly flowing. This is indicative of a certain mechanism in our brains, but in this chapter, we will go no further than presenting the possibilities.
I wrote earlier about how a certain degree of three-dimensionality can be obtained even through the use of only one eye. It appears that there is no definitive explanation for the cause of this phenomenon. But even in this case, it can easily be explained through the framework of the stereogram of which has been mentioned earlier. An after-image that exists in our brains in a specific moment has fluctuated from the visual information from our eyes. When observing a subject such as a single desk, the time-lagged information deviates in the same manner as the visual information from the differing angles of both eyes. And when that goes through the process of being stereogram-generated, three-dimensionality is born.
Conversely, it can be said that the fact a certain degree of three-dimensionality is obtainable with visual information from only one eye is one way the paradigm of this book is proven. For example, when an opponent is in possession of a ball during a ball game, it feels as though it is easier to see the ball when swaying your body than when planting your heels and standing still. In tennis there is even a technique called the split-step, when a player jumps up and lands right before the opponent hits the ball. It can almost be said that this technique is for enhancing the perception of distance between the ball and/or the opponent, by making the deviation between the after-image from a split second ago and the actual image of this current moment greater through a conscious augmentation of the visual information of the ball coming at you.
In the previous chapter, I mentioned that a fly buzzing through the air drags its own after-image with it. Even though it is not recognized, if an object in motion has an after-image, so should an object at rest. And it that is indeed the case, in regards to the information content in the brain, there is essentially no difference between a moving object and one that is not. The only difference is whether or not an after-image and actual image are recognized as a single image after being processed like a stereogram in the brain. We subconsciously sense that an object in motion and one at rest both have after-images. That is what gives us the impression of the passing of time. Considering this, it can be said that recognizing the movement of objects, and sensing the passage of time in objects at rest, is a phenomenon closer to that image than we realize.
Here is where a number of new viewpoints arise. The first of those is that which I mentioned earlier, the point of how the deviations of visual information and auditory information are continuously maintained within the brain, and how that in turn allows us to recognize the steady passage of time. Furthermore, another point is where the boundary between the state of rest and the state of motion exists. In other words, what are the operating conditions for the stereogram-processing of after-images in our brains? By examining these points, how we recognize reality in our daily lives will gradually be made clear. And at the same time, by presenting the system in our brains that is able to adapt consistently to various ways of recognition, we will examine the validity of the paradigm of this book, one that still is nothing more than a possibility.
2. Why Does the Optical Illusion Graphic “Rotating Snakes” Move?
In Chapter 1, I mentioned the existence of something that continuously moves without stopping even though it is only an instant, i.e., a single frame. That something is the “Rotating Snake,” created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan Universtity. The “Rotating Snake” itself can be said to be counterevidence against Zeno’s Paradox. A two-dimensional image that should be still moves around and around. This of course is not actually moving as physical reality, but “happening within our brains,” a type of optical illusion. However, the movement produced within this single illustration is so real it is almost hard to believe that it is an optical illusion. Let’s think about the system in our brains that creates this spurious motion, by using the framework presented up until now in the preceding sections. (Please use the color frontispiece as a reference.)
First, closely observe the “Rotating Snake.” There are close to 20 discs with mottled designs lined up. Each one of them is a coiled-up snake. Every single of one of the mottled designs of the discs are lined up concentrically with regularity, with the circles and the patterns of their designs gradually becoming smaller towards the center. The mottled designs circle over the disc, repeating the pattern of white-yellow-black-blue-white. The direction of motion is also fixed at white-yellow-black-blue-white. It starts moving the instant you look at it, but when you continue to stare at just one spot, the movement slows. The moment you move your line of sight, the disc starts to actively rotate. When you look closely, you realize that out of the almost 20 discs that are lined up, the ones positioned in the center of your line of sight do not rotate at all. The snakes closer to the peripheral part of the observer’s line of sight, the more they actively rotate. That is why even when you try to capture the moment of movement by darting your glance, the discs that should have been rotating until just before come to rest, one after another. It is as if motion is escaping your line of sight.
What I am about to state is obviously a hypothesis. There apparently is no hypothesis that explains the spurious movements of the “Rotating Snakes.” Because we are dealing with the black box known as a brain, whatever gets said will never achieve the level of being conclusive. For example, there is an advanced medical instrument called an fMRI. By being able to record any changes in blood flow of the brain, this instrument can reveal what kind of actions or thoughts activate what region of the brain. This appears in various literature on the brain, but we are not yet able to analyze things on the level of how individual neurons connect within the brain, or what kind of networks it has. The same can also be said of all other instruments developed for the purpose of researching the internal parts of the brain. Consequently, when discussing the system in our brains at this point in time, the only way it can be presented is as the most convenient explanation for how the black box called a brain reacts to stimulus …
This of course does not constitute full proof. However, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, for example, predicted how gravity from the Sun would influence and bend light within that framework, then by observing that, was recognized as the most valid out of all the theories that explain how the universe works.
To get straight to the point, why the optical illusion graphic “Rotating Snakes” looks as though it is rotating is because the appearance of past after-images and present actual images overlapping in the brain resemble the mottled pattern of yellow-black-blue. The basis for this line of thinking is described below.
The set mottled pattern of yellow-black-blue leaves an impression as a single group, with the white being its background. Putting dark colors in the foreground is a technique seen in paintings, providing a natural effect. When closely looking at the set of yellow-black-blue, the yellow and blue are both equally elliptical, while it appears as though the black is used as a shadow to fill out spaces in between. It is as if the ellipse that used to be where the yellow was slid to the side and shifted to blue’s position. When comparing the blue and yellow, the blue seems darker, with the yellow being lighter. Appropriately, the blue can be the very-fresh visual information that has come in from our eyes in this very moment, while the yellow is the after-image from the almost-gone blurry past within our brains. There actually is a different version of “Rotating Snake,” a monotone version with the blue replaced with a dark gray and the yellow with a pale gray, and this one too creates an illusion of movement, albeit not as much the colored one. It is thought that the black has been crushed by the overlapping of various after-images from when the object moves from the yellow position to the blue.
As to why the colored version is more effective in creating an illusion of movement than the monotone one, the influence of the complementary color afterimages can be considered as a possibility. Complementary color afterimages occur when you stare at a certain color for a fixed amount of time, then replace that with a black-and-white screen right after, which causes a complementary color of the original to emerge, appearing in color when it should be in black-and-white. Look up “complementary afterimages” online and a number of images are readily available. Blue and yellow have a complementary relationship, and white will appear yellow if you look at it after staring at blue. However, for complementary color afterimages to produce any effects, especially considering that a certain amount of time is needed, it becomes problematic to attribute that as the cause for all movements in our daily lives. To think of it as a condition for evoking recognition of movement is appropriate.
Afterimages themselves are actual phenomena, and as mentioned in the preceding chapter, easily verifiable by wagging your own finger in front of you. But there are various types of afterimages, such as complementary afterimages. These are what make up the multiple factors that give birth to the illusion of movement inside the brain.
The question of why a snake in the peripheral part of our field of view produces an illusion of movement, and why the snake that we observed stops rotating, is indicative of one of the ways of how we perceive reality. This means that the ways our brains process visual information from peripheral areas and central areas of our field of vision is different.
For example, try lining up identical cans of coffee in front of you. There are two patterns with the same designs lined up not even a few centimeters away. Without moving their head, the observer compares the two cans just by shifting their line of sight. The focal distance should be constant so the focus of the lens called the eyeball should be on both cans. And yet when you actually gaze at just one of the cans, you will notice the other one slightly out of focus, when you observe it from the edge of your field of view. Being only a few centimeters apart, it is difficult to imagine that this is due to the structure of the lens of the eyeball. Also, because the result is the same when making the observation with one eye closed, it is doubtful that this is caused by the mechanism that synthesizes the differing visual information from both eyes. When looking up and gazing at your room you realize that the area you are able to recognize with clear contours is surprisingly small. Because you can easily observe a clear-cut image just by bringing what you want to see to the center of your field of view by shifting your line of sight, there is no doubt that everybody recognizes that they are living perpetually surrounded by a real space with clear contours.
If the blurriness of peripheral areas in fields of view are not due to the structure of the lens in the eye, nor because of deviations in visual information, it is possible that the reason for it stems from afterimages in the brain. We live our lives constantly perceiving afterimages of the past. Only when an attempt is made to closely observe something, afterimages from the past and actual images from the present get forcefully stereogram-generated, going on to produce a clear image with distinct outlines in the brain. In the previous chapter I discussed the relationship between water cascading down a waterfall and the rocks in the background. When one of them is gazed upon the other one blurs, with each one constantly appearing clear or blurry at any given time. And when synchronizing the movement of your line of sight with the water from the waterfall, the falling mass of water would look as though it momentarily would stop in midair. This suggests that when we recognize the movement of objects, we not only use as clues the relative relationship with surrounding objects, but the extent of the synthesis of time-lagged visual information inside the brain. Afterimages of moving objects are not completely synthesized in the brain, but are left trailing as shadows. Zeno’s fly is blurry because it wears its own afterimage while flying.
When ball-playing first-class athletes are at their best, they seem to claim that balls in the air appear to not be moving. This is probably due to their highly developed dynamic vision, but what exactly is dynamic vision in the first place? This much can be said from the framework of this book. In addition to their innate ability, athletes that compete in ball sports are able to unconsciously follow the path of the ball as a result of persistent training. They are able to follow the moving ball with their eyes like a computerized camera would, readily able to capture it in the center of their field of view and fixate on it. It is as if they are able to stereogram-generate the afterimage and actual image of the ball in their brain, and recognize it as a single object with clear outlines, as if it were a still image.
So, let us return to the “Rotating Snakes.” The snake that we have fixated on in the center of our field of view is accurately stereogram-generated in our brains as designed, with yellow for yellow, and blue for blue. However, assisted by where light and dark colors are positioned and the effects of afterimages of complementary colors, and by the instability of the observer’s line of sight, the images in the periphery of our fields of view are processed as movement, misrecognized by the brain as overlapped afterimages and actual images. Except, as long as it is recognized as movement, it does not mean that afterimages and actual images inside the brain are not stereogram-generated at all. If they were not processed at all, they should simply be recognized as a bunch of overlapped deviated images in a blurry state of rest. Rather, the brain mechanism itself that forcibly attempts to process as one image, the afterimage and actual image, is what leads to the recognition of movement. Every time these repeated attempts at processing information that can’t be processed are made, is what seems to create these mysterious movements.
In this way, the yellow-black-blue design pattern of the “Rotating Snakes” can be thought of as approximating the positional relationship between the afterimage and actual image of a single image. The mottled graphic pattern of the “Rotating Snakes” is set up so that any closer the positions of yellow and blue get to each other the movement will weaken, any further they will be processed as a different object altogether and placed in a position where they will barely be moving.
From what has been discussed so far, we can see that there are two kinds of ways in which we recognize movement in our daily lives. When we are able to fixate on a moving object by capturing it in the center of our field of view, it gets treated the same as an stationary object in our brains, leading us to conclude that the object is moving by its relative relationship to the passing background. In this case, what is being processed as movement by the brain is rather the background and not the object. On the other hand, movement captured in the periphery of our field of view causes a kind of dysfunction in the stereogram-generating mechanism in our brains, preventing it from synthesizing an afterimage and actual image into a complete single image, thus creating our recognition of movement.
For example, it is not as if a soccer player who assists a teammate with a perfect pass is constantly fixated on the recipient of it. If anything, by capturing this recipient in the periphery of their field of view, all the while capturing the positional relationship with the other players, it is possible that they are consciously causing a malfunction of the stereogram-generating function in the brain, and by that trying to capture movementmore effectively.
The reality that we recognize, is one where the present and the past has been virtually synthesized, and we live our lives by concluding whether an object is stationary or moving according to the extent of that synthesis. The motion of the “Rotating Snakes” that should be at rest can be thought of as being one example that points to that kind of function of our brains.
3. The Spurious Duration of Time –– Loop Reaction of Neurons
So far in this book, an attempt has been made to first analyze the internal time perceived by our brains, by using as a starting point The Flying Arrow is Motionless, as told by Greek philosopher Zeno 2500 years ago, and separating our perspectives into physical time and internal (psychological) time. Up until this point, the only thing necessary during analysis was our minds. Let’s observe our surroundings here once again, and take good look at our emotional chemistry. The second hand on a clock slides smoothly over the board, and the desk before our eyes is right there in its spot with a definite presence. Even after witnessing the effortless stereogram-generating of Magic Eye, it still should not be believable that the reality before our eyes is a synthesis of the past and the present.
Even when simply staring at a white wall, I mentioned earlier that just like water from a fountain being replaced in rapid succession to keep up its appearance, actual images and afterimages continue to maintain a constant state by replacing each other one after another in our brains. I stated that vectors in different states of the past and present continue to maintain a constant shift while replacing each other in our brains. This points to the existence of a certain mechanism in our brains, but in order to discuss this it becomes necessary to have neurons make their appearance.
A neuron is a brain cell. It is said that 100 billion of them exist within our brains. They react to various stimuli and ignite, producing all sorts of brain activities like generating electrical signals and releasing brain chemicals. How this works is described in detail even in high school biology textbooks, and can be considered to be common knowledge in this day and age. But even if it is for certain that neurons are responsible for sending out action commands to the body, how each one of the ignited neurons specifically produce these activities are apparently still unknown. For example, the fMRI introduced in the previous chapter can measure the increase in blood flow within the brain when some kind of action or thought is carried out, but what state those band of neurons are in when that happens is something we do not understand. Pretty much what we know is where in our brains the blood flow increases when we use words, or when we use our hands and feet.
Analysis regarding the mechanism of a single cell has even made it into high school textbooks. However, as discussed up until now, if actual images of the present and afterimages of the past cause us to feel the passage of time and the movement of objects by being synthesized in our brains like a stereogram, it is insufficient to just know the mechanism of a single neuron. At the very least, two kinds of neurons are necessary, the one ignited at this very moment, and one just ignited an instant ago. Also, the impulse from the ignition of a single neutron converges in approximately 0.003 seconds. If the afterimages from a finger being shaken left to right before our eyes really disappeared in that short of a time, it should be impossible for us to even perceive that. As long as the phenomena of afterimages actually exist, we can say with certainty that the action of a single neuron does not produce our perceptions, regardless of whether or not the framework of this book is fact or not. Our perceptions are created by more than a certain amount of a group of neurons. Moreover, for very single phenomenon, for example such as a white wall or desk, as long as it can be stabilized and recognized continuously, there should be a considerable scale of neurons existing within the brain that react to the same stimulus.
In January of 2012, there was a press release announcing the upcoming publication of Tokyo University researcher Yuji Ikegaya’s paper, “Locally Synchronized Synaptic Inputs,” in the January 20 issue of Science Magazine. A commentary accompanied by colorful illustrations appears on the Japan Science and Technology Agency’s homepage. It is clear that consideration was given to making sure that it could be understood by those in the general public, with explanations for every single technical term. The commentary includes the following:
“When observing the actions of synapses, it became clear that nearby spines (projection of neurons) would often simultaneously get active. Upon conducting statistical analysis, we found that the nearby spines within 8μm were able to significantly become active synchronously. This was the first time in history that this phenomenon was confirmed. Since then, this spatially gathered synchronous activity has been called cluster input. Not only in hippocampal slice culture preparation, cluster inputs have been confirmed in vivo in the cerebral cortex, and are thought to not only be a unique phenomenon of the hippocampus, but one widely observed beyond regions of the brain.”
A cluster indicates a group of things, from several to several hundred and even more than that. This research has shown that neuron groups that react to the same stimuli activate simultaneously. The fact that this group of clustering-structured neurons exist is extremely convenient for the framework of this book, one that states that the perception of the present is produced by a synthesis of given stimuli to the brain in this very moment and afterimages from an instant ago.
But, in order to establish steady, continuous time perception, simply having several neurons that react to a single stimulus is simply insufficient. I mentioned earlier that the actual duration of an impulse activated by neural ignition is approximately 0.003 seconds. Even if that duration extends a little due to the simultaneous ignition of a group of neurons, the fact that they will ignite then disappear in an instant remains constant. For example, when doing something like staring at a white wall, the neuron resource in the brain that reacts to white should be depleted right after the neuron group that reacts to the white stimuli ignites, compelling the white wall to be recognized as a different color.
In order to establish a certain amount of recognition and continuous time perception, the reactions of those several neurons that react to stimuli must be sustained. The 100 billion neurons in the brain represent an extraordinary number, but they have a finite existence, and are not the ones that sustain infinite ignition. If that’s the case, in order for ignition to be continuous, it is necessary for the reactions to be in a loop. After igniting once, a single neuron apparently takes around 0.3 seconds to prepare for reignition. The ignition of one neuron prompts the ignition of another neuron connected to it, thus inducing the successive ignition of neurons, one after another, like a set of fireworks. And 0.3 seconds later, the neuron that ignited first receives the firing stimulus that looped around, causing it to reignite. This is how the reactions of neurons to a single stimulus, such as white, are sustained, which in turn sustains our recognition of white in our own minds.
Yuki Ikegaya, who is a neuroscientist, states as follows in his book, The Brain That Evolved Too Much (Kodansha Blue Backs):
“Let’s say you were a leading nerve, and you just sent information to the next nerve. This nerve then sends this information to the following nerve. Then this nerve sends …, and as this goes on a number of times, you will inevitably find yourself included in this transfer of information.” (pg.270)
Mr Ikegaya calls these loop reactions of neurons recurrent loops and recursive circuits, explaining that they are abundant in the hippocampus, which is part of the brain related to memory, and in the frontal lobe, which is said to create our uniquely human mind, and also in the visual cortex, which manages information from our eyes.
Now, let’s think about the specific process of loop reactions of these neuron groups, in line with the framework of this book. It does not mean that all simultaneous ignition of neuron groups in clustering structures occur at the same time. Mr Ikegaya explains that the synapses (part of a neuron, the site that ignites) of cerebral brain cells have a low probability of ignition, at times as low as 20%. (However, the probability of ignition for motor neurons, the ones that send out commands to contract muscles, is apparently close to 100%.) Therefore, even if the neuron group reacting to a single stimulus were convergently structured in a way that they were piled on top of each other, their reactions would steadily move forward, with reignition starting 0.3 seconds later, and so on.
But here is where still one more mystery remains. In the previous chapter, I discussed how it should be necessary to have a spurious duration of time in order to make recognizing the passing of time and the movement of objects possible, which is impossible to do in this present moment which lacks any duration. For example, even if neurons ceaselessly continued to ignite as mentioned earlier, as long as the impulse of a single ignited neuron converges in only 0.003 seconds, the spurious duration we have to recognize anything is the same 0.003 seconds. So, we are basically viewing the world through a camera shutter that opens and closes in a span of just 0.003 seconds. Just like the thought experiment we conducted in the previous chapter, we should not be able to sense the movement of objects or the passing of time in such a short duration of time.
Television uses 30 consecutive frames of still images per second, movies use 24 frames per second. 24 frames per second means that each frame is responsible for 0.04 seconds. The duration of an impulse is 0.003 seconds, which equals less than one-tenth of a single frame. Even if a frame was to switch to the next frame without any time loss, approximately only a tenth of the image from the previous frame would be left over. If that is all that overlaps from the afterimage of the previous frame and the actual image of the following one, it cannot be said that it is enough for stereogram generation to occur.
Also, the founder of Gestalt Psychology, Max Wertheimer, conducted an experiment just like the following. (Use Wikipedia’s “Phi Phenomenon” as a reference.) He prepared an experimental apparatus where two spots of light alternately blink on and off, and he examined how differently we sense the lights by altering the intervals of the blinking. Thereupon when the blinking intervals were shorter than 0.03 seconds, the lights appeared to blink at the same time, and when the intervals were at 0.06 seconds, the light spots looked to be switching most smoothly. And at intervals of more than 0.2 seconds, the two spots of light were recognized as two separate points. There even exists a mathematical formula called Korte’s Law, which calculates the most favorable conditions for recognizing movement, by modifying conditions such as the distance between the spots of light and intensity of the light. In Chapter 1 of this book, I presented the question of where the boundary was between an object in a state of rest and in a state of motion. This is the question of what operating conditions exist for the stereogram processing of afterimages within the brain. Korte’s Law clearly points to these conditions. Wertheimer’s light spot experiment makes no mention of distance or intensity of the spots in light in its information. But it is possible for us to recognize the blinking of two spots of light with at least 0.2 second intervals between them as movement. To establish the framework of this book from this, afterimages in the brain must be sustained for at least 0.2 seconds. For reality in this very moment and an afterimage from a past instant ago to be stereogram-generated, there needs to be enough time duration for them to overlap and exist.
There is no way the time duration of an afterimage is the 0.003 second ignition time of a single neutron. If that was the case, the rate of progress for the reactions of neurons would not be linear and linked together, but it would have to be so that the group of neurons that generate the exact same type of impulses would activate simultaneously while scattering about in a span of at least 0.2 seconds. There is a necessity in that simultaneous activation turning into the exact same type of impulse. Either the group of neurons play the same role, or they become associated with that role as a function of the entire brain. For example, it would be like neurons associated with conscious decisions turning into motor neurons that move muscles. If there was no such system, there would be no way that the brain could be responsible for certain functions. Even in Mr Ikegaya’s research cited earlier, it was experimentally proven that neuron groups reacting to the same stimulus cluster together and cause simultaneous ignition.
The igniting of neuron clusters may be due to resonance. Whether this is an electrical thing or physical thing is not understood, but it should be easier to serve up stable impulses if you think of the entire cluster starting to ignite at once because of resonance.
Let’s try to imagine how a clustered group of neurons fire synchronously due to resonance within a duration of 0.2 seconds. Close your eyes for a second and open them again. The visual information from your eyeballs have stimulated a part of the neuron group and started firing. Resonance has caused the entire cluster to ignite in an instant. As stated earlier, because the probability of neural synapses firing is at a low 20%, even when the entire cluster resonates the firing steadily progresses. The scale of ignition is the greatest at the onset of firing and decreases linearly. The reason we feel that we live in moments called the present despite recognizing afterimages, is because the total amount of impulses of the neuron clusters that react to visual information is at its highest at the moment of stimulation. In other words, the visual images of the moments closest to the present will always be the greatest.
And the firing of all neurons in the cluster structure will be done within 0.2 seconds. What is important here, is that those reactions are all creating the same impulses. In other words, during those 0.2 seconds, a certain visual image is being kept in the brain while gradually fading. This is comparable to a still image equal to a single frame of film being projected on a screen for 0.2 seconds, while gradually fading out. The Brain That Evolved Too Much includes the following:
“Time for the human brain is never a continued physical quantity, but advances by frame every several tenths of a millisecond, basically like a quantum (in intervals). And due to unconscious processes, basically workings of the brain, these advances simply appear to be smoothly connected.” (pg.125)
From those statements, it is clear that Mr Ikegaya’s image of the passage of time within the brain, and the firing pattern of the neurons that create that perception, closely resembles the system of film in movies.
At this time, there is still the question of how the igniting of multiple frames happen. Neurons apparently take 0.3 seconds to prepare for reignition. From Max Wertheimer’s earlier experiment involving the two spots of light, we know that 0.2 seconds are necessary for a cluster’s worth of a group of neurons to finish lighting up. After that, there is 0.1 seconds left for reignition. Given that, unless there exists multiple clusters of neuron groups that react to a single stimulus, it would be impossible for frames to be in succession like film of a movie.
Earlier, I explained the system for 3D movies. By sending each frame left and right by visual information shifting when, it makes the viewer perceive an artificial three-dimensional shape. In doing so, the information from the right eye and information from the left eye are sent through an intersecting optic nerve, to both the left and right side of the brain. The visual information sent to both sides of the brain have a time-lag of 0.04 seconds. Since three-dimensionality is achieved by stereogram-generating that information, it would make sense that the left brain and the right brain both have mechanisms that can even synchronize time lags. It does not necessarily mean that the way our brains process visual information from a 3D movie is the way everything gets processed in our daily lives. But, as long as it is for certain that time-lagged visual information gets stereogram-generated when it comes to 3D movies, it is also likely that the mechanism for that is one that is routine.
The group of neurons that react to the same stimulus, like to white if that’s the case, have plurality in both the left and right brain. They synchronously fire upon getting stimulated by visual information sent from both optical nerves through semidecussation. For example, it is as if both the right and left side of the brain each have a piston of an engine. They both repeatedly combust, combining their power and activating the engine called the brain. Of course, there is no problem with thinking that there are multiple clusters concentrated on one side of the brain, but the more the clusters are divided between either side, the more favorable it is to measure the timing of synchronous firing.
The manner in which neuron groups in the brain ignite to the same stimulus, then loop react, is similar to the Barbershop Mark. The Barbershop Mark is the barber’s pole, the one that spins around with its spiral pattern painted on the cylinder, looking like it is gradually rising. The direction of rotation is horizontal, but the movement looks vertical. This simple optical illusion of a cylindrical movement very closely resembles the manner in which the shifts in firing depths of multiple neuron groups create the perception of the passing of time.
The flow charts to the left represent how the multiple neuron groups A, B, and C that react to the same stimuli inside the brain go through the cycle of loop reactions — each one firing 0.1 seconds apart from each other, with the entire cluster being done firing 0.2 seconds later, and then reigniting 0.3 seconds later. The pattern here is the total amount of impulses produced by firing, with the = signifying stereogram-generation.
“Firing of A (large scale)” = “Stimulus B from 0.1 seconds ago (small scale)” = “Stimulus C from 0.2 seconds ago (fades away)”
0.1 Seconds Later
“Reignition of C (large scale)” = Stimulus A from 0.1 seconds ago (small scale)” = Stimulus B from 0.2 seconds ago (fades away)”
0.2 Seconds Later
“Reignition of B (large scale)” = Stimulus C from 0.1 seconds ago (small scale)” = Stimulus A from 0.2 seconds ago (fades away)”
Earlier, I presented Husserl’s statement that, “The phenomenon called a desk is also a continuation of changing various perceptions.” Even this desk that never seemingly changes, in terms of the visual information in our brains, its essence is constantly being replaced. That sensation is what gives us the perception that time is passing.
The way in which visual information from a certain instant is maintained for 0.2 seconds and then comparatively synthesized with visual information form the next instant is also similar to the system of television noise reduction. 3-Dimensional Digital Noise Reduction (3DNR) loads a certain number of frames in advance, then by comparing and synthesizing them, separates the noise and normal information, ultimately outputting beautiful images onto the monitor. Neuron groups that have cluster structures fire synchronously in a duration of 0.2 seconds, getting stereogram-generated with impulses for other clusters. In other words, with the 0.2-second duration, the present and past get synchronized, appearing as one reality.
Neuroscientist Kenichiro Mogi describes in his book, Brain Phenomena-How I Am Created (NHK Books), as follows:
“Regarding the relationship between the physical time that occurs during the information transmission from neuron to neuron and psychological time in our consciousness, it becomes clear that at first glance, a strange property materializes. In other words, in order to create a certain qualia in our brains, the transmission of information is necessary. Obviously when transmission occurs, finite physical time elapses, but that elapsing is ignored and squashed in psychological time.” (pages 115 – 116)
Mr Mogi calls the brain activity that actually conducts this kind of contradictory information processing The Principle of Interaction Simultaneity, regarding it as the key to solving the mystery of consciousness. The framework presented in this book has solved this mystery. Namely, the igniting of specific brain cells have a duration of 0.2 seconds because of cluster structure neuron groups, which additionally loop react and continue to maintain their impulses. That lines up the firing state of brain cells when physical time should be elapsing during information transmission, making possible the realization of a present, a psychological time that has no duration. Of course, not all neurons loop react. As written about earlier, motor neurons have a firing probability of 100%. The contraction of a muscle is a one-time thing, so naturally there is no need to be in a continued state of firing. Perhaps, like the base sounds in a piece of music, the loop reactions of some neuron groups are playing the role of rhythm maker, controlling neurons like motor neurons that have a one-time firing pattern. Even further, it is said that the brain remains vigorously active even during a state of sleep, continuously creating impulses. This activity, in other words, is like embers glowing, sustaining small loop reactions. In an instant, this in turn transforms into big loop reactions, or maybe, it is conceivable that it causes the firing of one-time neurons, mutually tying each other up and producing our perception.
Everything up until now is the foundation of the framework of this book. By starting with the paradox “The Flying Arrow is Motionless” devised by Greek philosopher Zeno 2500 years ago, and then by focusing on human perception, we have been exploring how time-perception is established inside our brains. And if this moment called the present has a duration, that makes it possible to observe the movement of objects and the passing of time. That is what gives rise to the possibility of tearing down the paradox presented by Zeno. Here, the 0.2 seconds it takes for the cluster of neuron groups in the brain to burn out produce a spurious physical time duration of 0.2 seconds, when there should be no duration at all, at which point the reactions of the multiple clusters overlap, creating the passage of time from the past to the present in the brain.
The viewpoint of loop reactions of neuron groups have all sorts of possibilities for development. In Chapter 3 we will pay attention to language, examining the structure of our consciousness based on the framework presented in this book. And in Chapter 4, we will look closely at mathematical time and physical time, further investigating the question of what time actually is.
Chapter 3 The Actual State of Consciousness
1. Why are we able to have thoughts during duration-less time?
We are all living in the present, which are moments with no duration. So why are we able to have thoughts in this time with no duration? Replacing the flying arrow with thoughts in Zeno’s Paradox will still make the paradox valid. Let’s try interchanging these words presented in the opening part of this book.
At any specific moment in time, "thought" is at rest. Moments have no dimensions, so the"thought" would be at zero velocity. If the passage of time is made up of accumulated moments, then things at rest will always be at zero, no matter how many moments are stacked. Therefore, the"thought" is actually at rest.
Of course, all of us are living in this very moment while pondering various matters in our brains. And that is why this argument is surely wrong. However, flaws in this logic are nowhere to be found. Just like the essential meaning of Zeno’s Paradox hasn’t been solved in over 2500 years, it can be said that the mystery of what consciousness actually is has also not been solved in these modern times. In ancient times, many people believed that the mind and body were two different entities. That sort of mentality probably stems from the contradiction that thoughts take place in moments in time that are supposed to have no duration. People have intuitively felt that the existence of their own minds and the reality right before their eyes were inexplicable.
Thoughts are not simple. Understanding whatever takes place before you, and making some sort of judgment on that occurrence is a thought, as digging up a past experience from your memories is another type of thought. Even if it is not something directly experienced, you can experience a simulated fictional world by reading words on a page, or learn an abstract concept and use that as material for thoughts. And finally, these various activities intricately overlap to establish one single thought. This all takes places in the present, in moments that have no duration.
This mystery can be rephrased as the mystery of a certain continuous thought. We sustain certain thoughts during moments that pass in an instant, as if going against the flow. Try observing your own mind in this very moment. Unquestionably, the present moment disappears in an instant and becomes the past. And yet, the you in this present moment and the you that should have disappeared into the past are the exact same entity, while not being something that can be cut up and divided. It is as if your mind that should have passed on by is still left behind as is.
This sensation of your mind transcending time and continuing on, is clearly qualitatively different from the spurious duration of time induced by visual information, of which has been discussed thus far in this book. The passing of time and movement of objects obtained from visual information is orderly to the point of being mathematical, of which most can actually be expressed as numerical formulas. On the other hand, regarding the state of our own continuous thought, it is complex and does not have a clear-cut shape, as if to reject that type of analysis. Thoughts suddenly jump around, with new thoughts welling up one after another. No sooner than when you think a certain thought is in the background and another is in the foreground, that relationship will sometimes be reversed in the very next moment.
The mystery of continuous thought within time that has no duration poses the same problem as that of words and music. As discussed in Chapter 1, what makes up the words and music we hear in moments called the present should be but a single sound. And yet we accept each word and sentence composed of those words as a single batch of meaningful information, just like we enjoy the melodies of the music we listen to, ones that last anywhere from tens of seconds to several minutes. This goes way above and beyond the spurious duration of time induced by the synchronous firing of neuron clusters. As for visual information, for example, even in regards to a single scene from a favorite movie you have watched numerous times, it would be difficult to clearly recreate that image in your head. You will notice if you try, but even remembering details from a single frame is not easy to do. But with words and music, recreating them in your hearts is done rather easily. While recalling melodies of symphonies heard over and over again, even the sounds of small cymbals will almost subconsciously resound within you. Sometimes, once the music starts, the sounds will continue on in our heads, even in the midst of work. Even for movie scenes we aren’t able to recreate visually in our brains, we can revive the dialogue as if it were nothing. For example, the famous line in the last scene of Casablanca, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” can easily be realistically recreated any number of times, along with Humphrey Bogart’s classic tone of voice. Strangely enough, even visual information, in other words, like Ingrid Bergman’s beautiful eyes, will naturally come across your mind as if enticed by the dialogue. Obviously, these types of specific examples are nothing more than subjective, and there is nothing about them that can be proven. However, in comparison, the characteristics of auditory information are likely to be closer to those of thoughts in terms of sustainability and reproducibility than visual information.
In conclusion, how audio information gets handled in our brains has similar characteristics to thoughts, because words are responsible for the majority of our thoughts. For words there is the spoken language and written language, but the purpose of this book is to investigate the state of our brains during those instant moments that make up what is called the present. Therefore, here we will mainly target and examine spoken language.
An article titled “How Language Shapes Thought” was published in the May 2011 edition of Nikkei Science. This was the theory of Stanford University’s L. Boroditsky, who specializes in cognitive psychology.
In the article is as follows:
“It seems as though language is related to many aspects of our mental lives, even more than what scientists had previously imagined. Even for simple tasks like identifying different colored parts, counting points on a screen, or determining direction in a small room, human beings depend on language. (pg.70)
In the field of cognitive psychology, they had apparently until recently underestimated the role words played in our minds. The fact that an article such as this even appeared in print, is proof in and of itself that due to advances in brain science, words themselves are increasingly garnering prominent attention. Even within the quotes, the large extent to how words intervene in our thoughts and recognition of reality come through.
Many academic disciplines other than cognitive psychology have thus far studied the relationship between words and thought. Out of all these, one of the most important is Semiology, established by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in the early part of the 20th century. Semiology is now considered a prominent academic discipline, established as a field of study according to high school language textbooks.
The field of Semiology itself was born after the death of Saussure. A book published by his pupils after his passing, from notes gathered from linguistics lectures he had given through the years at the University of Geneva, became the foundation of this field. In Japan, a translated version titled Ippan Gengogaku Kougi was published by Iwanami Shoten, and Keizaburo Maruyama’s Saussure No Shisou (Saussure’s Thoughts), a commentary on that book, is very easy to understand. The following quotes are from Ippan Gengogaku Kougi (translated by Hideo Kobayashi/Iwanami Shoten):
“Regarding thought, when taken independently, they are like galaxies, with nothing in them necessarily divided up. There are no such things as preconceptions, and as long as there is no language, nothing is clear. “ (pg.155)
Prior to Saussure, words were just names for things that already had existed. What Saussure did was partly flip over what was then the conventional relationship between words and reality. What people recognized as reality before, was that of a chaotic galactic state, where light and sound were in disarray. The mesh of relationships created by words themselves divide that up, bringing recognizable realities into existence. In other words, the reality that we recognize is being created by our very own minds.
Saussure also stated that words and reality were like the front and back sides of a piece of paper. If you cut the front side of the paper, the back will obviously get up, too. Realities get constructed according to the sequencing of words, and when the horizontal relationships of these words change, so do the realities that are created by these delimitations. As seen in the above illustrations, changing one word affects the semantic fields of all the words related to that word. For example, when the word monkey disappears, the originally dangerous impression of the monkey gets allocated to the other similar words, in actuality influencing our actions when coming face to face with the dog.
Saussure believed that the horizontal relationships between words during specific moments was where linguistics should target its viewpoints, and he attempted to differentiate this with the viewpoint called diachrony, which researches how words change and develop, by naming it synchrony. And by thinking of relationships between words in synchrony as having systemic differences in sound, he claimed that those were what gave birth to meaning and value, which in turn created recognition of reality.
These types of semiotic concepts offer a great many indications of the framework of this book. In addition to the fact that words play an important role in reality recognition, the systemic differences in sound also become an important viewpoint within the framework of this book. Here, we will focus on sound itself, examining it by using this book’s framework.
Earlier, the differences between visual information and auditory information were explained. Compared to visual information, auditory information has superior sustainability and reproducibility. However, what has so far been discussed in this book applies in the same way to the recognition of sound. Basically, why is it that we are able to recognize individual sounds, in present time that has no duration? Using the most simple example, let’s think about a merely resonating sound.
For instance, whether it’s Do or Mi, even if it’s a single sound being blown by a flute, there should not be any recognition of it as sound in the present moment, one in which there is no duration. But an explanation regarding this point has already been presented in Chapter 1. Sounds get converted into electrical signals by organs inside the ear. Those signals then simultaneously ignite neurons in the cluster structures within the brain. Similarly, to visual information, the entire cluster resonates, igniting in accordance with the 20% firing rate of synapses, and ending 0.2 seconds later. If that was all there was to it, sounds that should be reverberating in the real world should stop in terms of recognition inside the brain. The auditory information from the ear ignites, in succession, the multiple neuron clusters that react to those sounds, and 0.3 seconds later reignites clusters that are prepared for ignition, sustaining recognition of continuously resonating sounds.
Regarding that re-ignition, the mutual stimulation between neurons also gives it a boost, along with outside stimulus. Of course, when information from sensory organs no longer comes in, or in other words, when sounds of the flute stop, the firing of neurons should also come to an end, the mutual firing stimulus ends up being auxiliary.
The firing of multiple clusters should, as auditory information, layer as echoes within our brains, but similarly to the synthetic processing of stereograms, is recognized as an individual sound. For example, in the case of BOSE speakers, the structure of the speakers themselves was designed with reverberation included as a component, based on acoustic psychology. The fact that we have no problem hearing an individual sound with clear features even with reverberation, is proof of processing similar to that of stereogram synthesis taking place inside our brains.
Even a single sound that just reverberates, is recognized as a sound that persists from the past to the present, by crowding together as loop reactions of multiple neuron groups in the brain and then being stereogram-synthesized. Then how about words constructed by multiple phonemes? Auditory images for every single phoneme that constructs a word should persist in the brain for 0.2 seconds, until the clusters of neuron groups flame out. In addition, even by consciously stretching a phoneme of a word, for example pronouncing neuron as neu––ron, the vowel u can be recognized without interruption. Even from this, it can be seen that just as the senses, multiple groups of neuron clusters that react to a single phoneme exist, carrying out loop reactions by re-igniting.
When we hear words spoken by someone, we naturally recognize the words as being in a single lump. Words have a strange certainty about them, as if they exist outside the moments called the present. That is probably because the phonemes that construct words are sustained in our brains, like a turning engine that continues to turn because of inertia, by the loop reactions of neuron clusters reacting to that stimulus.
Now, the discussion regarding words doesn’t end here. For example, let’s actually try pronouncing neuron. Then right after doing so, this time just say neuron to yourself, without uttering a sound. You may be compelled to vocalize, but just bear it. The sounds in your mind are of course not as real as actual sounds, but you should surprisingly be able to recreate in your brain something sufficient enough to be called sound. Not limited to this, instead of humming tunes, many of us play music in our minds every day. Furthermore, when we think about something, we actually convert these thoughts into words that can explain them, with sounds inside our minds. And then, sometimes we literally end up talking out loud, even surprising ourselves for doing so. If we utilize the framework of this book as is, these examples point to the fact that the loop reactions of neuron groups within the brain are autonomously occurring regardless of the presence of outside stimulus. When this happens, it is conceivable that music and words, and even our own thoughts, have very similar characteristics, but this viewpoint will be brought up in the sections that follow.
2. Music in the Shape of Words –– Sounds That Reverberate in Duration-less Time
Words and thoughts have similar characteristics, like their respective sustainability and reproducibility. And the discourse that takes place across various academic disciplines suggest close connections between them. Through the framework of this book, which is of spurious duration created by loop reactions of neuron groups, we will further examine the specific behavior of language and thought.
How words autonomously occur inside the brain was discussed at the end of the last chapter, but for the time being, let’s go back to looking at how neuron groups within the brain react to the stimulus of sounds coming from outside.
Words are an extremely common presence. Even if you are able to block visual information by closing your eyes, audio information that comes flowing into your brain is not something that can easily be stopped. Sounds created by the vibrations of objects cannot be completely blocked, even if you were to cover your ears with your hands. Even when sleeping, sounds will stimulate your brain by infiltrating it through your ears. This must have been an indispensable function for the human animal for when escaping danger. The fact that devices like noise cancellers (which drown out sounds by artificially creating antiphase waves of air in opposition to waves that create sound) are commercially successful, speaks volumes of how deep the relationship is between ourselves and sound. This means that at times, people are willing to pay a price just so they can have some silence.
As pointed out in the previous section, sounds do not get recognized in our minds as they occur in the natural world. The paradox “Motion (thoughts) in duration-less time,” presented by Zeno, destroys our illusion that the sounds in our brain are as they are in the outside world. Even in the case of a reverberating sound, it will get replaced by an action potential that persists for 0.2 seconds, created by loop reactions of multiple neuron groups, then synthesized by the brain and ultimately recognized as one continuous sound.
To begin with, sounds from the natural world are overlapping with all sorts of wave frequencies. For example, even the voice that pronounces “a” sounds like a single sound, but is actually constructed with multiple frequencies of sound waves. Likewise, our brains are not recognizing that sound in the overlapped state that it is in.
In the supplementary issue of scientific journal Newton titled, The Science of Waves –– Sound, Light/Electromagnetic Waves, Seismic Waves . . ., it states as follows:
“In the primary auditory cortex, neurons that react to the same wave frequencies are huddled and lined up in order. (omitted) Sounds, like light, get processed in different parts of the brain according to the properties such as wave frequencies.” (pg. 116)
In other words, the sounds that we hear on a daily basis are first disassembled according to frequency by various organs in the ear and in the brain, then recognized as a result of further synthesis. The quote “…huddled and lined up in order,” refer to none other than the cluster structure of neurons. The neuron groups that react to sounds and their respective frequencies sustain action potential through their loop reactions. This is what gives us the real feeling that the sustained sound we hear is existing outside this moment of the duration-less present.
A way to understand how auditory images exist outside moments called the present is to look at chords (harmonies) in the backgrounds of melodies in music. Multiple sounds with differing high pitch blend to create beautiful harmonies. For example, try strumming the C chord on a guitar. The various sounds harmonize and reverberate pleasantly. Then by using a technique called arpeggio (broken chords) thrum the notes that make up a chord, one by one and in order. Regardless of the time lags between each generated sound, the same pleasant auditory image as when we simultaneously strum a chord is created. Physical reverberations of the instrument itself may have something to do with it, but even when loosening your left hand that was holding down the strings and suppressing the vibrations, there is no change in the impression that every single note as a whole creates the harmony of the chord. Basically, the melody itself is pleasant.
You try substituting one note for another one that helps to construct a C chord, or loosen a string that is responsible for a certain note. Then, the reverberations that used to be pleasant until just earlier come crumbling, and you realize that you “hit the wrong note,” or you are “out of tune,” and are able to react immediately.
It is not that each note that constructs a chord vanishes into the past. As discussed thus far in this book, due to the loop reactions of neuron groups of cluster structures, the sounds continue to stay in the brain. This assumption is the only explanation for why the melody lines of an arpeggio resonate beautifully within a certain chord. Of course, the auditory images of these sounds inside the brain are not as clear as those immediately after the stimuli are brought on by sounds from outside. If they were to have clear auditory images, those sounds should overlap one after another in your mind, eventually becoming the exact same harmony as when you strummed them all at once. Just like layering notes one after another without releasing your fingers from the keyboard on an organ. However, the sounds of an arpeggio are a persistently linear and connected melody line. The mystery of music lies in the fact that sounds that should have vanished into the past are able to create harmonies in your mind.
The sounds that resonate in your mind, are, so to speak, the shadows of sound, which are unlike reverberations. At the end of the last section, I wrote about silently muttering the word neuron to yourself in your mind. The muttering in your mind does not have as clear an auditory image as when you say the word out loud. This fact proves that even for a simple act like listening to sounds, there are various processes in the brain at work, ones that should be called shadows.
Regarding the point that multiple functions of the brain operate to establish a single recognition, the following example of a visual display is interesting. An article titled “Mysterious Vision of the Blind,” was published in the August, 2010 issue of Nikkei Science. It comes with the subtitle, “Can’t See but Can See.” It brings up the story of an individual whose primary visual cortex has been damaged by accident or disease, and despite being fully aware that he/she cannot see their surroundings, is able to walk while avoiding obstacles. This condition known as blindsight affects only a handful of people, but enough so as to not be considered so rare. This contradiction that the brain is able recognize something that you are not even aware of, points to the involvement of multiple systems within the brain that establish a single recognition, and depending on the circumstances, function even with only some parts working. So, it should be sufficed to think that even the muttering in your own mind is a part of one of the functions of the brain, one that establishes the recognition of sound.
Let’s turn the conversation back to music. From what we have discussed so far, we know what there are two ways in which sounds are grasped in our brains when listening to music. Actually, try listening to some music. There’s no way that this rich flood of sounds stimulating your ears in this very moment can happen during duration-less time. The sounds you are hearing through your headphones right now are being grasped by 0.2 second-long reverberations created by neuron clusters, while some sounds are being synthesized as identical sounds by the same mechanism as stereogram-syntheses, as other sounds resonate with others without getting synthesized. This is the first way sounds are grasped. The second way is by the sounds of the shadows that create melody lines. Not as the clear and distinct sounds in their true form, but loop reactions of neuron groups sustain reverberations of sounds that are similar to the musings in your mind, causing those who listen to music to feel the beautiful melody lines based on certain chords.
In the previous section, I mentioned that music constructed by sounds and words have common characteristics. Words also have functions the same way harmonies do. At some point in time, I started noticing the following types of writing in various media on the internet:
“The odrers of letters in this sntecnece have been raerragned on pruopse bsaed on the rsaerech that states that poelpe can rcoengize letters and read porprely as long the first and last letters are corrcet the odrer can be in diasarry .”
Strangely enough, the sentence can certainly be read. You will get stuck at certain parts if you attempt to carefully read each and every word, but if you just haphazardly read through it quickly there is no problem at all. You can even read it out like an announcer. Like character recognition on a computer, are you instantaneously associating words that are visually similar to those images? The positioning of the letters being out of alignment should have a significant impact on visual imaging, but they can be read normally within the flow of the sentence. Read it out loud over and over again, and observe your own mind while reading. When you do, it is as though you’re capturing all the words in your head like a scanner, and the moment that’s done, words that meet the right conditions seem to pop out and emerge in your mind.
As mentioned earlier, it is impossible to definitively say what exactly goes on in the blackbox that is the brain. All that can be done to explain what happens is to present the most concise and efficient theory. What can be said with certainty, is that words are not tied to linearity as much as we feel they are in our daily lives. If using what is the framework of this book so far, the following can be said. Letters and phonemes that construct words ignite neuron clusters that react to their frequencies, thus sustaining their action potential with their loop reactions. Further reading of characters consequently increases the clusters that are on standby. When a single word’s worth of characters are done getting converted to sounds in your brain, a word made up of those components gets automatically determined. This is exactly the same as in a music performance, when the background chord of a bar gets determined after an arpeggio (broken chord) gets played. Or perhaps our brains take in one word’s worth with a single breath. In that case, it would be more like a stroke that strums a chord at once, and not so much like an arpeggio. It would mean that loop reactions of neuron groups in your head would start up, as they react simultaneously to sounds and a word’s worth.
Nevertheless, why we don’t find words with misplaced letters to be so odd is utterly incomprehensible. At this time, the theory that letters and phonemes are in a collateral state is the most concise explanation for this mystery. The persistent state of the action potential of loop reactions of neuron groups makes it possible to maintain the recognition of letters and phonemes longer than a limited period of time.
So up until now, I have discussed what occurs inside the brain when we recognize words and music, and by focusing special attention on its sustainability, I presented a hypothesis. Let’s further discuss words, music, and our thoughts, and the commonality between them.
The defining difference between auditory information like words and music and visual information lies in its reproducibility. We are able to hum songs to ourselves. We can vocalize words that we envision in our minds. As I explained earlier regarding visual information, even if it was a scene from a movie that you’ve seen over and over again, you would not be able to reproduce that image in your mind as well as you would auditory information. Much less, you would not be able to outwardly enunciate that in an instant as you could with words. The only way you could do it is indirectly, like drawing a picture or describing it verbally.
For example, when singing a song, we just heard for the first time in music class, or when reading aloud unfamiliar words used by people 1000 years ago in classical literature class, we listen to the instructor’s voice and try to keep the image of it remaining in our minds. We then, through our vocal chords, project that image out of our minds. When auditory information is thought of in that way, it can be said that the recognition of external sounds and the subsequent projecting of them in your own voice are both extremely similar functions of the brain.
Human beings are not the only ones that can hear external sounds and conduct vocal learning. The University of Tokyo’s Kazuo Okanoya wrote Why Words Were Created (Bungeishunhju), a very intelligible book intended for the general public, complete with illustrations. According to Mr Okanoya, 5,000 out of 10,000 species of cetaceans like dolphins and killer whales, humans, and even birds like parrots possess the ability to engage in vocal learning. That means that half of all bird species can, like human beings, do vocal learning. What’s very interesting is that amongst these birds, there are those who compose their own music and sing their own songs. The following is from Why Words Were Created:
“To begin with, the Bengalese finch can vocalize about eight kinds of short chirping sounds. We will call these short chirping sounds elements. Please think of these as you would the 50 sounds of the Japanese alphabet. The Bengalese finch connects these elements and creates songs unique to themselves.” (pg. 48)
Mr. Okanoya considers these patterns created by a number of connected elements to be similar to words used in human speech, and refers to them as chunks. Bengalese finches learn chunks from a variety of parental generations and create songs by arranging them. In Twitter on the Origin of Language – from the song of the bird to the new edition of human words (Iwanami Shoten), also written by Mr. Okanayo, he states:
“We know that this bird cuts out parts of songs created by his biological father and three other males, then pastes them together in various orders, creating its own unique song.” (pg. 104)
The following can be said if using the framework of this book. Several phonemes make up the foundations of songs and words. Due to the loop reactions of neuron groups in the brain, phonemes are in a standby state. By having been repeatedly made to listen to sounds by our parents, the neuron clusters that react to these stimuli get strengthened, and the phonemes transform into big reactions from their standby states, able to do things like stimulate motor neurons that control vocal chords. Even in the research of Yuki Ikegaya, which was introduced in the previous chapter, neuron clusters expanding in scale in response to repetitive stimulus has been proven by experimentation. Clusters in standby state are like hand-bells being lined up in front of a Bengalese finch. The bird would then randomly select the bells and play, improvising a performance. But there are a certain set of combination rules when it comes to grasping phonemes, and that is what creates the embodiment of chunks. It is as if the combinations for both hands to ring hand-bells is already determined.
An example that makes thinking of it in those terms convenient is presented in Twitter on the Origin of Language. When pointing a flashlight at both a bird that sings linearly simple songs and a bird that sings complex ones, what happened was that the individual who sang simple song was more prone to being interrupted, while the bird who sang complex songs was not. In other words, simple and linear songs have their melody lines in a fixed state. Therefore, even if the song was to be cut off even for an instant, the bird would have to start all over again. But if the bird was the kind that sang complex and improvisational songs, the loop reactions of neuron groups in the brain that react to phonemes are in standby state, as mentioned earlier. Even if the performance was to be interrupted by a flashlight, phonemes were getting selected at random while performing, so resuming the activity can be done with ease.
This sort of improvisational style of singing by the Bengalese finch brings to mind the ad-libbing style of jazz. Assigned chords, performers freely select notes that make up those chords with their own sensibilities, and create melody lines as they play. Notes that construct chords must be in a collateral standby state Inside the minds of these musicians.
The words we articulate must also be created by the same type of system. In the case of Japanese, five types of vowels and ten types of consonants are in a collateral standby state in the brain, and arranging those create semi-improvisational words. Maybe the reason we are able to smoothly manage words without having to strain ourselves, is because the hand-bells in our brains that are the loop reactions of neuron groups reacting to the respective phonemes are already lined up, and all that has to be done is for us to ring them.
In this book, we have taken a look at words and music constructed by sounds reverberating in duration-less moments called the present, despite having linear characteristics. The multiple neuron groups loop-react and cause the present of this moment and the past of a moment ago coexist simultaneously, and by stereogram synthesizing that, gives us the recognition of flowing sounds. Furthermore, loop reactions of neuron groups that react to various frequencies bristle within the brain, in standby state to immediately react to external input or autonomous output of the brain.
In the next section, we will explore how our conscience created by words recognizes reality, and how it makes recognition beyond reality — abstract thinking — possible.
3. The Entity of Conscience (1) –– The Mind is Born in an Ocean of Sounds
Time recognition caused by loop reactions of neuron groups, and spoken language created by that, is the embodiment of our conscience. I will demonstrate that in this section.
It is hard to think that when we evolved from apes, conscience and mechanisms of the brain that create it suddenly came into existence. It is more reasonable to think that a mechanism that was already in place got diverted to being in charge of this new mechanism called conscience. Its original mechanism must have had a comparatively simple structure. If a system with same-level complexity and delicacy was necessary in order create a complex and delicate conscience, then there should be no way that conscience would have been born, even if there were unprecedented changes while apes evolved into man. That is literally like creating something out of nothing.
Sounds are extremely ordinary, and on top of that, very simple. Using Japanese as an example, we can explain away all phenomena in the real world with only 50 types of sounds. So, all that was needed to create conscience was those sounds, moreover, just five types of vowels and ten types of consonants. In other words, with only a total of fifteen types of sounds controlled by loop reactions of neuron groups in the brain during time that shouldn’t have a duration, we have all acquired an opportunity to obtain conscience. But of course, the entity of conscience is not only made up of words.
A program titled Science Zero: The Labyrinth of the Five Senses (2) –– Exploring the Hidden Possibilities of the Surprisingly Powerful Sense of Hearing was broadcast on NHK in 2010. Footage like the following aired to show the connection between sounds and vision. Two shining balls are projected on a screen installed in the studio. The balls are coming and going left and right on the screen. The balls overlap when they intersect in the middle of the screen, and they appear to pass each other and continue moving apart in each direction. Then a loud noise is made the moment the two balls overlap. Suddenly, the balls look like they are bouncing off each other in the middle of the screen. There is no time to consciously apply whether or not there is sound as a criterion. The moment the loud noise is made, the impression of the balls passing each other gets replaced by the impression of being repelled. It’s not that it seems to appear that way, it actually clearly appears so.
From this experiment, it becomes clear that visual images and auditory images are connected beyond our daily impressions of them. If a simple experiment like this makes it apparent, our daily lives must be overflowing with instances of our visual and auditory senses connecting. For example, the sound of a glass shattering not only arouses an image of the sound of it in our minds, but also a visual image of the glass shattering and flying into pieces. On the contrary, if you watch footage of glass breaking, an image of the sound being made when it happens is created. This is not a result of judgements made according to sound or images, but is a result of semi-automatic association. Ingrid Bergman’s wet eyes getting evoked from our memories upon the line, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” is essentially the same thing. Likewise, let’s say someone played the same classical song in the background every time they read a certain novel. If they picked up that novel years later, many would have the experience of automatically having that same background song start playing in their minds.
Professor Shinsuke Shimojo of the California Institute of Technology is conducting experiments capturing how auditory images elicit visual images. By experimenting with various types of apparent motion (phenomenon where continuous lights appear to shift; the phi phenomenon), Professor Shimojo explains that contents of perception are reconstructed in retrofit in the brain, and as a result, the time we perceive has a duration of 0.1 seconds in our brains. The above diagram was culled from a presentation given by Professor Shimojo at Yamaguchi University on December 8th, 2012. Named the “Rabbit Effect,” this experiment involved setting up two light sources and lighting them up twice, with the timing delayed. Thereupon an apparent motion would take place, and the lights would look like they were shifting. (A similar experiment has already been described in chapters 2 and 3 of this book). And here, synchronized with the lighting up of the light sources, a sound would be emitted from a set of speakers. After repeating this a number of times, the same sound would be played exactly halfway between the two light sources lighting up, and lo and behold, another light source would clearly appear where there shouldn’t be one, right at the moment the sound comes on. In short, auditory images are arousing visual images inside the brain.
Words are not a presence that stands alone as auditory information. For example, try making the sound of desk in your mind. As described in chapter 1, it sounds like the shadow of a sound, with no real image. It’s the sound from inside the brain, one that can immediately be generated as an actual sound by a jolting of the vocal chords. Then, in an instant, a visual image of that sound pops up in the mind. Still yet, there will probably be counterarguments insisting that words function separately from the brain’s recognition of reality, and visual images are not directly related to them. But if for example, we read a novel with no illustrations or pictures, then after that watch a film adaptation of it, we get the impression that the main character doesn’t match the image we have. So, words are clearly directly linked to visual images.
But just because words and visual images are linked together, that doesn’t mean that words arouse actual visual information in the brain as is. If that was the case, every time we envisioned a word, visual images connected to that word would overlap in our minds, instantaneously creating a state of saturation. Earlier, I explained blind sight, and mentioned that brain function related to visual recognition was not simplex, but comprised of a combination of various functions. And there are times when just a part of these functions is enough to establish recognition. Every time visual images are elicited by words; only necessary functions of the brain are used. For example, a proper noun like Ingrid Bergman elicits a visual image closer to the real image. On the other hand, when the noun is desk and more abstract elements come with it, only something like a simple image of four legs and a top come to mind. At times a visual image wouldn’t even be aroused before it connects with other words and becomes an element in context. Purely abstract words like freedom and peace must have been created while words were being used separately from visual images. There is even a theory that states that most words were actually created out of metaphors. A good example of this, is that in Japanese, the origin of miru in shite miru (to attempt) comes from miru (to see). Basically, the origin of many words have connections to visual images.
So, if words arouse visual images in the mind, then the opposite is also true. When we look around at our own surroundings, it’s not that we are processing that as pure visual information in our brains. If words in our brains instantaneously link to visual images, then conversely, we should be instantaneously linking the reality around us to words.
A few years ago, there was a late-night program on NHK that featured amateur filmmakers and their work. One of the pieces involved the appearance of single characters of text. A character would move around and act in front of a white background on the screen, just like an actor. For example, the character for person would be trudging along, and right behind him the character for dog would be following, hopping and jumping around. On top of a narrowly elongated character for column were a bunch of small beams of light dancing around. While the characters for train shake and rattle, they travel across the top part of the screen. Oddly enough, the footage simply showing various characters dancing around on a white screen appear to look like a dog being walked during a sunset. It even has perspective.
When we recognize reality, we enlist the help of words, without realizing it. As Saussure pointed out, a word is not merely a name given to reality, nor is it just a means of communicating reality and what’s inside our minds to others, but is in fact the reality we recognize itself. Of course, sometimes we just gaze blankly at our surroundings without the use of any words. But when this happens, we shouldn’t be able to remember the sights before our eyes, nor whatever it is that happened. Inspired by the words of Brentano, Husserl wrote of intentionality, which stated that “consciousness is constantly facing the target and always in agreement with it.” When we become conscious of the phenomenon in front of ourselves and grasp it, we reverberate the soundless sounds of words in our minds. Just like when the word desk elicits a visual image in our minds, the visual information of the actual desk makes the sound desk reverberate in our minds, while simultaneously arousing visual images connected to desk that have been embedded into the brain. In other words, the reason we can spuriously experience reality when reading novels and such is because the establishment of reality experience itself is aided by words. If they didn’t go through this type of recognition process, how would the desks and chairs lined up in a classroom look to us? The actual features of a desk and chair are not that different. They are both lanky with a top and four legs. There’s no doubt that we would get the sense that they were a variety of small and large tree roots growing from the floor of the classroom.
When this happens, what state are the sounds in our minds in? If words reverberate in our minds just by us gazing at our surroundings, and those are sounds of the part of brain function with no actual image, they should instantaneously accumulate and reach a saturated state. But let’s reverse our thinking, and imagine that sounds are instead incessantly reverberating in our minds. This means that if it was Japanese, it would be a total of 15 sounds, 5 vowels and 10 consonants. In the previous section of this chapter, I brought up the Bengalese finch singing by randomly selecting from the phoneme groups that are in standby state in its mind. Our brains, as well, cause neuron groups that react to the basic phonemes that construct words to loop-react, and are also in standby state. Now all that has to happen is to link those loop reactions according to the phonemic structure of the words targeted for recognition, and output them to other functions of the brain. Because there are in standby state, they are able to instantaneously connect to those brain functions.
Even with only 15 types of phonemes, their combinations allow them to dramatically connect with all sorts of images. Words are, so to speak, like digital information. For example, in Japanese again, inu (dog) and isu (chair) only have a difference of one phoneme. For the same phonemes, these words share the same loop reactions of the neuron groups that react to them. By sharing, it simplifies the reverberating sounds in the brain, and recognizes the lines of various words within it, in other words, it recognizes complex realities, and makes paradoxically possible the forming of complex thoughts. If you think about that fact that a computer actually operates on binary system words, such as 0 or 1, and ON and OFF, it really isn’t that odd. In the previous section, I raised an example of being able to recognize characters in words even if their orders were rearranged randomly, and mentioned the possibility of phonemes in the brain being in a collateral state. If they are indeed lined up, then it seems rather natural to think that the neuron groups that react to sounds with the same frequencies in the brain are being shared.
There is something that resembles the system inside the brain that I just described. It is a storage medium named Core Rope Memory, used in the Saturn rocket for the NASA’s Apollo Mission. Although called a storage medium, it was developed during the very early stages of computing, so compared to SD cards that are used in devices such as the digital cameras of today, they are heavy, large, and lacking in style. To that extent, the memory functions are intuitively easy to understand. A core is a perforated magnet, and there are tens, hundreds of them in a line. Numerous cords have been passed through these holes. These cords are passed through in an inventive way, where each cord doesn’t go through all the holes in the cores, but are wired in a way that they bypass the outer sides of several cores. This detour pattern differs with each cord. When electrical currents are sent through these cords, the parts that pass through the cores gets output as “1”, and the parts that don’t pass through get output as “0”, and this functions as memory for the computer.
The structure of this Core Rope Memory becomes a clue when thinking about the functions of neuron groups inside the brain that react to words. Within the human brain that has learned arbitrary words, are neuron groups that react to phonemes that possess basic structures of that linguistic system, which loop-react invariantly to external auditory stimuli by using them as an energy source. Each and every one of these phonemes is each and every core of Core Rope Memory. Within the cores of the brain are interconnected wiring, as many as there are words of that linguistic system. It is said that there are 100 billion neurons alone, and if you were to multiple that with the number of synapses, the numbers are astronomical, so the extent of wiring for words that construct a single linguistic system are probably pretty simple in terms of the structure of the brain.
When you hear certain words, the wiring connected to all the multiple phonemes that construct words, namely the neural circuit, become active. And then, they get instantaneously accessed by other relevant functions of the brain, such as visual information, for example. When recognizing a word heard for the first time, all words groups that lexically explain that word get activated, linking to other functions of the brain for the time being, and as that gets repeated, the neural circuit that directly connects the cores that construct that word gets created. It is like short-term memory becoming long-term memory due to repetitive learning.
As mentioned earlier, there are grounds for why neuron groups that stay in invariant standby states while loop-reacting to specific phonemes get shared as cores for lined-up multiple words. If the stimulation was for the exact same sound, and even if there were multiple ones, the reason that they are processed in our brains as a single stimulus is because our brains do this on a daily basis. For example, compression processing of data for voices done be digital technology does not record all real sounds. For sounds like those of a small cymbal, parts that overlap with other bigger sounds actually don’t get recorded. Even so, we can still undoubtedly hear the sounds of the cymbal while the music plays. This in fact becomes plain evidence that if the frequencies are the same, sounds inside the brain are sharable with a variety of other sounds.
Basically, words are precisely what Saussure said they were, merely “systematic differences in sound.” Despite differences in linguistic systems, the structures of the limited numbers of phonemes lined up within the brain that react to them as loop reactions of neuron groups don’t change. Regarding the similarities of phonemes for multiple words, the structures get simplified by the sharing of neuron groups that react to that stimuli, and to that extent making possible the lining up of even more words, and namely, complex thinking.
This is somewhat of a digression, but I can’t help but think that Saussure was seeking, as is this book, the identity of consciousness itself, by presenting a perspective called synchrony, which studied horizontal relationships of language in certain moments. The concept of synchrony itself contains the mystery of the formation of thought in duration-less moments called the present. I also heard that later on in life, Saussure studied anagrams. Anagrams are when words and sentences come to mean different things, when characters or letters being used for them are rearranged. Saussure is thought to have explored how thoughts, namely multiple words, were lined up within our minds in moments of the present, but of course all of this is only speculative.
For brains to instantaneously read words from their surrounding realities, and for us to be able to work various thoughts out by using words, it is essential that the basic phonemes of words all be in standby state as loop reactions of neuron groups inside the brain. Also, this is a function necessary for when we think during the present of duration-less time. But the question of what kind of stimulus input this standby state is created from remains. Regarding this, the following example is easy to understand.
In order to simulate the experience of being in the stimulus-free void of space, astronauts train by confining themselves in a room completely cut off from all light and sound. Maintaining mental stability for long hours in these kinds of conditions is apparently grueling. Warping the sense of time, it is said that even brief periods cause the illusion that hours, even tens of hours, have passed. This points to the fact that our brains need stimulus from outside. If using the framework of this book, it can be said that our brains capture external ambient noise, and a certain number of neuron groups are constantly in a reacted state to that stimuli. Neuron groups connected to phonemes that construct words invariably maintain loop reactions according to the stimulus of external sounds.
In the beginning of this section, I mentioned of how when we evolved from apes, our linguistic abilities were probably acquired by being diverted from abilities already inherent in apes themselves. This is only speculation, but it is possible that the depth perception that allowed apes to jump around between trees by reading the flow of air is the foundation of that function.
Yuji Ikegaya’s The Brain Has a Strange Habit (Fusosha Publishing) gives an account of depth perception. Two solid figures captured from viewpoints with differing angles are projected on a monitor. There is a depth-perception test that, by having the subject spin the two figures around in their head, assesses whether or not they’re the same figures. Apparently, individuals with exceptional musical abilities also have excellent depth perception. Concerning that, Mr. Ikegaya has stated as follows:
“It’s very strange. What does sense of tone intervals have anything to do with depth perception? At the present moment, all we can say is that it’s a mystery, but Professor Butterworth of University College London and others point out that “Scales are originally meant to be expressed as space.” (omitted) Maybe, the interval structures of melodies are also processed in the same brain circuits as solid figures are. (pg. 182)
As explained in the previous section, compared to many birds and other animals that have the ability to voice words, apes that are closer to man as a species aren’t able to do so. It is unlikely that the brain function for handling words suddenly came to be, as if suddenly popping out of nowhere. Just like we obtained the ability to create things with our two hands that were freed upon walking upright, there should also have been a preliminary function of our linguistic abilities. Even if it was positive fact that words, which are auditory images, linked with visual images, and that allowed man to acquire reality recognition and communication abilities, what exactly was it that triggered the need for those images to link up? I get that autonomous reactions independent of the realities outside of the brain are caused by loop reactions of neuron groups within the brain for seeing and hearing, respectively, but there has to have been some sort of trigger for two obviously differing functions to connect.
A part of a passage from The Brain Has a Strange Habit got me thinking the following. By living atop trees, and while jumping from tree to tree, monkeys heard the sounds of the wind, and the creaking of the trees and the bustling of the leaves, all of which developed their ability to shape and understand their settings. By instantly grasping the state of their surroundings, they reach for the tree next to them and swing to it, without even looking. This is what created the trigger for language acquisition, the profound connecting of visual images and auditory images within the brain. Apes developed their visual functions to be greater than birds by expanding their brain capacity. This may be how they acquired their well-balanced depth perception, one made up of both the visual and auditory senses.
Our conscience and our words are intimately connected. Words are called upon by the brain when recognizing surrounding realities, and fragments of reality connected to those words within the brain are awakened when evoking words. These are two sides of the same brain phenomenon. In that sense, it can be said that the word is reality itself.
Words were created from the sounds of reality as a natural occurrence. Human beings can even make their brains receptively learn, by replicating these sounds with their vocal chords. On top of that, by having someone else listen to those sounds, they can mutually reinforce them. By using stimulus from various sounds of their surroundings and using that as an energy source, humans turn on the power of consciousness, the loop reactions of neuron groups that react to phonemes that construct words. Our consciousness is born out of an ocean of sounds. Because of this, our consciousness has acquired a sustainability and reproducibility as if its existence protrudes the moment of the duration-less present.
4. The Entity of Conscience (2) –– Self-Consciousness Called Time Perception
In Chapter 3, we developed ideas focused especially on sounds, and namely, words. In this section we will explore the flow of human consciousness while comprehensively grasping the visual and auditory aspects.
First off, let’s review what has been unfolded so far in this book. What’s at the center of the framework is the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno’s paradox, “The flying arrow is motionless.” The mystery of why we are able to recognize the movement of objects and the passing of time is synonymous with why our consciousness is sustainable during time that disappears in an instant. This book is attempting to explain the various phenomenon that pertains to consciousness, by using as a base the idea that human consciousness is created as a result of after-images from an instant ago and present images of the present being synthesized like a stereogram within the brain, making the recognition of passing time possible.
Let’s think about what happens inside the brain right when you look at an analog clock, for example. Visual information that comes bursting in the moment you opened your eyes have stimulated neuron clusters, starting ignition. A single cluster is like one taken photograph, continuing to remain in our brains for 0.2 seconds while gradually vanishing. Multiple clusters ignite one after another, without pause, creating multiple visual images in the brain, overlapping. The overlapped images then get synthesized like a stereogram, causing us to sense the movement of the hand on the clock and the passing of time. The neuron clusters that create the visual images reignite and loop-react, continuing for however long we look at the clock. That visual information simultaneously awakens the sound of clock in the brain. The code called clock that got called upon by the linking of invariably continuous phonemes in the brain further awaken semantic information and other connected visual images related to them, such as the second-hand, minute-hand, hour-hand, and face. By superimposing what’s been called upon in our brains and the actual scenery of what’s right in front of us in that way, what we are doing is recognizing reality.
I hear that car navigation systems that get directly projected onto windshields are getting put to use, and I imagine human minds work that way was well. We use words as mediators, as visual images that directly reflect external stimulus and the images that get called upon in our minds struggle with each other. We can even say that we live in a world linguistically woven in advance. For example, the linguistic associations for every corner of the room we live our lives in have already been completed in our brains, and we can even say that CG (computer graphics) data of the entire room has been manufactured in there. We live our lives while fleshing out the CG data in our minds with our sense of reality and auditory information. When we think of going to the bathroom, an image of ourselves going before we even actually stand up get navigated in our minds as if in a story. And on your way to the bathroom, the sensory information from your eyes give body to the story in your mind and actualize it. Does the fact that even a cat can go to the bathroom disprove that? Cats of course do not have a linguistic story in their minds. But just because cats and humans are conducting the same action, it shouldn’t have to mean that they are using the same functions of their brains. As the human animal, we’ve even verbalized the function that belongs to the intuition that we’ve had before we acquired speech, and have placed it under the control of our consciousness. With that we abstract reality and grasp it, and possess a flexibility that responds to changing circumstances. Apparently, even cats that have been toilet-trained aren’t able to lead settled lives for a while after their environments change, such as when their owners move. Looking at articles on the internet, you’ll find advice on how helpful it is to bring the same sand from the litter box of the prior home. We also tend to get initially flustered when being in an environment we’re not used to, like when staying the night in a newly-renovated ryokan (Japanese inn) in a hot spring district. Once we’ve checked to make sure we know where the emergency exits are, and when we’re done with creating the linguistic story of the ryokan in our minds, we are then able to conduct ourselves the way we usually do. This linguistic story is not one just woven together with words like a novel, but is one that denotes the condition of various visual images being organically connected. Just like Plato’s Ideas, we live while referencing the pseudo-reality in our minds.
There are other examples that becomes easier to understand when thought of as us living while constantly referencing the pseudo-realities in our minds. One is what was mentioned in the prologue of this book, the experience of feeling that time seems to accelerate and decelerate. The kind of experience you have as a child, when you immerse yourself in reading an entire book, only to look up and noticing that the hands of the clock have moved significantly. The framework of this book makes possible an explanation for that state of mind.
We all are constantly receiving external stimuli, and we live our lives while sensing the passing of time due to that. The pseudo-reality that gets awakened in our minds by words is usually nothing but an auxiliary. However, when you’re obsessed with something, or when you’re lost in deep thought as you trace your memories, the neuron groups that are supposed to ignite when recognizing external realities are largely deprived as a resource when constructing pseudo-realities inside the brain. In other words, when you’re obsessed with something, the weight of reality inside and outside the brain gets reversed. Time recognition is not established by external stimuli, but by the pseudo-realities that get evoked by language. Due to the invariably loop reactions of neuron groups that react to specific phonemes, language continues to remain inside the brain, timelessly. Consequently, the pseudo-reality created by language is, as language itself, able to sustain the same image for long periods of time. In other words, inside the brain, time passes slowly. Children that read books are truly leaving the real world and entering the world of the book. They are in the process of experiencing what’s inside the book and the slow passing of time. And, when they go back to recognizing time due to external stimuli, they find themselves surprised at how fast time passes in the outside world.
Time perception and self-consciousness are two sides of the same coin. As discussed so far in this book, the theory that there needs to be spurious duration for time reception and thoughts to be established in this moment called the present which should have no duration, is also one of the arguments for that statement, but here I am going to attempt an explanation from a different point of view.
Earlier, I stated how the moment you open your eyes, external visual information would ignite neuron groups reacting to that. (Regarding the argument that that ignition is equal to a single neuron cluster that creates the same type of action potential, that has already been explained in Section 3 of Chapter 2.) When this happens, self-consciousness cannot get established by a single cluster’s worth. Because if the ignition of a single cluster’s worth was enough to establish consciousness, we should be seeing scenes before us from an instant ago in stop-motion right after we open our eyes. Let’s try experimenting with our computers and desks right in front of us. First close your eyes. Open them again after 0.2 seconds have passed, immediately after the after-images from when you had your eyes open have completely disappeared. Repeat. You do not for even an instant see anything in stop-motion. It may just be your imagination, but it’s almost as if the moment you open your eyes, there seems to be a time lag until your computer regains its clear image. This sort of experiment is obviously one of personal opinion, and is not claimed as providing any kind of evidence. It can even be offered as an alternative explanation, simply as the time necessary for the lens of the eyes to focus on the computer before you after opening your eyes.
However, there exists a theory that states that our recognition is established a split-second late. Benjamin Livet states the following in Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience):
“When you tap your finger on a table, you believe you experience the event in real-time. That is, as your finger touches the table, you will subjectively feel contact, but experimental evidence strongly supports the amazing discoveries that are contrary to our intuition and emotions. In other words, the brain needs a relatively long activation period of a maximum of 0.5 seconds before an event can be registered in awareness(realization)! (pg.39)
This theory was also introduced in the science magazine Newton, in its May, 2012 issue. Benjamin Livet introduced a few experiments to support this in Mind Time, but those details will not be explained in this book. Stating only his main points, when electrical stimulation of the brain exceeds 0.5 seconds, only then does the subject become aware that they are receiving stimuli. Furthermore, the subject doesn’t stop at simply recognizing that stimuli in that moment, but they become aware of receiving stimuli from a split-second before, as if going back in time. Another example would be in sports, when an athlete is required to react in less than a split-second, the unconscious workings of the brain are supplementing that.
If using the framework of this book, this contradiction can also be easily explained. Human consciousness gets established for the first time by fusing, like a stereogram, the past of an instant ago and this present moment. Direct external visual and auditory stimuli create a firing state of multiple neuron groups within the brain, and when those overlap, the passage of time and self-consciousness that is drawn to that are created for the very first time. Though this does not mean that stereogram synthesis, or namely sensory stimuli that even generated consciousness, just disappeared into the past. They are retained within the brain even in moments of the present, and as one of the ingredients for stereogram-synthesis, are components for the passing of time in this very moment. That is why the instant consciousness gets generated, the contradiction of also recognizing events that occurred beforehand gets established.
This logic is meant to explain cases when you suddenly open your eyes after cutting off external stimuli by closing your eyes, and does not apply to when loop reactions of neuron groups have already taken place, and a certain recognition is being sustained. For example, because a ball thrown by a pitcher and the visual information of its surroundings do not suddenly appear before a batter’s eyes, it rather is inside the flow of time recognition created by after-images of the past that has already been retained. The batter should be able to recognize the ball in real time without having to borrow the presence of the unconscious. That being said, Benjamin Livet’s argument regarding those points fails to be convincing.
Earlier, I presented an example called blindsight. It refers to people that have lost their sense of sight and despite not being aware of it themselves, are able to avoid obstacles in front of them as they walk. People’s consciousness is formed by parts you can be self-aware of and parts you cannot. And a lot of the parts you are aware of are established by the stereogram synthesis of loop reactions of multiple neuron groups. It can be said that the split-second delay of awareness explained in Mind Time is one way that this framework is proven to exist.
Consciousness is generated the instant varying levels of action potential created by multiple neuron clusters get stereogram-synthesized. There is a subliminal effect to one of the things that make this theory explainable. A subliminal effect is when, for example in a single frame of film in a movie, an ad for a refreshing drink is placed. The running time for a single frame of film for a movie that projects 24 frames per second is 0.04 seconds. People who see this film do not even notice the fact that they’ve seen it. Despite that, after watching the movie, they spontaneously feel the need to quench their thirst by drinking some juice. This is not some hypothesis, but an apparently effective effect that actually took place. But I heard that since the consumer is made to buy a product without involvement of their free-will, and the fact that the right to choose freely was denied to those who viewed the film, it caused problems and eventually died down.
When I first heard about this, I remember not being convinced at all. I don’t mean to deny the effects of the Freudian unconscious, but at the very least, for specific information to affect the unconscious region, I thought it was necessary to become conscious of that information, if only briefly. Something bypassing the conscious and directly affecting the region of the unconscious was, for me, akin to acknowledging the existence of supernatural teleportation, and all I could think was that it was witchcraft. However, even an explanation for this becomes possible with the framework of this book.
People are able to recognize the reality in front of them as reality the moment loop reactions of neuron groups within the brain take place. We have discussed so far that namely, time perception and self-consciousness are the exact same brain phenomenon. Because subliminal effects are equal to a single frame of film, they cannot ignite multiple neuron clusters. Consequently, stereogram synthesis in the brain, which requires multiple clusters, does not occur. In other words, time perception does not get created. However, even with the ignition of a single cluster, it can remain in the brain for 0.2 seconds as an after-image of the past, and can activate other functions of the brain, such as the blindsight-like and non-aware visual imaging. That is why even if you’re not conscious of the fact that you’ve seen anything, a reaction occurs in the brain as though you have. Subliminal effects are created as a result of a single frame’s worth of after-images from the past not being stereogram-synthesized as time perception, and wandering around in the brain.
Regarding this chapter, we have augmented into our own thinking the paradox presented by ancient Greek philosopher Zeno that movement materializes in duration-less time, and explained the framework of our brain that makes that possible.
There is a way of thinking called the Cartesian theater. Human consciousness is like a small audience watching a movie screen, using brain functions to watch the reality of the outside world. That is why no matter how you individually analyze functions of the brain, the actual state of consciousness can never be discovered. And actually, there is a view that no matter where you look inside the brain, you will never find any parts of it that create consciousness. All the hypotheses we have so far discussed in this book present an answer to one of the mysteries of the mind-body dualistic structure of consciousness. Loop reactions of neuron groups that react to the auto stimuli sustain themselves like a spinning waterwheel, by using the stimulus from external sounds. The invariable standby states of the phonemes that construct words instantaneously do so within the brain, editing surrounding realities linguistically, further sustaining that recognition. Loop reactions that react to sounds are lining up and drawing themselves next to the loop reactions of neuron groups that react to visual stimuli. Visually and audibly, 0.2 seconds worth of information is condensed into duration-less moments of the present. Furthermore, in the case of language, due to the invariable sustenance of loop reactions of phonemes, it can last longer than a duration of 0.2 seconds. That is what gives us the sense that our consciousness exists beyond moments of no duration. There is a flowing river called time, and while our consciousness itself gets swept away in it, we get the feeling as though we are watching the river flow from the riverbed. This is because language being the actual state of consciousness is a certainty.
As discussed up until now, the passing of time can be established from the perspective of human recognition even if it lasts for 0 seconds. But that alone does not destroy Zeno’s paradox. Physical time and mathematical time — basically, when dealing with true reality that doesn’t involve our recognition, will we be able to solve Zeno’s paradox of, “The flying arrow is motionless?” That will be the theme of the following chapter.
Chapter 4 The Essence of Time
1. Physical Time (1) — Reality with No Observers
The flying arrow is motionless in single moments. In other words, its velocity is zero. No matter how many zero velocities you accumulate you will always have zero, so if the passage of time is an accumulation of moments, the flying arrow is actually still. The essential meaning of it unsolved for 2500 years, Zeno’s Paradox is explainable in terms of human recognition. Then how about in terms of physical time? This is the theme of this section.
So how should we define the perspective of physical time? In regards to this book, there is of course no intent to ever deviate from the original and standard definition of the word physical. However, as stated in the prologue, providing an overview of the discourse related to time is not the objective of this book. While referring to the existing laws of physics, and from an angle that this book’s perspective should be, I will discuss physical time. So far in this book, we have been focusing our discussion on time as recognized by people. In this section, we will do the opposite, and examine time in a state completely removed from human recognition. We will define this as physical time.
What in the world is reality that doesn’t get recognized by anybody, anyway? The sand of an empty desolate desert whistles in the blowing wind. Maybe that’s the kind of scene you imagine. But if you were to use what we have discussed so far in this book as a premise, even the sensation we get that something is moving is created in our minds. It is like an illusion created as a result of having stereogram-synthesized the visual information from this very moment, and the after-image from an instant ago. The wind that blows in the desert, and the whirling clouds of dust, obviously exist even when we are nowhere around. But those images of deserts seen on documentaries on television only exist in our brains. The philosopher Shigeki Noya states as follows in his book, The Mystery of Philosophy (Kodansha’s New Library of Knowledge):
“Let’s say all life forms on Earth become extinct.” “What are you suddenly going on about?” “When that happens, is the sunset still going to be red?” (pg.12 “Maybe it should be said that color is not a characteristic of an object in itself, but a collaboration between the object and whoever is seeing it. Therefore, if the observer goes away, the object loses its color. The world in and of itself is colorless, and color is nothing but characteristics that appear in our fields of view. Don’t you think so?” (pg.13 )
The red color of a sunset only exists as a result of human perception. Even so, a physical phenomenon that causes people’s retinas to sense that it’s red certainly does exist. In the same way, objects certainly do move even if we were to not exist. Precisely because it is moving, a lag between the after-images in the brain and the visual information from this very moment gets created, enabling us to perceive that as movement. However, when trying to describe movement that doesn’t involve human perception, we suddenly realize that it’s not so easy to do. The same problem we encountered in the thought experiments conducted in Chapter 1 resurfaces. The physical moment of the present, naturally, does not even have a duration of 0.0000000001 seconds. Even within tiny amounts of time that are beyond human recognition, there should be appropriate physical movement. However, physical moments called the present last for 0 seconds, and do not have any duration. So why is movement able to exist in 0 seconds of time? Even movement inside people’s brains made possible by the spurious duration of time is beyond deception in physical time. The riddle thrown at us by Zeno over 2500 years ago has not yet been solved whatsoever.
Earlier, I defined physical time as time established in a state completely removed from human recognition. But let’s try casting some doubt on whether or not elements of this recognition are really completely removed. For that, let’s return to the image of the desert. An image of a reality with no observers, with blowing wind and rising clouds of dust in a barren land. But who is watching all of this? When we have an image like this, we observe the scene by unconsciously setting up a specific viewpoint. Somebody is setting up an imaginary viewpoint in what should be an uninhabited desert, and watching it. When you think about it, the image of reality that we recognize is always, no matter what, from a certain viewpoint. Not to mention the world each and every one of us watching, but photos are from the viewpoints of cameras, and even in the case of comic books, which should also be removed from reality, are written by assuming a specific viewpoint. In other words, removing our recognition doesn’t simply stop at the disappearance of the subject perceiving the passing of time, but it comes to mean that a viewpoint to observe the real world doesn’t exist anywhere on this planet.
There is a style of painting called Cubism. It is a style made famous by the works of Picasso. It involves the drawing in of multiple viewpoints in a single work, without limiting perspective to a single viewpoint. A person’s face would be painted as a composition of multiple points of view, from the left and from the right, resulting in a piece that bears no resemblance to faces we ordinarily recognize. However, even Cubism is just an expression of what happens when multiple viewpoints are composited, and does not mean that viewpoints are actually eliminated. So, is it possible to describe reality without setting a viewpoint?
Viewpoints not existing can be rephrased as not having viewpoints from specific angles. That means nothing other than the fact that there are viewpoints everywhere. We will not be bothered by whether or not it is possible to imagine a reality captured by infinite viewpoints. This is because our concern lies in the reality of physical time, one that doesn’t involve human recognition.
To consider what it means to have viewpoints existing everywhere, there is a need to review Galileo Galilei’s theory of relativity. When hearing the words theory of relativity, many are probably reminded of Albert Einstein’s, and assume that it’s difficult to understand. But Galileo Galilei’s theory of relativity is easy to understand, by using our everyday senses. For example, let’s say that we are on a train that is going 80 kilometers per hour. When a train traveling at the same speed in the same direction on a parallel track lines up next to ours, any relative difference in speed disappears, allowing us to even see the expressions on the faces of those on the other train. When the space between the tracks narrow, and the distance from the other train becomes closer, the scenery outside the window that up until then seemed to flow away backwards gets obstructed by the other train and no longer becomes visible, making us feel not that we are completely still, but unable to recognize just how fast we are really going. Also, when those in a car speeding along at 50 kilometers per hour on a road alongside the tracks sees the train traveling in the same direction at 80 kilometers catch up to them, it will appear that the train is passing them at a speed of 30 kilometers per hour. In other words, speed is always determined by the relative relationship with a certain viewpoint, and is not something that is absolute. A train traveling at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour does not necessarily have an absolute speed of 80 kilometers per hour. That speed of 80 kilometers per hour is only relative to the relationship it has with the surface of the Earth in which we live, and when you think about how the Earth rotates, then revolves around the Sun, all while the entire solar system and the galaxy move along the universe at blistering speeds, it becomes apparent that what we recognize as speed is simply something that appears that way from where we are. Regarding the famous Copernican theory, Galileo Galilei was said to have used this argument in explaining why it feels as though the Earth is still to us even though it is moving.
And another point, let’s keep in mind the theory that there exists no inertial frame in outer space that can be used as an absolute reference. In terms of the law of inertia, the paragraph in Wikipedia for Newton’s first law of motion that states, “In an inertial frame of reference, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force,” is easy to understand. Einstein was the one who explained how no inertial frame in outer space existed that could be used as an absolute reference. By looking at the results of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment on the invariance of the speed of light, Einstein’s view was that the same laws of physics would apply anywhere in outer space. In other words, all of space has the same qualities. However, that hypothesis brings about some unusual interpretations of the real world that all of us live in. For example, as long as an absolute inertial frame of reference doesn’t exist, it is not possible to definitively differentiate whether or not the movement of an object before an observer is moving in front of the stationary observer, or if the object is stationary in front of a moving observer. Even those thought to be static objects are only observed as having zero speed by those belonging to the same static state. Objects thought to be in inertial motion at 80 kilometers per hour are thought to be so only because the relative velocity of the observer’s viewpoint is at 80 kilometers per hour. So, the velocity of all objects we are able to observe is nothing more than the relative relationship between us and the objects themselves. Even if Einstein’s theory was incorrect and indeed there was an absolute reference in outer space, as long as it doesn’t get discovered, there would be no way to actually tell how fast or in which direction in space an object before you was going.
So, we are now done preparing. Let’s go back to discussing a pure physical reality, one without the existence of ourselves as observers. Not having observers means that there exists no specific point of view for observation. Contrarily, I mentioned earlier that this was nothing other than the establishing of points of view in every possible place, namely the observation of reality with infinite viewpoints. When this happens, as long as there is no assumption of an observer that can describe a relative location, every single point of view draws closer to all inertial frames of the real world. This is because the moment that point of view gets separated from the inertial frame during observation, the relative positional relationship between the observer and whatever is being observed is created. This causes a specific viewpoint to be restored, making it unsuitable for the objective of this chapter, which is to describe a pure reality free of all human recognition. That is exactly why all points of view have to be right next to all inertial frames. According to the logic mentioned earlier, from a point of view close to a specific frame, the velocity of that frame will be observed as zero. In other words, all physical realities described by infinite perspectives are at a standstill. And as long as everything is at a standstill, motion in an essential sense does not exist, nor does time created by motion itself.
This conclusion is no doubt a curious one. Take a look at the reality that surrounds you. Your own fluttering fingers, the various images that jump around in your television; no one would believe that these would be still if we were not around to observe them. So now, by using specific examples, I will attempt to describe motion a little more prudently
Let’s try thinking about the act of throwing a ball. A tennis ball is good. It leaves your hand and flies far away. The ball is obviously moving. No one would claim that the ball was actually still, and the person who threw it is moving backwards in full force.
Now let’s put a spacesuit on the ball thrower, and change our location to outer space. Somewhere pitch dark, where no planets can be seen to the sides or above and below. When the ball is thrown, it flies far away, just like on the surface of the earth. Even if the stage is outer space, not one person would say that the person who threw the ball is the one that is actually moving. But because outer space has no footing, the recoiling from the throw may cause the person who threw the ball to start spinning around. You have probably seen something like this play out in broadcasts from space.
Using this recoiling as a principle is how spaceships travels through outer space. Spaceships move forward by injecting explosives from their rocket nozzles. Put differently, it would be like throwing a bunch of tennis balls behind you, one after another. Now this is where the question of what is actually moving starts to become a little dubious. Is the spaceship just staying in the same place, and constantly throwing explosives far away? Definitely not. Anybody would think that the spaceship was the one that was moving. The image of explosives being thrown away is more agreeable than them seeming to be just moving.
Let’s go back to the person throwing the tennis ball in outer space. This time we’ll gradually increase the size of the tennis ball. Even if the ball was now bigger than a soccer ball, it would still be the ball moving and not the person. But how about suddenly going even bigger, like an asteroid. As big as it is, somehow with some effort, it seems throwable. However, even the person who threw the asteroid would probably start to question whether the asteroid is moving or if he or she has bounced off and is flying away. Even bigger, how about the Moon? But to keep it simple, I would like you to ignore the presence of gravity. Bringing the Moon above your head and making a throwing motion should be easy enough, but the one who would be moving through outer space would probably be the thrower. And yet, maybe the person who tried to throw the Moon would think that he or she actually moved it.
Reading up to this point, you are probably aware that the only thing that determines the difference between whatever is moving and whoever made that something move is the subjectivity of the human being who is observing the two. And here is where Einstein’s theory that there exists no absolute inertial frame of reference in outer space starts to become significant. When something is in inertial motion, even if that object looks like it’s not moving when seen from Earth, or if it’s moving at 10% of the speed of light, there is no fundamental difference. Because it’s said that there are no coordinates or no velocity that can be used as references in outer space. Because it’s said that everywhere in space, in all states of inertia, the same laws of physics apply.
Right before the Moon is thrown, right until the hand is placed on the Moon above the thrower’s head, both the Moon and the person throwing it are part of the same inertial frame of reference. But as soon as the Moon is thrown, an action-reaction due to acceleration takes place, and the Moon and the person who threw it start to move apart in opposite directions. If the original inertial frame is used as a reference, the Moon would hardly move, and the Moon thrower would get sent flying backwards. But in a moment, the Moon and the thrower would break out of the state of acceleration that started when the Moon got thrown, and settle into their respective inertial frames. As we’ve discussed until now, when infinite points of view are used as references, it can also be said that both parties have settled into different frames of rest. Therefore, the act of throwing the Moon cannot be differentiated between throwing the Moon, or getting bounced off the Moon. It only means that they’ve separated into different frames of rest.
Motion is determined by where the point of view is positioned. All motion is still, when perceived from right up close. Motion is not in the nature of the moving object itself. It is only the result of recognition by someone observing that object from a specific point of view. Our daily activities, like our fingers smoothly typing away on our keyboards, is nothing more than a complex sequence of inertia and acceleration. If we were to match our points of view with every single finger, or even with every single atom that makes up our bodies, these would all be at rest.
However, are mentioned in the beginning of this section, even without our observing selves, the wind blows regardless, and clouds of dust still whirl up in the air. If motion really is not a property of objects that make up physical reality, then how do we describe change, something that is supposed to definitely exist? Physics and mathematics, which have both built the material prosperity of civilized society as never before, have already supposedly accurately described motion and change. So why is it that a crack in these theories, like Zeno’s Paradox, continues to exist for over 2500 years? These questions will become the descriptive content of the following sections.
2. Physical Time (2) – Descartes’ Fly is at Rest
Motion is not a property of objects that make up reality. And if that’s the case, how are we to grasp change, something that’s supposed to definitely exist?
There is a popular science fiction manga (comic book) called Star Red, created by manga artist Moto Hagio. The protagonist Sei is a psychic. Though her vision is non-functional, she grasps reality around her by using her clairvoyant powers. The following is a conversation between scientists regarding her method of perception:
“It’s like a surreal painting.”
“Cubism?”
“Nevertheless, the way she sees things . . . it’s out of the ordinary. First of all, she doesn’t have a fixed point of view. Second of all, there’s no vanishing point in the composition. And third, she captures things with multiple vectors.”
“In other words, the normal way to capture something is to have a fixed point of view. When that happens, a vanishing point naturally emerges. And colors are then seen, shown by visible rays of light. Infrared and ultraviolet rays are not within visible range. Photos taken with the use of infrared filters look to be a different tone of color. You can know the nature of something by capturing its specter.”
“Put simply, Sei is . . . she has the ability to see things from any and all angles, in any and all wavelengths. There’s probably not much difference no matter how far something is. This is an instant composition . . . but if an unguarded person was to see this, they would do so from the front, side, back, from above, from below . . . and further on from inside the body, the internal organs, each and every bone from various angles . . . it’s as if she’s dissecting everything, with her eyes. Even furthermore, maybe she can capture red blood cells and white blood cells in the blood, and possibly even all cells, molecules, and atoms . . .”
This is of course all fiction. However, it suggests a pure physical reality, one detached from human recognition. The wind that blows, the sand that whirls in an empty desert. As mentioned earlier, this too is an image seen from an imaginary point of view, set up somewhere in a desert supposedly devoid of people. Not using a particular viewpoint is nothing other than recognizing reality with infinite viewpoints. This kind of world may be similar to the cubism seen by Sei, the protagonist in Star Red. At any rate, it’s probably a totally different world from the reality all of us experience in our daily lives. How to describe a physical reality that uses infinite viewpoints.
Various theories on time appear in the supplementary issue of Nikkei Science’s What is Time? One of the articles in this publication introduces a theory by British physicist Julian Barbour. In the 1960s, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation was created, by rewriting Einstein’s equation of gravitation. This equation doesn’t need this variable called time to describe the real world.
“If all conclusions up until now are to be interpreted literally, then what we call time does not exist.” (pg. 30)
By using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation as his foundation, Julian Barbour is attempting to consolidate the theory of relativity (which is said to be hypocritical) and quantum mechanics by rewriting them without the involvement of time. He focused on the relationship of reciprocal objects as his perspective for describing a world with no time. Formerly, this theory that began with Leibniz was called the relational theory.
“The reason they think this is all possible, is that despite the general theory of relativity not having a common universal time, it is able to describe change. The essence of this lies in not giving an abstract concept like universal time to a physical system, but by directly associating it with other physical systems, it becomes a point that indicates change.” (pg. 30)
Regarding reciprocal relationships between physical systems, there are common points in the content of this book as well. Let’s examine these reciprocal relationships by using Zeno’s paradox, the starting point of this book, as a clue.
In the first chapter, I gave an example of a waterfall to prove the existence of afterimages in the brain. If you focus on the water flowing down the rocks the background becomes blurry, while the flowing water becomes blurry if you focus on the background. If the context of what’s been explained so far is to be expressed differently, it would be that the blurriness of the waterfall and the rocks are like the past that should have passed and the present moment being superimposed right before our eyes. On the contrary, subjects seen with synchronized lines of sight will have clear features. From the perspective of Galileo Galilei’s principle of relativity, which was explained in the previous section, it can even be said that this implies a state of rest. Of course, it’s not like we can jump down the waterfall together with the mass of water, so we can’t in a complete sense bring our viewpoint right next to our subject. Therefore, simply synchronizing lines of sight only makes the claim that something is at rest a spurious one.
We can say the same thing about the Paradox of the Flying Arrow. If you were able to synchronize your line of sight with the flying arrow using the same dynamic vision as the master swordsman Musashi Minamoto, the arrow would acquire clear features and be in a spurious state of rest. But relative to that, the surrounding scenery will start to flow, as if it was flying. When you switch your gaze to the background scenery of the flying arrow, the arrow starts to move again. A subject will stop moving for the observer whose line of sight gets closer to it, but everything at rest up until that point will then start to move. All that happens is that this continues on like a game of cat and mouse, and no matter how long it goes on for, stopping motion will never become possible.
However, as you can see from what’s been described so far, this non-stopping movement is strictly for the observer. I discussed in the previous section how that in order to describe a pure physical reality without any observers, there had to be an assumption of an infinite viewpoint, one without a specific point of view. And I also discussed how each and every infinite viewpoint draws itself closer to all inertial frames. Now let’s try to imagine a point of view that draws itself close to the inertial frame called the Flying Arrow. To the point of view that clings on to the flying arrow, the arrow will be at rest. From that perspective, the surrounding scenery will flow past as if it was flying. But this spurious perspective has now become the new observer, one that has gotten mixed into the pure reality that should be without observers. As mentioned earlier, every single infinite viewpoint cannot separate itself from the inertial frame it has drawn itself closer too. This is because the moment it separates itself, a relative relationship is born, and that point of view now becomes one of an observer. Similarly, these viewpoints cannot observe other inertial frames from the inertial frames they’ve drawn themselves closer to. In other words, the only one who can describe two inertial frames simultaneously is the observer who can grasp the relationship of things from a constant point of view.
The Paradox of the Flying Arrow simultaneously describes two inertial frames. One is of the flying arrow, and the other is that of the flying arrow’s background. To begin with, as long as they are being described at the same time, this would be the result of an observation made from a fixed and specific viewpoint. If this can be defined as human recognition, movement within zero time becomes explainable. according to the logic of time recognition as explained in Chapter 2. However, in that case, either the flying arrow or the background of it has to be blurry. In order to describe these two as static frames with clear contours, there needs to be two differing viewpoints that get close to each of them. In a sense, this would be like an individual using a cloning technique to simultaneously synchronize his or her line of sight at two different inertial frames. In other words, the Paradox of the Flying Arrow is described as though the “viewpoints of two observers” are actually the viewpoint of one.
But, there is another example of treating inertial frames as though they are a single one, while simultaneously describing more than two differing inertial frames (static frames). Descartes’ fly is just that. As explained in Chapter 1, while watching a fly buzz around a room, Descartes invented the concept of coordinates so as to be able to describe the position of the fly, by using corners of the room as references. As I mentioned earlier, in terms of human recognition, Descartes’ fly has a blurry afterimage. By stereogram-synthesizing this in our brains, we create time movement and the time recognition that accompanies it. Time recognized by people has a duration equal to afterimages. However, the concept of coordinates describes the position of the fly when at a reference point of zero by using the existence of numbers, which exist without a hint of blurriness.
In order to think about the meaning of describing the position of an object with a non-blurry concept, we will conduct a thought experiment using Descartes’ fly.
Mount a camera on the ground and shoot a fly buzzing around. In response to the shutter speed of the camera, the fly will look blurry in the photograph. If you were to synchronize the movement of the camera with the fly, the blurriness would disappear, but obviously the background would then become blurry, so completely getting rid of any blur would essentially be impossible. The longer the shutter stays open, the bigger the blur; the shorter it’s open, the smaller the blur. When you steadily increase the shutter speed, the blurriness will become hardly noticeable, but it will never completely be gone. Now let’s infinitely increase the shutter speed, and have the time it’s open be zero. We will save examining whether or not an infinitely fast shutter speed is equivalent to an open time of zero in the next chapter, but for now let’s assume that this is the case so we can create the state of an instantaneous moment. This would mean not opening the shutter at all, so obviously there would be no photo. But let’s assume that this was possible, and continue the thought experiment. So now the blurriness suddenly disappears, and it is as if the camera synchronized its movement with both the fly and the background, creating a sharp photograph. The concept of coordinates is like taking this sharp photograph continuously in each and every moment. In other words, this is exactly the Paradox of the Flying Arrow itself.
Even if the state of the moment — one that can’t open a shutter nor be recognized by the human brain — actually existed, there would be a thing missing upon describing it by the non-blurry concept of coordinates. In order to scoop up those missing parts, Leibniz and Newton have described movement as tangent to the trajectory, as a differential, but that doesn’t mean that they have explained the essential meaning of movement. It can even be said that this shows the imperfections of the concept of coordinates.
All mathematically-indicated coordinates are described by the concept of non-blurry numbers. Therefore, when the relative relationship between two systems is described numerically, the respective numbers are simultaneously utilizing viewpoints that are closing in on the two systems. But, us humans, the observers of reality, are only able to have one viewpoint at a time. This is what turns into various paradoxes, and sometimes, they show themselves before us. And it can be said that the archetype of that, is Zeno’s Paradox.
By the way, how is it that random coordinate points on a trajectory of an object and coordinate zero, which should be qualitatively different, are able to be expressed by a mathematically homogenous concept? Precisely because this can be done, human beings have been able to build this scientific civilization. What follows is a potential interpretation of this.
In an earlier section of this book, I wrote a scenario about throwing the moon, and how the moon and the one who threw it would immediately be simultaneously separated into two inertial systems (static system). As a result of the action of throwing, the question of whether the moon or the person who threw it is moving is answered by nothing more than the observer’s perception. When this happens, the observer is also an independent system. It is impossible to decide which is moving, the system being observed or the system of the observer. The description that the relationship between the object being observed, and the observer, changes may be the most concise representation of this thing called movement. Basically, the relationship between the coordinate point represented by the fly buzzing around the room, and the corner of the room represented by coordinate zero, are interchangeable, and it’s not possible to declare which one is actually moving. When the fly looks like it’s getting farther away from the corner of the room, the fly and the corner are simultaneously getting farther apart, and when the fly looks like it’s getting closer to the corner, the fly and the corner are simultaneously getting closer together. That is why, at any moment, the method of expressing coordinate zero object and random coordinates on an object’s trajectory with similar numbers is, according to how you look at it, an accurate description of a physical reality with no observers. Simply put, the amplitude gets equalized. The shaking and blurring homogeneous to the anti-phase are eliminated by points of view homogeneous to them, resulting in coordinates that are considered a static system. The problem lies in the fact that even though it describes the relationship of two homogeneous systems, one of the systems is described as a seemingly absolute system with coordinate zero. When a trajectory of another different inertial system and its coordinates are added, coordinate zero ends up as the different system that originally has distinct blur, superimposed in once location.
There is an example that becomes easy to understand when you assume that the most the Cartesian coordinates can do is describe the relationship between two systems. That is the movement of the double pendulum.
Late in life, Galileo Galilei discovered that the pendulum accurately ticks at regular intervals, and so he devised a pendulum clock. This happened after he had already lost sight in both eyes, which only suggests his tenacity of purpose. Having been created in the mind of Galileo Galilei, and the fact that it was actually used as a clock, proves how the movement of up to a single pendulum is completely mathematically predictable.
A double pendulum is a pendulum with another pendulum attached to the end of it. As described in Wikipedia, a single pendulum “will continue to sway forever in an ideal environment absent of friction or air resistance,” and in essence a double pendulum is no different. The problem is that the movement is mathematically totally unpredictable. In other words, it creates chaos. If you search the internet, you will be able to view a lot of video data, all of which are pretty astounding. As if it was an organism with intent, the attached pendulum, while jerking and shaking, and sometimes spinning, will continue to move. Of course, it’s not as if the movement itself is chaotic. The core of the problem lies in the fact that the double pendulum totally rejects any predictions based on mathematical formulas.
Based on the arguments proposed so far in this book, this double pendulum is a concrete example of a third movement point, added to the two homogenous points as an anti-phase. It may be more easily understood when explained in the following way. The end of a single pendulum constantly moves, except when it comes to both the left and right ends. That movement is predictable, but actually, the end that is about to move is not in a state that can be represented by a number. When another pendulum is connected to that, the blurriness inherent in the end point of the original pendulum gets affected by factors caused by being scraped off the Cartesian coordinates, giving mathematically unpredictable movement to the second pendulum.
This mystery of the double pendulum is synonymous with the three-body problem (multi body problem). It is said that mathematics and physics may be able to computationally predict up to the relationship of two objects, but anything more than three creates chaos, making predictions impossible. Basically, the science that supports our society cannot as a fact describe the relationship of even just three objects. For example, the relationship between the three objects of stars, planets, and moons is exactly a double pendulum. Planets revolve around the Sun. This is the first pendulum. A pendulum is something that tethers a weight that tries to move inertially with a single bar, and converts it into a circular motion. The bar connecting the fulcrum to the weight is nothing other than gravity. Furthermore, moons revolve around planets. This is the second pendulum that’s been added to the end of the first pendulum. The conditions for gravity to influence reciprocal celestial objects are not always the same, but if you look at how the movements of the first pendulum - moons influence the movements of the next pendulum - moons, it becomes clear that this is pretty much the same system as a double pendulum. Upon observation, there are portions of the orbits of planets and moons that do not match mathematical calculations, and there are yet to be any definitive explanations for this, although there have been various interpretations. This book’s view that the limit of Cartesian coordinates is that they can only describe the relationship of two systems coincides with the limit of mathematical analysis that indicates the three-body problem (multi-body problem).
The relational theory presented by Julian Barbour, who was introduced earlier, does not need a coordinate of zero. It is only used to as information for measuring changes in relationships of reciprocal objects. Regarding this, a detailed explanation is presented in The Mystery of Space/The Mystery of Time - Drawing Near to the Beginning of the Universe with Physics and Philosophy (Chukoushinsho) by Soshichi Uchii, who specializes in the philosophy of science. The diagram to the left is taken from page 165 of his book. Barbour named the triangle indicating the relationship of three reciprocal physical systems as Platonic, describing change with the use of this diagram alone. There are no coordinates of zero. What’s necessary is the relationship of the three objects at a certain moment, and the relationship of the three objects at another certain moment. By moving the tentatively determined position of Platonia, and by determining the minimum value of the intervals, the positional relationships of a certain moment make it possible to acquire objectivity of the change of reciprocal systems. This way of thinking — one doesn’t involve coordinates of zero — is clearly advantageous, even from the context of this book. The differences in migration distances between points vastly decrease compared to Cartesian coordinates, which fix a certain point as a coordinate of zero. This signifies that the blurriness of the points that indicate the positions of respective systems become qualitatively close to each other, even if the vector direction differs. In other words, the flying arrow and the background of the flying arrow in the Paradox of the Flying Arrow both are approaching a state of rest. Or should we say that both of them are moving just ever so slightly.
As for Cartesian coordinates, and the relational theory, the relative speed of physical systems is at our day-to-day level, and if it’s a case in which the ground can be spuriously regarded as an absolute inertial system, there really should be no difference between the two. In this kind of case, it is easier to follow the trajectory of a movementby fixing a certain system at a coordinate of zero. However, when the system of interest has a relatively extreme speed, for example like a percentage of the speed of light, the quality of the coordinate of zero and fast-moving coordinates are sure to become significantly different, when using Cartesian coordinates. For a case such as this, the relational theory is considered to be especially advantageous.
In order to summarize this section, let me present the following words, found in the previously introduced supplemental volume of Nikkei Science’s What is Time?
“Time may not exist in this universe, but if you consider finely dividing up space, it is said that a number of those parts would function as clocks for other parts. This thing called time would appear from a world that didn’t have any. The reason we feel time, is because, in the first place, we make up one of these parts.” (pg. 31)
Each inertial system is no different from a static system. As long as it is a static system, movement is not an attribute of an independent system. Movement gets created by the relationship between reciprocal physical systems. However, we observers are the ones who find these relationships. By us providing perspective to the world, relationships are created, movement is born, and time comes into being.
Incidentally, a mathematical theorem called the Poincaré conjecture was proven at the beginning of this century. This conjecture, which was unsolved for a century, was presented by French mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré, a proponent of relational theory, at about the same time as Einstein’s special theory of relativity. It has been said that solving this conjecture is what gave rise to the possibility of the universe being a closed three-dimensional sphere even if there is no end to it. This is a universe connected in all directions – front, back, left, ride, above, and below. For example, if you were to put the Earth on a rocket and have it take off, and if it continued straight ahead forever and ever, it would return to Earth from the opposite direction it took off. Let’s try imagining that kind of reciprocal relationship that takes place in outer space. As there is the Moon next to Earth, and next to the Moon another planet, then the Sun, and another star system, a different galaxy, these relationships connect, one after another. However, while these neighborly relationships connect, everything comes full circle, totally unawares. And the Earth itself, which should have been the beginning of these relationships, comes back as a single part of the relationship. In a universe like this, coordinates that can be used as references don’t exist, with only the relationships of reciprocal physical systems configuring space, and the changes that occur here are what create time. Systems sometimes collide, exploding and scattering an infinite number of new inertial systems across the universe. But for the whole universe, that type of change may only mean that objects swapped positions, and the change may not be essential at all. As the existence of the law of energy conservation (first law of thermodynamics) suggests, matter may just vibrate continuously, without stopping, in a closed universe. Us human observers construct movement and the passing of time in our brains, by slicing off just a part of that entirety.
The following also appears in the aforementioned supplemental volume of Nikkei Science’s What is Time?:
“Even if time did not exist in this world in an essential sense, at first glance it certainly looks as though it exists. Why does this world appear to be running on time? Explaining this has become a pressing problem for proponents of the timeless quantum gravity theory.” (pg. 30)
3. Mathematical Time — Achilles and the Tortoise —
One of the paradoxes presented by Zeno is Achilles and the Tortoise.
Once upon a time, ancient Greek hero Achilles raced a tortoise. He gave the tortoise a handicap and let it start before him, and Achilles chased after him. But Achilles couldn’t catch up with the tortoise. When Achilles looked up upon arriving at where the tortoise first was, the tortoise was advancing just a little farther. When Achilles finally got to where the tortoise was again, the tortoise was again getting a little farther. This went on and on, and while the distance between the tortoise and Achilles did shorten, that was all it did, and Achilles would never actually be able to catch up.
What I am about to discuss, I mentioned earlier on in this chapter.
By means of infinite viewpoints, mathematics has allowed differing inertial frames to be deemed as spurious static frames, allowing them to be used as points. Because of this, it succeeded in objectively describing the relationship of reciprocal inertial frames, which actually differ in their state of unrecognizable moments.
A moment is indeed a strange state. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, to photograph a moment with a camera, you would need an infinitely fast shutter speed. However, even it was an infinitely short exposure time, it would still be something and not at zero. As long as it’s something, the blurriness that should exist in the photograph becomes nothing only in a moment, and in other words, gets depicted as not having any blur at all.
If a comparison was to be made, a moment is like a single painting. With only human recognition, we take every single system of this unidentifiable state called movement and fix them as points on a canvas we call the moment. By superimposing these paintings like continuous photographs, the trajectory of the system itself and the relationship with reciprocal systems is being depicted. In a sense, this would be like recreating the original movement by briefly freezing it, then lining this lump of ice up, which used to be movement, along that trajectory. No matter what moment you capture, movement can be frozen with infinite viewpoints. But, this moment belongs only to that moment. By putting at rest what were differing inertial frames, and by treating multiple systems as though they were one, relationships with other moments become disconnected, making it possible to describe them mathematically. Because of that, any relationship of reciprocal points in moments became depictable, but inevitably, the essential connection between reciprocal moments –- flow –- became undepictable. But by lining up what has lost its connections, spurious connections (flow) can be depicted.
And at this time, what sort of meaning lies behind the respective points being positioned at the same coordinates —Achilles catching up to the tortoise?
I mentioned earlier that mathematics was what treats whatever is in differing inertial states as spurious static states through the use of multiple viewpoints that draw close to them. By assuming the fictitious state called the moment, it depicts differing inertial states in them as if they were another state.
When those spurious points overlap on the same coordinates, inherent characteristics that are the essence of the respective points start to appear, such as their differing inertial frames and movement of the vectors. The limitations of mathematics, which were still effective in depicting the relationship of two points, become exposed the instant the points overlap.
Even if these were all at the same coordinates, in an essential sense, it cannot be said that have hit the same coordinates. It is like differing waves of wavelengths overlapping while maintaining the state of the wave. The matching coordinates of different inertial frames in this mathematical description aren’t really matching, and treating them as though they are is in and of itself like treating words that are defined based on different paradigms as if they mean the same thing, and not realizing that they are not.
In other words, even if it involves the same points, the definitions themselves differ for the state of two points being even a little bit apart, and for the state of them being completely matched. Mathematics has created a dual spurious state, one that treats qualitatively different inertial frame as spurious static frames, and on top of that, overlaps them on the same coordinates. If those same coordinates were really a single coordinate, it would mean that the previously multiple and essentially different inertial frames have all but disappeared except for one. The respective inertial frames that have been treated as spurious static frames — points — by infinite viewpoints, are originally heterogeneous with other points, namely, with other inertial frames, you cannot erase all of them. In other words, even if you are able to depict the relationship of points, you cannot overlap them. Achilles will eternally continue to get closer to the tortoise, but he will eternally never overlap him.
In people’s day-to-day recognition, the paradox that Achilles can mathematically never catch up to the tortoise, even though he easily could, comes from what are the properties of mathematics.
I wrote about the properties of mathematics, but Achilles and the Tortoise is closely related to the concept of infinity. Achilles and the Tortoise could be rephrased in the following way: Infinite points exist between Achilles and the tortoise, and Achilles must pass all of them. Because it’s impossible to pass an infinite number of points in limited time, Achilles will never be able to catch up with the tortoise.
Even in this book, the word infinity comes up frequently. Infinite viewpoints and increase the shutter speed infinitely are examples of it being used. To describe movement in moments called the present, which are supposed to have no duration, the concept of infinity may be unavoidable. In Hiroyuki Kojima’s Introductory Textbook on Deciphering Infinity — The Story of Numbers that Connect Me to the World (Kadokawa Sophia Bunko), 19th century mathematician Georg Cantor’s proof is explained as follows:
“Two line segments of differing lengths have the same number of points.”
“It is a simple principle. In contrast to line segment AB and line segment CD, O becomes the point of intersection for AC and BD, and the straight line that passes through O and the point of intersection for AB and CD become P and Q, respectively. All that has to be done is for P and Q to correspond. By this method, all points of AB and all points of CD will correspond. The infinite number of points on AB and the infinite numbers of points on CD are equal.” (pg. 141)
If line segments of differing lengths have the same number of points, that must mean nothing more than the fact that points with different qualities, or namely, points with differing duration, are sure to exist. Starting with the aforementioned proof, Cantor proved the existence of infinity with different qualities, leading up to the concept of the famous continuum hypothesis, proven by Gödel to be unprovable. This book will not delve into this particular subject.
But, this much can be said from the context of this book so far. The concept of infinity may be nothing more than the excess portion of duration, created upon being scraped off the duration that was originally present, as a result of non-blurry points indicating coordinates and causing movement to be still.
The incomprehensibility of the concept of points overlaps with that of the concept of numbers. Every single number has no duration. Neither do states called moments. Even conceptually, not much exists that have no duration like numbers and moments. But we still use numbers with ease, and comfortably speculate regarding states of moments, even making science-fiction movies with images of these. This may be because numbers and moments themselves have been created inside our own minds. ‘There is a book called The Numbers Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. (translated by Mariko Hasegawa and Tetsuo Kobayashi/Hayakawa Publishing) The author Stanislas Dehaene is a researcher who went from being a mathematician, to studying cognitive psychology, then neuroscience. Based on the theory that many animals, including humans, have an innate ability to recognize numbers, he presents various related episodes related to this.
All of us are able to recognize the number of objects placed before us in an instant, as long as it’s between one and three. But when the number becomes more than three, the speed of recognition drops radically. Animals like monkeys can more or less recognize a number as an abstract concept as long as it’s up to three, but as soon as it gets higher than that, the accuracy of recognition decreases. Also, various cultures that use numbers as letters will use hieroglyphic symbols for numbers up to three, but anything higher than that will start using symbols that have nothing to do with the original number. An example would be something like IV and VI, which both use V as a base in the middle. In this way, the author states that 1, 2 and 3 are special numbers –– and us animals have been given the ability to recognize them transcendentally.
Using the framework of this book, the following can be said. It is thought that when us humans recognize the number of objects, we don’t determine whether there is 1 or 2 or 3 of something as a result of dividing up the groups of objects presented to us, but rather by recognizing the number of something by stereogram-synthesizing them in our brains and using that as a reference to see if it’s recognizable as 1 image. When it’s determined that it’s 1, the single image arranged before our eyes is the present, and the other images are processed in our brains with afterimages of the past. When it’s determined that it’s 2, both images arranged before our eyes are the present, and anything other than after-images are processed in the brain. When it’s determined that it’s more than 3, the images in front of us get precessed as long as there are enough of them that they don’t even need to get stereogram-synthesized in the brain.
It’s written in The Numbers Sense that not only do we recognize numbers the bigger they get, but the action of comparing also takes time. By stating the following, the author explains how numbers other than 1, 2 and 3 are processed linguistically:
“We tend to say numbers out loud when we perform complex calculations. If we try and calculate something whilst reciting the alphabet it proves how difficult it is to put arithmetic into words. Just try it. You can see the difficulty caused. The reason being that speaking causes the language production system in the cerebrum to fill to capacity. Capacity that is required by mental arithmetic.”
The reason why only the numbers1, 2 and 3 are special, is that they are a creation of our reality recognition systems themselves, regardless of our language faculties.
As I mentioned earlier, we are able to easily imagine the presence of duration-less numbers and moments. This is because in responding to the same stimulus, cluster-like neuron groups, that maintain the same quality of the action potential over 0.2 seconds, are creating the duration-less image of the stop-motion present in the first place. When that image gets sustained and repeated, the object is determined to be still, and by having it be stereogram-synthesized with blurry images, we recognize the movement. We are naturally creating a duration-less existence in our minds. Numbers must be one of these kinds of brain images.
Anatomist Takeshi Yorou states the following in his book, Yuinoron (Chikuma Gakugei Bunko):
“The logic of mathematics can be found because it is inside the brain, in some form. However, mathematicians aren’t conscious of this.” (pg. 24)
In this section, we started with the limitations of Cartesian coordinates as the starting point for the subject of numbers, and explored their existence itself. If as mentioned in the previous section, the three-body problem (multibody problem) wasn’t just something to be used in the application of mathematics in physics, but if it was just a weakness of the concept of numbers in the first place, even if it belonged only in formulas, or only in computers, as long as it was something that described movement, the same problem — chaos — should be caused. The more variables there are in a formula — it gradually increases the unpredictability — like increasing the numbers of pendulums. Even if it’s a range that’s easy to come up with, you would lose count if it you were dealing with the transfer of money in the economic sector for things such as financial instruments, or with seismic calculations predicting how much buildings would shake in an earthquake. Perhaps whatever problems that have been processed as errors up until now, would be led to calculations predictions closer to reality if they were looked at from the perspective of points with duration (numbers).
The mystery of time does not end here. In this chapter, by positioning physics and mathematics as results of human recognition, I have explored the inconsistencies in the interpretations (paradoxes) of time in our day-to-day lives.
However, even when we aren’t present, it’s clear that change does exist. If only relationships existed in this world, and movement was only the result of an observer’s recognition, the relationships between reciprocal matter would still continue to change. As long as there’s change, there must be a beginning to that change. In other words, in essence, the mystery of the arrow of time (flow) has still not been solved.
In the next chapter, we will define the arrow of time (flow) as a state of broken symmetry, as indicated in the introduction to the revised edition, and explore the state of maintained symmetry, that is to say, the state right before the arrow of time (flow). And we will present and pursue a number of hypotheses on how that broke, and how the arrow of time (flow) came to be — in other words — the origin of the arrow of time.
Chapter 5 Seeking the Origin of the Arrow of Time
1. Quantum as a Spherical Wave –– Time as a Truly Independent Presence
So far in this book, we have attempted to explain the essence of time as it pertains to our daily lives, from the perspective of language, physics and mathematics, by using as a starting point the hypothesis that the passing of time exists as a result of our recognition, that it’s something like an illusion created in our brains.
In Chapter 4, I presented the relational theory, which states that the movement of objects is created by the relationships of multiple objects. The various objects that look to be moving before our eyes only look that way because of their relationship with us and other objects, and the movement is not an attribute of the object itself. In this chapter, we will delve even further and examine this perspective. And when we picture the shape of a quantum (particle) as a spherical wave, we will gradually make it clear that it’s possible to explain gravity, inertial motion and even mass. This section, so to speak, is an introduction to that.
If movement is really not an attribute of an object that looks to be moving in and of itself, can we really say that time passes for that single object? Can we say that time passes for an independent object, a purely single presence, that’s been cut off from all relationships with other objects?
To examine this pure single body that’s been completely cut off from relationships with other objects, I would like to start the discussion with what is called Newton’s Bucket. Newton’s Bucket is one of the thought experiments that have been the subject of a long-standing dispute between Newton and Leibniz, and it is a mystery still unsolved to this day.
Newton and Leibniz invented calculus at around the same time. Apparently, a long dispute ensued, regarding who was the first to do it. This wasn’t the only thing they feuded over, either. The biggest issue they had in their long-standing dispute was whether the real world around was absolute space or dual space.
If the real world is absolute space, then it would mean that there were absolute coordinates somewhere in the world. And if those coordinates were used as references, how all objects move could be measured. More than anything, it would become possible for movement itself to exist. Newton was behind this way of thought.
On the contrary, if the real world was a dual space, there would be no absolute coordinates anywhere in the world. Because there would be no coordinates that could be used as references, the movement of all objects could only be grasped as the relationship of reciprocal objects. In other words, movement would not exist. Leibniz was behind this way thought.
Newton countered the relational theory with the concept of rotation. If the movement of an object was not of its own, and if it was only the appearance of its relative relationship with another object that caused it to be observed that way, then what exactly is the relationship of rotation for?
Depending on how you look at it, rotation can be comprehended as a result of an observer’s recognition. For example, the Moon always has one side facing Earth. For us observers on Earth, the Moon is not rotating. However, no one thinks of the Moon as an object in an absolutely stationary state that is suspended in an absolute space. The Moon revolves around the Earth and the Earth revolves around the Sun, and as a result of this, the Moon, far from being still, moves through outer space with tremendous speed and rotates. In other words, it can be said that rest and rotation are also just results of human recognition.
But, this is where Newton brings up the example of the bucket. He wanted to present evidence that rotation didn’t exist as a result of a relationship with another object, but that it was an actual movement. The following is from John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality:
“Newton himself described a neat experiment which seems to show that there really is a preferred frame of reference in the Universe and later philosophers said that this experiment indicates just what it is that defines the absolute standard of rest. Writing in Principia in 1686, Newton described what happens if you take a bucket hung from a long cord, twist the cord up tightly, and then let go. The bucket, of course, starts to spin as the cord untwists. At first, the surface of the bucket stays level, but as friction gradually transfers the spinning of the bucket to the water itself, the water begins to rotate as well, and its surface takes up a concave shape, as ‘centrifugal force’ pushes water out to the sides of the bucket. Now, if you grab the bucket to stop it spinning, the water carries on rotating, with a concave surface, but gradually slows down, becoming flatter and flatter, until it stops moving and has completely flat surface.
“Newton pointed out that the concave shape of the surface of the rotating water show that it ‘knows’ that it is rotating. But what is it rotating relative to? (…the omission of the middle part…) So, Newton reasoned, the water ‘knows’ whether or not it is rotating relative to absolute space.” (pg. 227)
Put water in a bucket and rotate it. When this happens, the surface of the water rises up, as if clinging to the edge of the bucket. Basically, a centrifugal force is created. From the perspective that movement is not an attribute of an object itself, but, as the result of an observer’s observation, exists as a relationship with another object, centrifugal force cannot be explained. Centrifugal force is an attribute of the object itself. In other words, movement as an object in and of itself exists, and this is precisely what proves that absolute space also exists. This is Newton’s assertion.
Do only relationships of reciprocal objects exist in space, or does an absolute reference exist somewhere?
Centrifugal force definitely exists. In order to explain the circumstances of when centrifugal force is created, Newton conducted the following thought experiment. The diagram to the left was made using page 87 of The Mystery of Space/The Mystery of Time as a reference. Soshichi Uchii explains as follows:
“Following the bucket experiment, Newton posed a thought experiment like diagram 18. Let’s say two spheres were connected by a string. If this string was adrift in outer space, it would be impossible to know if it was the string itself moving or another object moving, just by looking at local movements or reciprocal movements with other objects. However, if it was in a rotary motion around the center of gravity of the two spheres (determined by two masses and the distance between them), you should be able to figure (with Newton’s mechanics) out the absolute speed and rotational speed by measuring the tension acting on the string. If it was linear motion, regardless of whether or not there was another object, you may not be able to figure out the absolute movement of it, but if it was rotary motion, even if there was another object, or even in empty outer space, the absolute rotational speed should be clear from the tension on the string. This is Newton’s thought experiment.” (pgs. 86-87)
Newton considered rotating objects to be similar to the state of two objects being tied together by a string. As I stated earlier with the example of the Moon, simply observing is not enough to determine whether or not something is actually rotating. But if you were to measure the tension of a string that tied two objects together, you could see if a centrifugal force was created or not. In other words, this means that you would be able to measure absolute rotations, which would also point to the existence of absolute space.
However, the two spheres connected by a string diagram on the previous page, the one in which Newton himself presented to prove the existence of absolute space, has conversely become proof that rotation is something that only has to do with appearance. Basically, objects that are originally multiple inertial frames, and are connected by the string of gravity as they pass, are observed to be rotating because of the process of continued orbital correction. (In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it can be said that two objects can continue to go straight ahead (inertial movement) along the distortion of space created by their opposing object.)
That’s why if you were to cut the string that connected the two spheres in the thought experiment with a pair of scissors, the spheres should split off into their original inertial frames and restart their uniform linear motion. To sum it all up, it can be said with certainty that what’s creating the centrifugal force (tension inside the object) are the relationships of the different reciprocal inertial frames.
However, there is still just one problem left.
The two spheres in the thought experiment are two, which means that they are constructed by multiple objects. That’s why they are able to split up into multiple inertial frames. So, if a rotating object is a truly individual presence, you should be able to say that that object’s rotation is a true rotation. And if this is the case, and you were able to measure the rotations of a truly individual presence, that would be proof of the existence of absolute space that had been previously disavowed, and Newton’s victory would be confirmed. But presently, in theoretical physics, the theory that there exists no absolute reference in outer space is what is widely accepted. And therefore, a truly individual presence should not rotate, and no centrifugal force should be created.
A truly individual presence probably means a single quantum (atom). If the shape of the quantum (atom) is a true sphere, with no blur in all directions, then there should be no point in questioning what’s above or below it, its direction, or its degree of rotation. If there was one, it would be that a quantum(atom) exists on that very point. When more than two quanta (atoms) become the subjects of observation, direction is created for the first time, and rotation comes into existence.
Except this explanation is not enough. Australian physicist Ernst Mach, who inherited and attempted to develop relational theory, insisted that centrifugal force was created out of an object and its relationship with the entire universe, and so he presented Mach’s bucket, which creates centrifugal force with its reciprocal relationship with the universe. But naturally, the question of how a rotating bucket perceives this kind of relationship with the entire universe arises.
This question has the same roots as the one asking what inertial motion is. Inertia signifies objects being at rest continuing to be at rest, and the movement of moving objects that attempt to continue movement. So, is inertial motion really motion of a relationship with absolute space, or is it motion of a relationship with matter of the entire universe?
Einstein supported the latter. The following is from In Search of Schrodinger's Cat:
“As I have mentioned, Mach’s ideas, essentially an extension of those of Berkeley, strongly influenced Einstein, who argued that the identity between gravitational and inertial mass does indeed arise because inertial forces are really gravitational in origin, and tried to incorporate Mach’s principle — the feedback of the entire Universe on any gravitational mass — into his general theory of relativity. It is fairly easy to make a naive argument along these lines. All the mass in all the distant galaxies (and everything else) reaches out with a gravitational influence to hold on to everything here on Earth (and everywhere else), including, say, the pile of computer disks sitting on my desk. When I try to move one of those disks, the amount of effort I have to put into the task is a measure of how strongly the Universe holds that disk in its grip.“ (pg. 228)
The gravity, inertia, and even matter discussed here will be the subjects of the flowing sections in this book, and will not be introduced here. But in going along with the introductory connotations of this section, let’s discuss what will develop from here on out. When the truly individual presence that is the quantum (atom) is deemed to be a straight sphere, or even a wave that vibrates spherically, everything becomes explainable, with no need to use absolute space as a reference as Newton did, nor to consider the relationship with matter in the entire universe as Mach did. A true sphere is one of the most common shapes in the natural world. Many celestial objects (even though there may be a little distortion) are true spheres, as drops of water that are falling will be. Gravity is being emitted to spheres and the entire universe.
Of course, these facts don’t prove that a truly individual presence is a true sphere. However, as each one of the various discussions coming up in this chapter will conveniently make a variety of objects in reality explainable, the efficacy of this concept should become proven. Earlier, as an introduction, I mentioned that not only was the structure of a truly individual presence a true sphere, but a wave that vibrates. In order to explain this, there is a need to touch on the concept of quantum mechanics.
What can be said to symbolize the mystery of the quantum is the famous double-slit experiment. Diagram 1 is an experiment with a single slit. After preparing two boards as the experimental equipment, a narrow hole (slit) is opened in one of them, while the other is placed standing and lined up to it as a screen. When light is shined from the side of the slit (left), an elongated band of light shaped like the slit appears on the screen. In Diagram 1, one electron (photon) is emitted from the left. A single electron (photon) will only leave a single trace on the screen, but if you repeated this over and over again, a band of light would gradually emerge on the screen on the right.
Next the number of slits will be increased to two (Diagram 2). When you shine light from the left, what appears on the screen on the right is not two slit-worth bands of light, but striped interference fringes appear. This experiment was used as proof that lights were waves until the early part of the 20th century. This type of phenomenon is also present in our daily lives. For example, sound is a wave that transmits through air. The sound from audio stereos will become bigger or smaller, depending on where you listen to the music from. This is because the sound waves emanating from the left speaker and the sound waves emanating from the left speaker interfere with each other, creating big parts and small parts of sound waves. The experiment of Diagram 2 was also deemed to be a manifestation of these effects, and therefore, waves being the identity of light was established theory until the beginning of the 20th century.
But due to the development of experimental equipment, it became possible to narrow down light to its limit, and conduct experiments with a single grain of light, namely, a photon (Diagram 3). While firing single photons over and over again, interference fringes will gradually get protected onto the screen. A single photon that is a truly individual presence, together with other photons that get fired over time, will create an interference fringe on the screen, a characteristic of waves. It’s as if an arrangement was made with other photons. In recent years, it has been confirmed that an experiment conducted with a single electron will provide the same results.
There is an interpretation of this extraordinary experiment called the Copenhagen Interpretation, the most common interpretation in quantum mechanics. It states that photos and electrons pass through double-slits as waves, contracting as a particle on the screen in a split second. In Search of Schrodinger's Cat explains as follows:
“The key concept is the so-called ‘collapse of wave function’. In seeking to explain how an entity such as a photo or an electron could ‘travel as a wave but arrive as a particle’, Bohr and his colleagues said that it was the act of observing the wave that made it ‘collapse’ to become a particle. We can see this at work in the electron version of the experiment with two holes — the electron passes through the experiment as a wave, then ‘collapses’ into a single point on the detector screen. But this is only part of the story. How can the wave of a single electron interfere with itself, and how does it choose which point on the screen to collapse onto? According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, this is because what actually passes through the experiment is a wave of probability, not a material wave at all. The equation that describes how a quantum wave moves — the wave equation derived by the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger — is not describing a material wave like the ripples on a pond, but is actually describing the probability of finding the photon (or electron, or whatever) at a particular place.“ (pg. 10)
The mystery of photons and electrons don’t just lie in the fact that they happen to have both personalities of particles and waves. So why is it that they can methodically create interference fringes on a screen? The Copenhagen Interpretation explains that this is because photons and electrons exist as waves of probability, that is until they get observed. What does it mean that existing photos and electrons are waves of probability? There apparently is still no way to describe it in a common way.
What’s even more extraordinary is that when observational devices are placed in the two slits, and they record when photons or electrons pass through them, they always pass through either of the slits, leaving only a trace of having passed straight through, with the interference fringe being completely gone. This means that the act of observing affects the state of photons and electrons.
Also, after photons and electrons pass through the slits, interference fringes collapse, even when the slit that doesn’t get passed through gets closed off. It’s as if photons and electrons are turning around and checking up on the state of the slit that they just passed through.
The claim of the nucleus of this chapter is that the hypothesis of spherical wavesmakes explainable the mechanism of the aforementioned strange behavior of photons and electrons. The above diagrams explain the transformation of spherical waves. Spherical waves is a hypothesis that claims that photons and electrons, as long as they are free of outside influence, will semi-permanently contract and diffuse (expand) repeatedly. Accordingly, the stages of contraction on the previous page are positioned on the left only for the sake of the diagram, and is not intended to imply
where they start. Photos and electrons, as a truly individual presence, are continuing to vibrate spherically by using some kind of presence in space as a resource. If we were to borrow the concept of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, we could maybe express this is space itself vibrating. In this chapter, we will refer to this presence that vibrates as a resource, which is exactly what it is, from this moment on.
Now, what will be an issue even in the following sections is how to address the most diffused state, which is on the right of the diagram on the preceding page. As quoted earlier, Schrodinger derived the wave equation. This is an equation that makes it possible to accurately predict the probability that a quantum, that is a presence of probability, would be observed, of which concept is incorporated in the diagram above. (In constructing the diagram, the diagram on pages 88-89 of Newton Press’s supplemental volume of science magazine Newton, Indeed — Sound, Light, Electromagnetic Waves, and Seismic Waves… the Science of Waves, was used as a reference.)
The Science of Waves has the following commentary:
“ Actual waves of electrons spread out three-dimensionally, but here I drew up images of electronic waveforms in a particular direction. Electronic waveforms are related to probability of discovery. In the illustration, the higher the probability of discovery a location had, it was expressed with higher transparency of the sphere. The points with the highest probability of discovery for electrons was the very top of the next mountain, and the very bottom of the valley. Points where electronic waveforms intersect with the horizontal axis will have zero probability of discovery. (pg. 89)
First off, regarding the top of the mountain and the spherical wave, these imply the particle-states the resources of space are in, as a result of being contracted to the limit. Therefore, they are observable.
Next, in terms of the points where waveforms and the horizontal axis intersect, they exist for an instant in both contraction and diffusion phases. A spherical wave is a vibration that comes and goes between a point in space and infinity. (Even if one side is infinite, vibration itself does, like gravity, weaken in inverse proportion to the square of the distance, and should get closer to normal space the farther it goes.) Vibrations come and go between a point in space and infinity, with the normal state of space as the midpoint. In that case, there should be a moment when the distortion of space becomes equal to normal space, just for an instant. It is in this moment, when photons and electrons are thought to have a zero probability of discovery.
The problem is the bottom of the valley of the wave. In spherical waves, even if they are in their most diffused state, they are at their highest probability of discovery. At this point, it might seem that the spherical wave as a hypothesis has failed in its logic, but that is not the case. When you put a point of view in the central part of the spherical wave, both the most contracted state and the most diffused state are in a state of complete rest at the moment the vectors are reversed, from contraction to diffusion, and from diffusion to contraction. In other words, the central part of the spherical wave is in a very similar state. Therefore, even in a state of maximum diffusion (expansion), it makes sense that it would get observed as a particle. If anything, the fact that the central part of the most diffused state of a spherical wave is characterized as a particle will come to have significant implications in the final chapter of this book. I will stop at just introducing these properties here.
Next, I will explain how electrons that are spherical waves travel through space. (Photons will be omitted and electrons will be described as the subject.)
The diagram on the following page represents what happens when electrons get emitted from an electron gun until they reach the screen, with the central part of the spherical wave placed in the middle of the image plane. For this type of wave to be formed, there are a few necessary conditions that need to be met.
(1st condition for the formation of spherical waves)
“When electrons are emitted from an electron gun, even the speed of light is accelerated. When this happens, the energy of the acceleration is generated by the expansion (diffusion) of the spherical wave. Therefore, the maximum value of the expansion speed of a spherical wave is the speed of light.”
Regarding acceleration, compound factors including conditions on the side of the electron gun may be considered as well, but if you think about how both electrons and photons always have a relative speed to that of the surface called the speed of light, there will be no room for variables to penetrate if you consider that the speed of light being accelerated comes from the properties of electrons themselves. Also, when explaining the strange behavior of electrons when passing through the double slits, the fact that the maximum value of expansion speed is the speed of light is advantageous. I will touch up more on this later.
(2nd condition for the formation of spherical waves)
“Spherical waves are a kind of inertial frame (static frame).”
As was explained in Chapter 4, inertial frames and static frames don’t have any essential differences. Spherical waves, unlike sounds that get transmitted by making air vibrate, do not have properties that propagate them through some kind of medium, but are considered to be similar to a materialized substance, always in some kind of inertial state. Therefore, when a point of view is placed in the middle of a spherical wave, electrons will remain stationary and continue to diffuse and contract on the spot. It should be easy to understand if you imagine a double slit or screen come crashing in at the relative speed of the speed of light, fast and furiously.
The resource of space mentioned earlier is not a presence that functions as a type of absolute space by filling space like air in the propagation of sound. The characteristics of the resource, which should be referred to as space itself, will be discussed in detail in the next chapter.
The fact that a wave is not something that gets transmitted by causing a certain medium to vibrate, that it causes space itself to vibrate on the spot, seems contrary to our common sense, but if you think about how a wave vibrates without needing an electric field or magnetic field, it really is not that strange. (Electric fields, magnetic fields, and light all travel through a vacuum. Maxwell regarded light as a kind of electromagnetic wave, which is presently considered to be common sense.)
The idea that an electron as a spherical wave is a kind of inertial frame will have significant meaning in the following section and after.
So how do electrons pass through a double slit? The above diagram is a visualization of right before and after an electron passes through a double slit.
Because an electron that is a spherical wave is a presence that has width, it will pass through the slit under different conditions for each electron. The variety of different situations, such as the angle of incidence of the electrons going into the slit. the distance to the side of the hole of the slit, and the difference in vibration energy caused by the stages of expansion and contraction during penetration, will all appear as traces on the screen.
However, if there was only a single slit, it would change the orbit of the electron and probably only blur the shadow of the slit reflected on the screen. This is where the second slit has a significant effect. Whether it’s during the contraction phase or diffusion (expansion) phase, it drastically changes how space gets dragged, and coupled with sinusoidal vibrations of the spherical wave, creates spurious interference fringes on the screen.
Next, I will explain the strange behavior of electrons when passing through a double slit that was mentioned earlier.
Let’s imagine when an electron passes through the slit, as one of the processes of contraction of the spherical wave, it gets unexpectedly particalized. As it approaches the slit board at the speed of light, an electron contracts the space ahead almost as fast as the speed of light. By flying at the speed of light, it draws the space ahead in, and the movement of the space is kept to a minimum. And after exiting the slit, it enters a diffusion (expansion) phase, receding from the slit board at the speed of light and expanding space with momentum close to it. In other words, even at this phase, the movement of space is at a minimum. Therefore, an electron that becomes an observable particle state once it arrives at the slit will arrive at the screen in a mostly straight trajectory.
On the contrary, how about the other highest probability of discovery, when an electron is at its most diffused state? Let’s imagine a case where an electron arrives at the slit in that state. As it approaches a slit board at light speed, an electron will also be expanding at light speed. Affected by the second slit, an electron’s trajectory will be largely bent, but after it passes through the slit and recedes in the opposite direction at the speed of light, it draws in space, similarly being largely affected by the second slit yet again. In other words, the effect of the second slit right before and after the passing through of it becomes completely symmetrical, offsetting the change in trajectory. Then, by the time an electron arrives at the screen, the trajectory of it looks to have been straight.
Basically, an electron observed at the slit will arrive at the screen having drawn a straight trajectory.
Because of this view, it becomes clear why an interference fringe won’t collapse even if the other slit closes up right upon the passing of an electron. By interfering with the expansion and contraction process of the electron receding from the slit, the orderly interference fringe induced by sine waves gets disturbed.
What’s baffling is the case where all electrons get forcibly observed when passing through a slit. Interference fringes disappear in this case as well. It is necessary to consider the detailed setting of the experimental equipment, but I will try to describe the possibilities. In order to think about this case, we need another hypothesis.
(3rd condition for the formation of spherical waves)
“A single point in the middle of a spherical wave functions as a quasiparticle.”
Earlier, I mentioned that the central part of an electron particalizes when it reaches the limits of contraction and diffusion (expansion), but separate from this, the concept of quasiparticle referred to here relates to the trajectory of the passing electron. When an electron inertially moves through space, even if it’s in a state of zero probability of discovery, it does not mean that it has disappeared and is virtually gone. In an experiment where each electron is launched one at a time, there should never be a time, when an electron is launched, that no traces are left on either the slit board or screen. The conditions that cause an electron to contract somewhere in the experimental equipment, and leave a trace as a particle, are thought to be determined by the central part of the passage route. The central part of the spherical wave in the diagram on the following page is, no matter what the state of the wave, in the middle of the vector. In short, it is well-balanced in all directions.
This central part, irrespective of experimental equipment or the screen, starts contracting on the surface of whatever common object it comes into contact with, and when it jumps out at the speed of light as if restarting, from when it reparticalizes at maximum contraction, it is considered to be a reflection. In other words, the central part of the spherical wave functions as a fulcrum. When viewed in this way, the electron would have been reset, as a state, in the moment of observation, and while expanding space before and behind it with momentum close to light speed, will separate from the slit board at the speed of light. Basically, with the effects from the first slit being minimized, the trajectory drawn will be close to straight.
I will now present the path integral, proposed Richard Feynman, one of the leading researchers in the field of quantum mechanics.
In order to explain why an electron (photon), that should be a free particle, creates interference fringes as if interfering with themselves during double slit experiments, Feynman came up with the theory that electrons will take any and all possible paths. Electrons (photons) that exist as probabilities are present as possibilities everywhere, according to the wave equation. So, if all paths of electrons as possibilities are summed up, the strange behavior of electrons when passing the double slit should be explainable. And as the path that connects the electron gun straight to the screen has the most probabilistically high existence, a path that passes the far side of the Moon, or more extremely, the far end of the universe, may also exist as a possibility — but probabilistically-wise, can pretty much be ignored.
If we were to go along with the framework of this book at this point, this presence of the sum of all paths that has a probabilistically high central part, which gets probabilistically lower in inverse proportion to the square of the distance the farther it gets from it, should become, at least in appearance, the sphere that fills the entire universe.
In this section, we have been exploring the possibilities of the hypothesis that the truly individual presences of electrons and photons are spherical waves. The word change doesn’t seem appropriate to describe how a presence with the structure of a true sphere, that is symmetrical in all directions, semi-permanently vibrates. Therefore, the passing of time for a truly individual presence totally differs from our normal recognition. It’s possible to describe expansion and contraction as time moving forward and backward as well. In other words, time for a presence that is truly individual and purely maintaining symmetry can be said to be going back and forth, to the past and present, at the speed of light.
However, there are moments when a truly individual presence, that continues to vibrate semi-permanently, changes. And that change is what is thought to create gravity and mass. The key to this idea is a concept called spontaneous symmetry breaking, which will be the subject of discussion in the following section.
–– Supplementary Theory 1 ––
The vibration of the spherical wave explained in this section has commonalities with the superstring theory, which referred to the smallest unit of matter as a vibrating string. If a one-dimensional string gets regarded as being three-dimensional, we should imagine it being closer to the three-dimensional sphere that was presented in Chapter 4. However, the superstring theory, as a result of mathematical thinking, is intended for much higher dimensions than three dimensions. Also, in the following sections of this book, I will attempt to explain gravity and inertia by using the resource that was brought up in this chapter, but these are theories that should only be derived three-dimensionally. Therefore, in this chapter, we will use aspects of the superstring theoryas a reference, but will not be making it a direct subject of discussion.
2. The Identity of Gravity –– The Point of Contact Between Quantum Mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity
In the previous section, I stated that a truly individual presence completely independent of relationships with other objects should be examined when considering the propriety of the existence of movement. For that we targeted quantum mechanics, and examined the quantum, the smallest unit of matter. When the wave of probabilitythat is the quantum is deemed to be an entity called a spherical wave (of space itself), the various strange behaviors of the quantum that can be seen in the double slit experiment and the like become explainable.
But, the fact that the quantum, the smallest unit of matter, is a wave that causes the resource of space (or of space itself) to vibrate, is far removed from our common perception.
In the first place, even in quantum mechanics, to this day there is apparently no real definite understanding of what it actually means that a quantum exists only as a probability of particalization at the moment of observation. So, thought experiments like
Schrodinger's Cat, which you didn’t know was in an alive or dead state until you observed it in the experimental equipment, became popular, which in turn led to there presently being various areas of research.
However, in terms of strangeness, the spherical sphere presented in this chapter is no different. The desk, computer, keyboard, and coffee cup, all of these things right before your eyes, can actually be touched, and are substantially felt. They have a definitive presence. No one would believe that they all were constructed by vibrations of space. Even if the arguments in this section were considered fact, it is necessary to consider why a presence like that would even be created in the vibrations of space that fill the entire universe.
In the previous section, I presented a hypothesis that stated that a quantum (electron) particalizes at the apex of its probability wave, namely at the highest probability of discovery. (In experiments with electrons and photons, they can be generalized as a quantum, the smallest unit of matter. Therefore, all descriptions will be consolidated as quanta from here on out.) It is difficult to imagine that every single quantum inside substantial objects that exist right before our eyes are in a state of low observable probability. Consequently, common matter should be constantly maintaining a state where particles have a high observable probability, or in other words, a state where the quantum that is a spherical wave is in the state of a particle, or close to that of a particle. We will explore how these conditions are created.
Also, in the previous section, I explained that a quantum particalizing and becoming observable happens when a spherical wave, at its most contracted, takes some kind of resource from surrounding space. (The most diffused state will be examined in the final chapter.) The illustration above (Diagram a) is an image that captures that exact moment.
The resources around the particalized spherical wave get surrounded by more particles the closer they are to particles themselves, and the farther they get from them, approach the concentration of normal space in proportion to the square of the distance. The uptake of resources by particles radially fill the entire universe, but with the effect that has on free particles being insignificant, and since it vibrates at a speed equal to that of the speed of light and repeatedly contracts and diffuses (expands), the positive state and the negative state of the resource concentration gets cancelled out, making it nearly impossible to distinguish from normal space.
The condition required for a quantum to maintain its particalized state is for multiple particles in a state of maximum contraction to accumulate. The illustration to the right (Diagram b) is an image of that.
After contracting to the extreme, and until the moment it turns to expanding, the spherical wave is in a stable state of minimal movement. By multiple particles in that kind of state accumulating, a state close to resonance gets created. What’s important here is that there are deviations in the states of diffusion of each particle, just by a very little bit. Because of this, particles in the expansion phase and particles in the contraction phase interact with each other, and continue to vibrate in short cycles while maintaining a state close to that of a particle. This can be described as multiple particles being in a trapped state, after having fit themselves into spaces between each other. And, by a multitude of quanta maintaining a particle state, a large number of resources are taken from surrounding space, sustaining the depleted state of the resources. The depletion state is highest around particle groups, and by getting weakened in inverse proportion to the square of the distance, approaches normal space.
There is some evidence for the simulation of these type of situations.
One of these is the fact that multiple fermions, which are elementary particles that make up matter, cannot coexist in the same state at the same time. This is evidence that when elementary particles are in a matter-constructing state, they are taking some kind of resources from surrounding space.
According to a classification method called the Standard Model in the theory of elementary particles, in the seventeen types of elementary particles, the one that makes up matter is called a fermion, and the one that transmits energy between matter is called a boson. Photons are affiliated with bosons, electrons are affiliated with fermions. (The fact that an electron is a fermion is an unfavorable condition in terms of the logical structure of this book, but I would like to hypothesize that when an electron separates from an affiliated object, it bosonizes. I will note evidence of this later.)
Regarding the various characteristics of fermions and bosons, the following descriptions found in Professor Ooguri’s Guide to Superstring Theory written by Hiroshi Ooguri of California Institute of Technology are easy to understand:
“When a single particle occupies a certain state, matter-forming fermions cannot get in the same state as a different particle. This can be thought of in the same way as not being able to place two or three bodies bodies that are called coffee cups in the same space. Matter occupies space, and even if you can stack a number of cups on top of each other or line them side by side, you cannot stack them in the same space.
On the other hand, bosons can force any number of particles in the same state. Therefore, if a commuter train only for bosons existed in this world, it would never overcrowd with passengers, even if the train car looked to be jam-packed. Because you could pack in as many as you wanted, it would never be full.” (pg. 88)
By using the framework of what has been illustrated so far in this section, I would like to propose an idea to help describe the characteristics of each of the aforementioned types of elementary particles. The idea is that both fermions and bosons are nothing more than a certain form of quantum as a spherical wave. As mentioned earlier, a spherical wave that fits itself between others and continues to vibrate shortly semi-permanently while maintaining an observable particle state is a fermion, while one that separates from the influence of other particles and reclaims its original stretching vibrations that fill the entire universe is a boson.
Evidence for this lies in the fact that a fermion cannot exist on its own. In terms of quarks, which are affiliated with fermions, not being able to exist on their own, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek explains as follows in his book, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces:
“Nobody wanted to believe that, of course, so people worked hard to smash protons, trying to find particles they could identify as single quarks. They scrutinized the debris minutely. Nobel Prizes and everlasting glory surely would shower down like the sweet rain open the heads of the discoverers. But alas, that Holy Grail proved elusive. No particle that has the properties of a single quark has ever been observed. Eventually this failure to find individual quarks, like the failure of inventors to produce a perpetual motion machine, was elevated to a principle: the Principle of Confinement. But calling it a principle didn’t make it less crazy. (pgs. 35-36)
(The theory of quark confinement is closely related to the Yang=Mills problem, which is one of the Millennium Problems presented by the Clay Mathematics Institute.)
If all elementary particles were regarded as structures like spherical waves that radiated out to the entire universe like photons, and they materialized by sustaining their particle state only when a number of them accumulated, it becomes exceedingly simple to explain why quarks are never found independently. The Lightness of Being also states the following:
“But the search for simpler building blocks inside protons and neutrons ran into a bizarre difficulty. If you bang protons together really hard, what you find coming out is . . . more protons, sometimes accompanied by their hadronic relatives. A typical outcome would be, you collide two protons at high energy, and out come three protons, and antineutron, and several π mesons. The total mass of the particles that come out is more than what went in. We discussed that possibility earlier, and it’s back again to haunt us. Instead of discovering smaller, lighter building blocks by going to higher and higher energies, and making more violent collisions, you just find more of the same. Things don’t appear to get simpler. It’s as if you smashed two Granny Smith apples, and got three Granny Smiths, a Red Delicious, a cantaloupe, a dozen cherries, and a pair of zucchini!” (pgs. 28-29)
This means that as empirical fact, when two protons collide, they become three, with a variety of elementary particles added on. In order to explain this type of strange fact, it should lead to a much clearer argument to regard elementary particles that construct matter to be vibrations of space, exactly like photons, instead of them being hard particles the way our common perceptions do. Spherical vibrations called photons, which have been present from the outset, split into multiple spherical vibrations by absorbing the energy created when they are made to collide with each other at speeds approaching the speed of light inside particle accelerators.
Next, I would like to further explain why multiple spherical waves are able to fit themselves in between each other and continuously maintain observable particles states. This becomes explainable with the concept called spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking is an idea proposed by Nobel Prize winner Yoichiro Nambu. The explanation in Strong Force and Weak Force by Hiroshi Ooguri is easy to understand:
“Please imagine many people standing in lines in a large gymnasium. This gymnasium is a perfect circle, and there are no clocks on the walls, neither are there basketball hoops or even a stage. Therefore, no matter where you look, the scenery is the same. In short, you are in a stage of rotation symmetry.
Because there is no specific direction, the people standing can face whichever direction they want. But these people are the type that blindly follow others, and want to face wherever the others around them are facing. They at first are facing random directions, but once a number of people amongst them face a certain direction, those around them are lured to do the same. As a result, even if the gymnasium itself has rotational symmetry, everyone there is facing the same direction. Rotational symmetry is autonomously tearing apart. The reason symmetry has autonomously torn up, is because the state of energy gets lowered that way, making it more stable.” (pgs. 181-182)
Applications of this idea to the framework of this book are represented in the Diagram A and Diagram B above.
Diagram A shows the aforementioned state of rotation symmetry. In the framework of this chapter, we should call this expansion and contraction symmetry. Each serried spherical wave inherently continues to expand, unrelated to other waves. However, this should prevent them from staying in one place and cause them to get scattered, as they get pulled towards space with a surplus of necessary resources for contraction. However, after a certain amount of time passes, resonance will occur (or quantum entanglement), and expand in the same pattern. In other words, expansion and contraction symmetry autonomously tears apart.
The aforementioned explanation is that the state of energy gets lowered, making it more stable, but regarding groups of spherical waves that are the subject of this chapter, that alone is not enough to make them stable. The reason for this is because the configurable state of matter, namely the spherical waves that are in multiple fermionic states, are not able to coexist in the same space in the same state. The reason given for this earlier on in this chapter was because the resources for contraction would deplete. Therefore, even if they weren’t piled up in the exact same place, the more the expansion phase shifted for every spherical wave, it should be more favorable in terms of using limited resources alternately.
The following is from the previously mentioned Strong Force and Weak Force:
“When everyone in the gymnasium is facing the same direction, it takes a lot of energy, in many ways, for just one person to face a different direction. (omitted) However, just tilting one’s neck a tiny bit in either direction should be pretty easy. Let’s say a person who has become tired of facing the same direction for a long time moves their neck just a bit. Lured by that, the person next to that person does the same thing and tilts their neck… and the neck-tilting action travels like wave ripples. It may be difficult for just one to face a different direction just by yourself, but to cause a ripple wave of neck-tilting does not require much energy.” (pgs. 191-192)
Applications of this idea to the framework of this book are represented in Diagram C and Diagram D above.
Diagram C is an example of when a spherical wave is just one person facing a different direction. In contrast to other groups of spherical waves in states of resonance that are in contraction phases, even if the supply state of resources was favorable, it is unreasonable for just one to move differently. When the neck-tilting action travels like wave ripples like in Diagram D, or in other words, when the phases of expansion of the adjacent spherical waves gradually change little by little, it should be more favorable for the efficient transfer of limited resources.
The diagram on the following page are sequential illustrations of a video that applies the neck-tilting action travels like wave ripple to a spherical wave. (The video can be seen on the author’s official website.)
How neck-tilting action travels like wave ripples can be seen in the sequential illustrations, which are interpretations of spontaneous symmetry breaking on the right as spherical waves, and it looks as if each of the particles (quarks) are moving diagonally. This illusion suggests a great deal in regards to the actual state of spinning photons, of which will be discussed in the following section.
There is a structural weakness in the sequential illustration of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Nothing contradicts the theory that states that every single particle in contraction phase switches to an expansion phase after it has reached its limit. But regarding what happens when it switches to contraction phase after having expanded to a certain degree, how that works is yet unexplained.
Particles in an expansion phase emit resources that they’ve been saving up for when they contract to their surroundings. Surrounding particles would then take these and contract. According to this logic, particles in an expansion phase should expand at once, while unleashing resources, and turn into bosons and break away.
To avoid this problem, I set up the following hypothesis. It states that fermions (quarks) are unable to arrive at the limit of contraction, continuously delicately vibrating on the brink. The above diagram is an illustration of this. (The video can be seen on the author’s official website.)
The boson on the left of the above diagram is the same as the sequential diagram shown in the beginning of this chapter. The vibrations of a boson are structurally very efficient. In Chapter 4 of this book, I wrote about the pendulum clock devised by Galileo Galilei. Even spherical waves of bosons, in a microscopic world at the elementary particle level, with no friction and the like to cause energy loss, continue to vibrate semi-permanently while maintaining symmetry. What’s important here is the point that both the contraction phase and expansion phase reach their limits before switching over to their next phases. Since these vibrations use formless resources of space to begin with, it’s inconceivable that they would physically bounce back halfway through, like the pendulum of a pendulum clock. In a world with no energy loss, reaching the limits of respective phases is what is required to switch over to the next phase.
When thought of in this way, the fermion (quark) on the right side of the precious page depletes the resources from limited space, as a result of multiple numbers (three for every one photon) of them congesting it. Multiple quarks fight for resources that are running low, then with the vectors heading for the contraction limit intact, certain quarks will be dragged down while heading to their contraction limits, then others will be dragged down while doing the same, with this happening repeatedly. As a result of this, a number of quarks end up maintaining the overall stability. This is the interpretation of the theory of quark confinement, used as a base for the hypothesis of this section.
The diagram on the following page illustrates the relationships of these type of quarks. (The video can be seen on the author’s official website.)
Likening two quarks (spherical wave) to a seesaw makes things simple.
The two quarks (spherical wave) have used up all the resources in space necessary for contraction, and are continuing to remain on the brink of their contraction limits. This is similar to fitting springs into both ends of a seesaw, and having it maintaining a horizontal state without either side of it slanting. Now let’s place our hands on the seesaw and rock it. In a world without energy loss like friction, namely a microscopic world at the quantum level, the seesaw would semi-permanently keep rocking. Both respective ends of the seesaw are the quarks (spherical waves). When one side drops significantly, the other side rises significantly. When one side drops insignificantly, the other side rises insignificantly. Therefore, the mean value is constantly equal to the original horizontal state.
Also, at the moment of observation, one of the quarks (spherical wave) would be raised and the other would be lowered. Even if it was the other way around, the mechanism of one of the quarks being raised above the other one doesn’t change. That’s what at first glance, the upper quark and the bottom quark look to be existing normally, but actually are interchanging their positions with the raising and lowering of the seesaw. It isn’t that elementary particles like up quarks and down quarks exist independently, but it’s just that a state that looks like an up quark, and a state that looks like a down quark, are being created alternately by multiple spherical waves.
What illustrates this seesaw in detail is the above diagram. (The “up” and “down” do not refer to up quark and down quark, but are descriptions for the example of the seesaw.)
The color in the above quark (color) confinement theory is a term used in quantum chromodynamics, a field advocated by Yoichiro Nambu. There are a number of other types of quarks besides the just-mentioned up quarks and down quarks that construct photons, and they are not necessarily always combined in the same way. However, if as a kind of example, color was added to them, it is said that the combinations would always be white. For us this would be like mixing three primary colors together to produce white. This can be concisely rephrased as the three quarks that construct a photon are constantly maintaining an overall fixed state. The white here is what proves that the three quarks are fighting for resources in limited space. Resources have clear limits, and because they the three quarks fight over them alternately until there are none left, they look to be in a fixed state when looked at as a whole.
There is another point that makes things favorable when thought of in this way –– the point of why there are three quarks inside a photon. A particle constructed by two quarks is called a meson, four quarks make a tetraquark and five quarks equal a pentaquark, and these are continuously searched for by particle accelerators and the like. However, even if what appear to be these particles have been observed, they often disappear quickly, in inverse astronomical time, so to speak, and there has yet to be an announcement made regarding the confirmation of their existence.
It is said that a particle called a gluon creates the strong ties between reciprocal quarks. By the three quarks inside the photon interacting with the gluon, they all attract each other with strong force. However, the existence of gluons as empirical evidence is not yet confirmed.
Tetraquarks structurally create a tetrahedon with four vertices. If the reciprocal ties between quarks were really due to gluons, tetra quarks with four vertices that have three-dimensional symmetry should have higher stability. But in the natural world, all that exists are photons, constructed by three quarks.
So why does a photon have three quarks? This is because three is the most simple number for creating a circle. The resources in space between the three quarks continuously whirl around like ripple waves in a circular pool. By the vibrations form these waves stabilizing after going around full circle (basically an integral multiplied frequency), the three quarks stabilize, becoming semi-permanent presences like photons and neurons. When there are two quarks (meson), the waves of the resources come and go directly in between them. Waves don’t interfere with each other so as a structure, two seems to be the most simple. However, depending on how the waves overlap, if even for an instant a locus is created that crosses the limits of the resources of space between the two quarks, stability collapses, and the meson disappears. If there are three quarks, the waves only go in one direction, and will not overlap.
The more quarks there are, the more the flow of resources become convoluted. Vibrations as spherical waves should not be able to adequately create a flow that mutually stabilizes each other. There is a necessity to there being three quarks in a photon.
With the aforementioned arguments, the identity of the spinning photons becomes explainable.
At the beginning of this 5th Chapter, I introduced the famous dispute between Newton and Leibniz. This dispute involves rotation, and in respect to what it rotates for. If the spinning of the photon just spuriously looks to be spinning because of the three quarks inside the photon vibrating on the brink of their contraction limits, there is no point in confronting the question of what it rotates for. In other words, it can just be explained by photons are spinning as themselves.
However, at this stage of this section, it is impossible to clearly explain the above argument. In the next section, we will be discussing the spurious spinning of photonsonce again, this time by exploring the questions of what is mass? and what is inertia?
Now, we will get into what is also the title of this section, the identity of gravity.
Spherical waves in a materialized state crowd together in multiple numbers, while maintaining a state close to that of a particle (observable state), vibrating little by little while throwing each other off. Therefore, even the state of resources being depleted in the space surrounding matter (state of multiple spherical waves being serried) is continuously changing little by little.
Let’s consider what happens when other matter approaches matter in that kind of state. The above illustration is a representation of that.
Because multiple materialized spherical waves try to maintain their particle states, they try to pull in resources to their spheres from the space around them. The rate of how much they pull in weakens in inverse proportion to the square of the distance, but radially expands in all directions, towards the entire universe. When this happens, and other matter approaches, this other matter also particalizes by taking resources from its own surrounding space, causing the supply of resources in respective directions of space to decrease, compared to normal space. In order to compensate for the shortage, matter will mutually draw each other closer together than the space in their orientation. This is gravitation, the identity of gravity, which is this section’s final assertion.
–– Supplementary Theory 2 ––
There is an experiment that is thought to demonstrate the hypothesis that groups of spherical waves and groups of spherical waves are particalized by spontaneous symmetry breaking, which is an assertion of this chapter.
There is a YouTube video online titled, “The pilot-wave dynamics of walking droplets” (https://youtuube.com/watch?v=nmC0ygr08tE). A case filled with liquid silicon is made to vibrate at a constant frequency, and one drop of the same silicon is then dripped into it. When this happens, the drop doesn’t get absorbed by the liquid surface, but stays floating in the air and starts dancing while vibrating up and down. It’s not that it just floats in the air, you can tell that several layers of concentric waves are spreading around the drop. It’s clear from the video that these waves are not a result of the drop getting into contact with the liquid surface. The waves are created by something that spreads radially from the drop, and the vibrating liquid surface, interfering with each other. What’s interesting is that the concentric waves that have floated up to the liquid surface like relief are hardly moving. If they were really created by contact between the drop of silicon and the liquid surface, the waves should radially spread than gradually diffuse. They are literally like frozen waves.
There is also an article regarding this experiment in MIT News, an official publication of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), titled “Fluid mechanics suggests alternative to quantum orthodoxy” (http://newsmit.edu/2014/fluid-systems-quantum-mechanics-0912). This article states that the experiment demonstrates the pilot-wave theory, proposed by Louis de Broglie, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. The pilot-wave theory is the idea that elementary particles themselves are hard particles, with every one of them emitting guiding waves to their surroundings, which shake the particle bodies themselves, creating the strange behavior of quanta as seen in the double-slit experiment. The article also argues that this theory should be reevaluated to replace the Copenhagen Interpretation.
The spherical waves I keep talking about in this chapter should clearly be regarded as an evolved version of the pilot-wave theory. The following paragraphs will explain the strange dancing of droplets in this experiment by using the framework of this chapter.
The something that emits from the droplet and draws concentric interference waves on the liquid surface is not, according to scale, a spherical wave, or namely, a quantum. As you can see from the earlier illustration of spontaneous symmetry breaking particle groups, the spherical waves separate into quasi-groups, regularly vibrating while maintaining a state of being on the brink of extreme contraction.
Since the droplets and liquid surface are both liquid silicon, their internal periodic vibrations should match. (Or silicon can be presumed to have properties that make it easy for it to synchronize their vibrations at the molecular level.)
The droplet gets close to the liquid surface. If we were to use this chapter’s arguments, the contraction and diffusion (expansion) phases of surrounding space for droplets and for the liquid surface appear in the same cycle. When a droplet is not easily absorbed by the tensile strength of the surface, the surrounding space of both parties enter the diffusion (phase) at the same time. When this happens, the opposite conditions for the aforementioned mechanism of gravity are created. In addition to both parties being in a diffusion (expansion) phase, when the vibrating vectors for the liquid surface are turned up at the right timing along with that, for a split second there becomes a surplus of the resources of space between the droplet and the liquid surface, which in turn work as a repulsive force, splashing up the droplets from the liquid surface. Conversely, when the surrounding space of both parties enter a contraction phase, the exact same conditions as those seen in the earlier gravity (gravitation) diagram are created, and they mutually attract. According to the vibrational state of the liquid surface and the distance between the droplet and the liquid surface, the scale of the splashing and attraction changes. This is repeatedly endlessly.
The concentric waves of the liquid surface indicate the conditions of space surrounding the droplet. The groups of spherical waves that are resonating inside the droplet are, as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, repeatedly shortly expanding, while maintaining a state on the brink of extreme contraction. If the expansion is complete (if symmetry is not broken), the waves created by expansion should spread radially. But since groups of particalized spherical waves vibrate through extremely short distances in extremely short spans, the waves around the droplets are pulled back before they are able to spread, maintaining almost the same state. In other words, they are frozen. Because of these frozen waves that almost spread, both depleted and excess areas of the resources of space are alternately created, depending on the distance from the droplet. The depleted areas pull up the liquid surface, the excess areas push the liquid surface down. This creates the frozen waves of the liquid surface.
Even the principle that states that droplets floating in space move across liquid surfaces as if they were sliding becomes explainable in this section’s aforementioned illustration of spontaneous symmetry breaking. When the vibrations of the liquid surface and droplets in the illustration are smoothly changing with directionality, surrounding space should also have changes that have directionality. Droplets slide over the liquid surface using this as guiding waves.
As described earlier, droplets that rise up from the liquid surface implicitly signal to the possibility of the existence of repulsion (anti-gravity), and its principles. Explaining this is the task of the last section in this chapter.
3. What is Mass –– Matching Conditions for Inertial Mass and Gravitational Mass
In this chapter, I have been exploring the flow of time regarding truly individual presences, by starting from the perspective of relational theory that states that movement is not a property of objects themselves, but rather created by the relationships of reciprocal objects
In Section 1, the generating factors for gravity became explainable when the truly individual presence of a quantum was regarded as a spherically vibrating wave, and even for inertial movement and mass, I stated that all could be explained without using absolute space as a standard like Newton did, nor was it necessary to consider their relative relationship with the entire universe like Mach and Einstein did. In the previous section I explored gravity. In this section, I will explore inertia and the identity of mass. The following is from Schrodinger's Cat:
“This may be related to another mystery that has worried scientists, off and on, for many decades — the puzzle of inertia. Out in space, where there is no friction, if you give an object a push it will keep moving in the direction you pushed it, until it receives another push. It takes energy to make an object change its direction, or to make it move faster or slow it down. This is such an important point that the Lorentz-invariant frames of reference of observers moving at constant velocity are often simply referred to as ‘inertial frames’. (pg. 178)
If movement is something created by the reciprocal relationships of multiple objects, and is irrelevant to individual objects, how do objects in states of inertia comprehend that they are indeed in states of inertia? If objects have reactive resistance to the urge to break their states of inertia, it means that objects themselves comprehend whether they are in a state of inertia or not.
Motion caused by the urge to break the state of inertia is accelerated motion. In other words, the mystery of this inertial motion is similar to the mystery of what is acceleration. If a single object in outer space, with no comparative object whatsoever, was in the process of accelerating, how exactly would that acceleration get measured? Or if you were to get right next to the accelerating object, and film it while accelerating in sync with it. What should show up in the recorded footage is the accelerating object in a state of rest. Basically, you can’t not say that acceleration is movement established by a reciprocal relationship with another object. So why does reactive resistance occur in an object when it accelerates?
This reactive resistance comes into the picture when defining mass. Wikipedia’s paragraph on mass states, “Mass is both a property of a physical body and a measure of its resistance to acceleration (a change in its state of motion) when a net force is applied.
This section’s assertion is that Inertial motion, accelerated motion, and mass are all perspectives that turn all questions into one, and their generating factors should be made clear simultaneously.
The following sequential illustrations are of a single group of particalized spherical waves in an inertial (rest) state, which shows how a regular object accelerates from its original inertial state to another inertial state with different relative speed, when being pushed by a metal rod from the right.
The particle group in an inertial (rest) state, while being made to vibrate by spheres in its surrounding space, is in a stable state in the middle of it all. As has been explained so far, every single particle continues to vibrate in groups as spherical waves by spontaneous symmetry breaking, while maintaining a state close to extreme contraction.
A metal rod comes extends out from the right, and pushes the particle group. Because metal rods cannot push space, only the body of the serried particle group gets pushed. The particles as a spherical wave are either in a contraction phase or expansion phase. No matter what phase it’s in, the spherical wave will attempt to maintain a state corresponding to the state of the resources in its surrounding space. A vector equivalent to the push of the metal rod gets positionally added to this ideal state, causing it to shift more than expected. For example, the spherical sphere on the side that touches the metal rod, in correspondence to the vector equivalent to the push of the rod, pulls in the resources from far away. This is reactive resistance. This is the identity of inertial mass that makes an object difficult to move.
This reactive resistance appears only while the metal rod is pushing the particle group, and will not continue after the metal rod has separated. (Continue in this case means for it to accelerate backwards even when no force is in effect.) The reason for this is because, as discussed in Section 1, spherical waves have a maximum vibration speed equal to that of the speed of light. When the central point gets shifted by the metal rod, and a new spherical wave is created, even the residual parts of the prior spherical waves diffuse towards infinity at the speed of light. You will never catch up to something that’s fleeing at the speed of light by chasing after it with the speed of light. Therefore, reactive resistance occurs only while pushed by the metal rod.
The particle group that the metal rod has separated from stabilizes after it’s been accelerated, and starts inertial (rest) motion. The speed compared to before it was accelerated will relatively differ, but if you transfer the observational viewpoint to its central point, it will physically be no different from its original inertial state. The particle group will continue to expand in the middle of the spherical wave. That is the essence of inertial (rest) motion.
To supplement the descriptive content of this section in this chapter, and to emphasize it, I will now introduce gravitational mass. This is mass that becomes the base for creating force when an object born by gravity accelerates. Both inertial mass and gravitational mass have been confirmed to correspond with the measurement limits of modern observational equipment through experimentation. This is called the equivalence principle. Einstein derived this from a thought experiment of his, and used it as the foundation for his general theory of relativity. It is well-known that Einstein called it the “happiest thought of my life.” However, to this day there are no theories to explain why inertial mass and gravitational mass, which are said to originally have differing generating factors, have measured values that correspond with the limits of measurement.
The following sequential illustrations demonstrate the generation of gravitational mass.
As explained in the last part of the previous section, in the space surrounding particle groups that maintain a state close to extreme contraction, a depleted state of resources of that space is maintained. When two particle groups (namely, two objects) in those states approach each other, and mutually draw space deeper in to compensate for the lack of resources in their respective directions, is what gravitational force (gravity) is.
Imagining that there is Earth under the previous sequential illustrations will make it easier to understand. Particle groups get drawn into the widespread, surrounding space of Earth depleted of resources, and come falling from above while accelerating. Since gravity draws in space itself, falling objects are essentially no different from inertial (rest) states, and continue to be positioned in the middle of spherical waves.
Someone is standing under all of this, and catching the particle groups. Since this person can’t push space, only the bodies of the serried particle groups can be stopped on the spot. The particle groups repeatedly expand in short spans on the palm of the person’s hand. Because all of space is constantly accelerating towards Earth, the particle groups on the person’s palm are constantly expanding downward with added vectors. This is what becomes reactive resistance, continuously pushing down the palm of the person’s hand. This is the identity of gravitational mass.
The illustration of gravitational mass on the previous page has particle groups under the person’s feet, but this has been drawn with the illustration of gravity from the last part of the previous section in mind. There is an intent to emphasize the fact that gravitational force is based on the interaction between two objects, but if you were to enormously expand the scale of the particle groups under the person’s feet, it would become Earth.
Inertial mass and gravitational mass, as just discussed, are generated when outside forces work against matter in states of inertia (rest) or close to it. Acceleration and deceleration are the exact same action, just different directions of acceleration (namely the appearance of it) regarding the relative speed of an object and its observer. Inertial mass is acceleration caused by the spurring of the metal rod, gravitational mass is deceleration caused by the catching of the person, and even though the subjective viewpoints when observing differ, in terms of both of them tearing off surrounding space from accelerating and decelerating particle groups, fundamentally, they can be considered to be exactly the same. The above diagram is a visualization of that.
As described, the equivalence principle is extremely simple to explain. Occam’s Razor was described in the introduction to the supplementary edition. That the arguments in the section are simple should be proof that the paradigms of this chapter are effective as the framework for explaining mass.
What can be considered to provide evidence to this idea are the spinning protons, introduced in the previous section.
The following is from an article in the August issue (2015) of Nikkei Science featuring quarks:
“When hadrons are placed in strong magnetic fields, it oscillates (precessional motion) in different directions and circulates depending on the value of the pin.” (pg. 39)
Protons (hadrons) oscillate and circulate in strong magnetic fields. In other words, protons don’t have characteristics that resemble spinning, but rather constantly have properties close to the spinning we see in our everyday lives. This is indeed very strange.
Let’s consider things that spin in our daily lives as examples. A spinning top rotates for the first time when rotational energy is given to it. And, because of the resistance from the part of the ground and friction that occurs between air, the momentum weakens and eventually it stops.
Celestial bodies look to be semi-permanently rotating, but this is because there are only a few factors that reduce their energy to be adrift in a vacuum.
However, protons that oscillate are affected from the outside by strong magnetic fields. Because they are affected, they change their state to oscillation. When thought of in these terms, protons should stop as well, just like a spinning top eventually stops. But protons never stop.
What’s possible is the idea that protons are a dual structure like a gyroscope, with its outer shell and internal structure being independent and spinning as if passing each other. When thought of this way, even if the outer shell was fixed by a strong magnetic field, the internal structure can rotate and maintain its oscillation. But where does the energy to semi-permanently maintain this kind of rotation come from? It is as if protons are perpetual motion machines.
As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, modern physics is established with the assumption of relative space in the first place. And if relative space is to be assumed, we have to discuss what rotation is rotating in respect to when we discuss rotation. Because the Moon that only shows one side to us while being at rest is not actually resting at all.
The idea that the manner in which three quarks alternately expand and contract creates spurious spinning satisfies all of these conditions.
In this chapter, we discussed how a group of spherical waves that have maintained their state of being on the brink of almost extreme contraction deplete their surrounding resources of space, and in doing so, generate gravitational mass as if fitting themselves inside it. Regarding the aforementioned spurious spinning, the three spherical waves (quarks) are respectively maintaining their inertial states. They scramble for the resources within each other without moving spots, thus generating what appears as spin. What could be called a type of spinning illusion is created. However, the three spherical waves (quarks) are rousing changes in mass inside them.
If we were to assume the hypothesis discussed in this section, the mass of a spherical wave (quark) in a state of high percentage of contraction should be larger than, albeit by just a little, the mass of other spherical waves (quarks). Therefore, by the three quarks contracting in order, the central point of the mass moves around and around inside the protons. Because of this, independent circulation and oscillation are created, without depending on absolute space or absolute coordinates. Protons are, so to speak, spinning as absolute coordinates themselves.
On the contrary, it can even be said that the fact that the mechanism of the strange spinning of photons can be made explainable without depending on absolute space should be proof of the efficacy of this section’s hypothesis.
It is possible to verify the aforementioned spinning (spurious) of protons through experimentation. I hear that presently, higher-precision particle accelerators that have been built all around the world have started operating. Apparently, there are even plans for the installation of equipment that can make one-thousandth of the volume of a proton observable. These devices cause particles to collide with each other and get shattered, and then by analyzing what gets scattered from this, the internal structure of protons can be explored. Watson and Crick, who immediately discerned the double-helix structure of DNA through results of experimentation, were able to do so precisely because they expected their results. I am looking forward to the analysis of the new particle accelerator’s observations being in line with the views presented in this chapter regarding the three spherical waves expanding while throwing off their timing.
This is a little bit off-topic, but I’ve heard that the question of where stars, planets, and galaxies get their energy to rotate is still unsolved. The aforementioned independent spurious spinning of protons makes these generating factors explainable.
When three quarks resonate (quantum entanglement) and protonate, they start spuriously spinning. They then gather even closer together and create matter, getting mutually affected by the weak mass change of their respective inner parts, and after a long time, start to slowly revolve around each other. This revolution occurs on a planetary scale, stellar scale, and galactic scale, creating the complex structure of the galaxy. This cosmic creation scenario may be possible to simulate with a computer.
Also, the Moon always facing the same side towards Earth becomes explainable as well.
Protons generate magnetic lines as if to penetrate the central point of three quarks. Terrestrial magnetism is generated by the multitude of quarks that construct Earth facing the same direction. The subtle fluctuations in mass of the three quarks inside these protons overlapping each other on an astronomical scale is what generates the Earth’s rotation and the revolution that spins it around the Sun.
The reason the Moon faces its same surface towards Earth when this happens is because the protons that construct the Moon have themselves have not aligned with each other. Proof of this lies in the fact that no terrestrial magnetism exists on the Moon. In other words, the Moon itself has no ability in and of itself to rotate or revolve on its own, and it is just being swung around at Earth’s mercy. This situation is akin to swinging around a watermelon dropped inside a net.
There is another example that becomes easy to understand, if you just think that each and every celestial body semi-permanently contains the force to rotate and revolve. This is the force that rotates the galaxy. Celestial bodies that make up the Milky Way revolve around the center of the galaxy. The problem lies in the fact that the orbital speed of celestial bodies in close proximity to the center of the galaxy are not that different from the speed of those far away from it. If something in the center of the galaxy is swinging around the celestial bodies that make up the Milky Way, it would require more energy the farther out it went, and the orbital speed should slow down. The existence of dark matter has been predicted to explain this, but its presence has yet to be confirmed.
If each and every celestial body was to have its own rotational and revolutionary force that used the mass fluctuations of the three quarks inside protons as sources, this problem could easily be solved. Basically, the groups of celestial bodies that make up the galaxy are not being swung around by anything, but rather are rotating and orbiting by themselves, and as a result, maintaining the same speed wherever they are in the Milky Way.
–– Supplementary Theory 3 ––
When reminded of what causes mass, one is sure to recall the Higgs particle and the associated Nobel Prize in 2013. However, the aforementioned Strong Force and Weak Force written by Hiroshi Ooguri states the following:
“However, the Higgs particle only has to do with one percent of all the matter around us.” (pg. 28)
The mechanism of mass derived from the spherical waves framework of this chapter is complete in and of itself, and there should not even be a one percent chance that any other factors would come into play. However, the argument of this book is that for inertial states, namely for both inertial mass and for gravitational mass, when you look at the particle groups, you are already under the assumption that the conditions of space are no different from being normal, so even if other factors were to come into play, they would do so for both. But this strays from the statement of this book, so will not be elaborated on.
Now, the inertial mass that has been made the subject thus far, also has to do with the law of conservation of mechanical energy. This law states that when two objects in inertial motion collide with each other, their original physical energy will be maintained, no matter how they were to bounce off of the other.
This law of conservation of mechanical energy can be described in the following way within the framework of what has been explained so far in this book. The state of the resources that surround photons (bosons), which are the source of matter, are forever unchanging. Photons are what maintain the state of these resources. Even if photons were to materialize due to spontaneous breaking of symmetry, the original state of the photons’ resources would be maintained according to the law of inertia. And when objects collide with each other, the inertial motion of the objects themselves gets disrupted, causing them to transition into differing inertial states. However, this only means that the state of the resources in the surrounding space was interchanged, with the original amount of the resource state of both objects being mutually maintained. This is the essence of the law of conservation of mechanical energy.
Well then, how about when photons hit an object and reflect off it? Photons do not have mass, so by reflecting, it appears as if the original amounts of the resource states of both photons and the object itself are changing.
But when photons reflect, they push the object.
One of the works of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark is a short story called Wind From the Sun. It is a story about spaceships equipped with solar sails racing each other, with the help of wind from the Sun. This story is not simply just science fiction. It has been known as a fact from early on that light pushes objects, with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) having conducted a successful field test that proved this in 2010.
From these facts, the following simple truths become clear. Light only possesses mass when it reflects. Photons contract to the limit of the surface of the object, and create a state of resource depletion, just like the three quarks trapped inside the protons (fermions) in surrounding space. They then will expand in the opposite direction while pushing matter, returning to the boson without its original mass. This fact suggests that bosons (photons) and fermions (ordinary matter) both originate from the same source.
4. Seeking the Origin of the Arrow of Time –– Perfect Symmetry
In the last section of this chapter, we will be discussing the origin of the arrow of time, which is the ultimate objective of this augmented edition of this book. But before we move on I would like to consider something just for fun.
Up until the beginning part of this section, I have been writing of observational facts that are confirmed at this moment in time, and interpreted them as a single possibility for a hypothesis. However, what I am about to discuss from now is completely fiction.
I would like you to look at the sequential illustrations of the spherical wave (quanta) in the beginning of this chapter. Around the middle part that looks like particulates, the resources of space are repeatedly contracting and diffusing (expanding), continuously vibrating semi-permanently.
The middle part contracted to the limit and taking resources from surrounding space is indicated by jet black, while surrounding space is indicated by shades of neutral colors.
The middle part contracted to the limit scattering about resources to surrounding space is indicated by neutral colors, while surrounding space is indicated by jet black.
Regarding this chapter, the former contracted state has mainly been the subject of discussion. For the fourth and final section, we will develop a hypothesis with the latter diffusion (expansion) phase as the subject. This will deal with the possible existence of anti-gravity (repulsion).
In Section 1, I interpreted the wave function of quantum mechanics, by stating that there were two cases the probability of discovery would be highest, one of which was a state of extreme contraction and the other a state of extreme diffusion. When the middle part of a spherical wave is looked at, both the most contracted state and the most diffused state will be in a complete state of rest at the moment the vectors go back and forth, between contraction to diffusion and diffusion to contraction. In other words, the middle parts of spherical waves are in very similar states.
When thought of in this way, the content of what’s been discussed in Sections 2 and 3 centering around contracted states can also be directly applied to diffused (expanded) states.
The above illustration is of the moment a spherical wave has diffused to its limit, taken from the sequential illustration of a spherical wave in the beginning part of this chapter.
As described in the beginning part of Section 2 in this chapter, the wave of a single particle weakens and expands out to the entire universe, in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. Because that wave oscillates at a speed equal to that of the speed of light, the depleted states and superfluous states of the resources of surrounding space continuously interchange instantaneously, and as a result, look to be almost no different from normal space.
I stated that when this happens, due to spontaneous symmetry breaking, the quantum groups turn into particle groups (bosons fermionize), and ordinary matter sustains the observable contracted states. If the states of the middle part during extreme contraction and middle part during extreme diffusion are similar, spontaneous symmetry breaking should occur even in diffused(expansion) states as well.
The above illustration is a depiction of that.
Regarding normal fermions (protons), they strongly attract each other, with their scrambling for the resources in each other’s space. However, this group of quarks of the spherical wave contracted to its limit should be repelling each other, due to the nature of the motion of diffusion. Therefore, even if some kind of action aggregated the multiple quarks in states on the brink of extreme diffusion, it’s natural to think that the action of repelling would immediately make them scatter.
To counter those type of arguments, the above illustration is a group of spherical waves on the brink of extreme diffusion showing the possibilities for their mutual attraction.
The normal fermions (protons) on the left of the above diagram are, as stated earlier, maintaining their stable structures by mutually scrambling for the resources of space. On the other hand, in regards to the dark fermions (tentative name) on the right, the resources of the space around each of the quarks (spherical waves) are in an extremely superfluous state. If quarks releasing resources is the essence of the motion called diffusion, then in circumstances where resources have reached the limit of superfluousness, the only ways out are the mutual quarks themselves. For the inner parts of dark fermions (tentative name), the quarks approach each other, as if getting jammed by each other’s surrounding superfluous resources. And while alternately pressing resources onto each other, continue oscillating on the brink of extreme diffusion. When thought of in this way, it can be said that quarks in diffused states can also possibly cause spontaneous symmetry breaking.
So now, if this type of matter really exists, what are its properties?
If ordinary matter enveloped in space with depleted resources has gravitational force, it should be possible to simply explain the opposite, that diffused particle groups enveloped in superfluous space should have repulsive force. However, I would like to somewhat cautiously proceed with this discussion.
At the end Section 2 in this chapter, as a supplementary theory I presented frozen waves resulting from drops of silicon. I stated that the drops of silicon that dance with regularity while floating in the air, without coming into contact with the oscillating liquid surface, indicate the presence of anti-gravity (repulsion).
Diffused particle groups keep the resources of their surrounding space satiated. As the frozen waves in the vicinity of the droplets in the experiment of Supplementary Theory 2 suggest, due to the very small vibrations of each individual particle, the satiated states surrounding the particle groups are maintaining their state and their shape.
Let’s imagine placing this matter on the surface of our Earth. Earlier, I stated that because ordinary matter is enveloped by space with depleted resources, there becomes a shortage of resources towards where that matter is, as looked at from Earth, and the deep drawing in of the space in that direction is what gravity (gravitational force) is. Contrarily, for matter composed of diffused particle groups, they get enveloped in their surrounding space that has a surplus of resources, causing the resources in the direction of the matter to become satiated. Because Earth’s gravity tries to maintain the state of its own surrounding space, it tries to push that matter away. In other words, a completely opposite force from that of ordinary matter works on that matter, sending it flying outside the range of Earth’s gravity while speeding towards the sky from the Earth’s surface. In other words, this matter is the presence of what should be called anti-gravity matter.
Also, this anti-gravity matter has similar inertial mass as ordinary matter. The reason for this is that just like the frozen waves of silicon drops, the surrounding space of diffused particle groups also try to maintain a surplus state of resources. That is why the exact same description of inertial mass in Section 3 can be applied to this matter.
Furthermore, when the same anti-gravity matter approach each other, the resources in the space in between become satiated, causing mutual repellence.
However, when ordinary matter and anti-gravity matter of the same inertial massapproach each other, something strange happens, according to the arguments of this book. Since resources are satiated in the direction of anti-gravity matter when looking from the side of ordinary matter, a force that keeps the space of that direction at arm’s length is at work. Meanwhile, since resources are lacking when looking towards ordinary matter from the side of anti-gravity matter, there is a force that draws in the space from that direction. Since gravitational force and repulsive force would be exactly the same for matter with identical inertial mass, they would both be in full contention, with no forces at all acting between these two types of matter.
What’s most interesting is the case where ordinary matter and anti-gravity matter are physically superimposed. When looking at the increase and decrease of the resources of space, the oscillations of spherical waves in states of extreme contraction and states of extreme diffusion should be in total antiphase states. (Unless this was the case, semi-permanent repetitive motion should not be possible.) If two types of matter in total antiphase states can be superimposed, they should be no different from normal space.
The formula seen above is a visualization of that.
In actuality, each particle occupies a space with a constant width. Even if you consider the point that only a single fermion can exist in a single space, at no time will ordinary matter and anti-gravity matter ever overlap. However, if you were to make anti-gravity matter into a sandwich-like plywood with ordinary matter, it should be possible to make the resources of surrounding space extremely close to that of normal space.
So what sort of features does this kind of structure have?
Gravitational force (gravity) or repulsive force will not have an effect on a structure (plywood) made out of ordinary matter and anti-gravity matter of the same inertial mass, so the structure will just lightly float in space. Furthermore, the inertial mass of the structure will get extremely close to zero, causing it to react linearly to acting forces. For example, if you were to push a structure with a metal rod, no matter how big the structure was, it would in an instant, without reaction, accelerate to the same speed as the metal rod. Since it’s impossible to actually completely overlap the respective matter, inertial mass can never be at zero. There is also air resistance on the Earth’s surface. However, when compared to structures made only with ordinary matter, this structure made with two types of matter clearly have extraordinary motion characteristics.
And now, we are going to enter the world of fantasy. What would become possible if we were to use this anti-gravity matter or structure with zero inertial mass?
First off, in a space with no ceilings, anti-gravity matter will instantly disappear into the sky by gravitationally accelerating in the opposite direction. Matter like that is rather difficult to control, but that doesn’t mean that it has no use.
For example, if it were to make a round trip to celestial bodies that had the same degree of mass as Earth, it would be possible to make the trip with hardly any fuel. Rockets made out of anti-gravity matter would leave the Earth’s surface by using its gravity, rapidly accelerating at 1G. (The force of acceleration would decrease the farther it got from Earth.) And when getting close to another celestial body that has the same 1G, the rocket would rapidly decelerate, getting to a velocity of zero upon landing on the surface. Right when this happens, it would just have to get moored to the surface with an anchor. (This scenario doesn’t take into account the air resistance of the respective celestial bodies, nor the relative speed of the mutual celestial bodies.)
The structure (plywood) made with the same-mass combination of ordinary matter and anti-gravity matter would be a presence of high daily value, even more than simple anti-gravity matter.
For example, in the case of an aircraft built with this kind of structure, the only resistance to thrust will be air itself. Air resistance is generated in proportion to the surface area of the aircraft. That is why, at the very least, thrust is needed to push back the air in the direction of travel. However, since the inertial mass of the body of the aircraft is zero, even a little bit of thrust would cause it to instantly accelerate. Contrarily, as soon as thrust is cut off, the aircraft would decelerate to a velocity of zero, affected by air resistance. This basically means that movements close to those of what people call flying saucers would become possible.
It’s almost impossible to imagine what sort of movement a structure like this would have in outer space. If we were to simply think in terms of logic, an object with an inertial mass of zero, for example, would completely synchronize with the acceleration of the explosive combustion of the fuel used for thrust. In this case, there is no way a human body could withstand this G. However, if you were to wrap this human body in a spacesuit made out of anti-gravity matter that had the same inertial mass as the person’s weight, and were able to make that have close to zero inertial mass, you should be able to comply with any type of acceleration, as though you were free-falling.
I am repeating myself, but this is of course all fantasy. Even if this sort of matter doesn’t actually exist, since we can sum it up as the diffusion state of a quantum does not cause “spontaneous symmetry breaking”, it doesn’t become a rebuttal of the arguments presented through Section 3 of this chapter.
But if matter with these kinds of characteristics and structure actually existed, it should prove one of this chapter’s hypotheses.
Furthermore, there is even something that becomes explainable because of dark fermions (tentative name) with repulsive force. That something is the accelerated expansion of the universe, and the reputed foam-like large-scale structure of the universe.
As a result of observation, the expansion of all the galaxies and stars is known to be accelerating. The fact that it is not only expanding but accelerating means that at some point, a phenomenon resembling an explosion scattered matter across the universe, implying that instead of that matter spreading in all directions, some kind of force is pulling stars apart from each other, even as we speak. And because of modern observational astronomy techniques, the thick and thin parts of the density of star distribution, and what at first glance looks like a foam-like structure are known to exist.
This clearly defies our common sense. Ordinary matter that we recognize has gravitational force. That is why since the general theory of relativity, the idea that an expanding universe with gradually weakening momentum, would at some point turn into a contracting one, was what was considered to be a common in cosmology. However, all celestial bodies that exist as observational evidence in the universe pull apart from each other while accelerating. Because of this, the existence of repulsive-force-possessing dark energy has been predicted, but its identity has not been revealed. And if all matter has gravitational force, it should only be natural to think that they would all group together in one place, without having to create a foam-like structure. And yet, stars are said to thinly spread membranously to a certain periphery, as if avoiding that.
This is explainable when using the arguments of this book.
The resonance of bosons (photons) should occur with the same probability, whether they are on the brink of contraction or expansion, so the probability of occurrence for fermions and dark fermions should also be the same. In all likelihood, what most easily occurs in outer space is hydrogen, which has a molecular structure of a single photon. This book argues that repulsive-force-possessing dark hydrogen (tentative name), which has opposite properties, should also occur at the same probability as normal hydrogen.
Hydrogen, which is ordinary matter around us, causes nuclear fusion by aggregating because it has gravitational force, which in turn produces a variety of other elements. But since dark hydrogen has repulsive force, it starts receding from all hydrogen and dark hydrogen the moment it gets generated. It continues towards outer space, where there’s a low density of matter, while maintaining its single molecular level without materializing by aggregating like hydrogen. And as a result of an enormous amount of dark hydrogen spreading to an area of low density, a cavity for a huge foam-like structure gets created, as if displacing ordinary matter. This cavity is made to continuously expand like a balloon, by dark hydrogen continuously created in succession from three bosons (photons), which causes the surrounding ordinary matter to continue its accelerated expansion.
When thought of in those terms, it becomes clear why dark energy is unobservable. Dark hydrogen repels each other, continuously roaming through outer space so as to always have uniform density. Since light passes through these gaps without getting blocked, confirming the presence of dark hydrogen just by observing the light that reaches Earth is impossible. The reason stars flicker is apparently because the path of photons are bent by cosmic dust, but maybe that cosmic dust is what dark hydrogen really is.
Also, the reason stars aren’t moving around like shooting stars is also explainable when using the arguments of this book. As you can see when you look up at the sky, the stars are stuck to the celestial sphere. Of course, what we are able to observe is not only limited to the horizontal relationships between the stars themselves, but their distance from us on Earth is getting farther away at a scale we can’t even imagine based on appearance alone. Even if this was the case, it’s hard to think that these relative relationships are hardly changing. These is this idea called principle of constancy of light velocity, but the relative speed of celestial bodies themselves actually seem to be within the speed of light. Earlier I discussed the huge foam-like structure of space. If repulsive-force-possessing dark hydrogen was pushing away ordinary matter to its periphery like a giant balloon, ordinary matter should get stuck between the space between the balloons and not be able be able to move.
Even if an accelerating force faster than that of the speed of light acted upon specific matter, the breaks would be put on as soon as they headed towards the cavity area, or in other words, towards the direction of repulsive-force matter. Basically, the reason stars look to be stuck to the sky is because repulsive-force matter acts as spurious absolute space, keeping stars made out of ordinary matter in place. When thought of in those terms, even for cases when the estimated degree of the curvature of space, according to the scale of celestial bodies observed, are off from the observed value, it is speculated that dark hydrogen that fills the surrounding space is the reason for that. But since this idea is even more speculative than the very arguments of this book, I will not elaborate on this any further.
As just described, the enactment of repulsive-force-possessing dark hydrogen makes present unsolved questions regarding various phenomena explainable.
We are now at the conclusion of this chapter.
Up until the last chapter, I discussed how the relationship between the observer and the observed object was what created movement. This movement was explained as producing the deviations in the reactions of neuron groups in the observer’s brain, which then get stereogram-synthesized to create time recognition.
Needless to say, all of us, and whatever the subjects of our observation, are both objects. To put it extremely, we are all a mass of an enormous amount of fermions. We have mass, we don’t overlap each other, and we maintain an inertial (rest) state as long as force is not applied to us.
Now let’s imagine if we all were bosons (photons). And let’s even imagine that bosons were the only things that existed in the universe. Bosons can overlap each other any number of times while in one place. In other words, bosons do not interfere with each other.
Can we really say that time passes for a presence that just continues to spherically oscillate, without being affected by another? It would probably depend on the definition of the concept of time, but time in a world of only bosons should at the very least be completely different from what we perceive as the meaning of time in our daily lives. Time in a world of only light (bosons) uses the moment called the present as an axis, so to speak, as if continuously oscillating alternately into the past and future. It basically maintains perfect symmetry.
In a universe where only bosons like this exist, multiple bosons that have incidentally drawn close to each other will start resonating (or quantum entanglement). Then, when the resources around these bosons get depleted, and the moment they stabilize after a maintained contracted state, or in other words, the moment spontaneous symmetry breaking is generated, bosons fermionize, and matter is born to this world. Furthermore, when multiple forms of matter are created, relationships are born, movement comes into existence, the arrow of time (flow) is generated, and the existence of an observer that recognizes this is made possible.
In other words, the arrow of time has its origins in the perfect symmetry of the world that has only light. Time, and our minds, are both created by the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the ocean of light.
Chapter 6 What is Reality?
For the final chapter of this book, we will be exploring what exactly the reality before our eyes really is.
In Chapter 4, it became clear that what physics and mathematics tries to grasp is not a pure objective reality, but one that includes the observer’s point of view. Takeshi Yohro discusses the following in his Yuinōron:
“I am not the one that brought yuinōron into physics. Einstein did this, as did Heisenberg. The brain, in physics terms, came out for a reason. It has now become commonplace for the brain, namely for the observer, to turn up in physical cosmology. This is proof that physics has become intelligent.” (pg. 242)
A reality with no observers is one of chaos, with no right or left, no up or down, with no interruptions. When a spurious absolute system called an observer is placed in this universe with no absolute system, direction, interruption, the movement of objects, and time perception of the observers themselves is created.
However, the time that we perceive is not just something that results from external reality. As mentioned in Chapter 3, neuron groups that constantly loop phonetically to sound stimulus instantaneously generate words and evoke visual images that connect to them, creating another reality inside the brain that lines up with external reality. Both the generated words and the visual images called out by them each have the duration and flow of spurious time. In order to think about the title of this chapter, What is Reality? I would like to spend a little more time discussing this inner reality evoked by these words. And what I would like to discuss here are words as extended bodies.
Extension of the body seems like something that comes out of a science-fiction novel with a cyborg as the protagonist, but this is something we all actually experience in our daily lives. Brain researcher Naotaka Fujii states the following in his Introduction to Social Brains: What is a Social Brain? (Kondansha Gendai Shinsho):
“Actually, this is a feeling we all get from in our daily lives, but when we master the use of a certain tool, we feel that the tool is a part of our own bodies. In other words, when we wear a new object, an extension of our body images is always occurring.” (pgs. 101-102)
Everyone knows what it’s like for a familiar tool they use everyday to feel like it’s an extension of their bodies. This feeling is always the same, whether that tool has a simple structure like a pair of chopsticks, or if, like a car, it requires complex technology for operation.
Extended bodies give people capabilities that exceed the original functions of the body. Chopsticks can sift through food a lot more meticulously than directly using your fingers. A motorcycle ridden by a skilled driver seems like a pair of legs running around with an engine attached to them. The driving of a car is like dancing in the seat. You step on the clutch with you your left foot (Japanese car), and step on the accelerator at about the same time as the brake, and when you shift into second gear with the shake of your left hand (Japanese car), you release the clutch with your left leg while turning the handle with your right hand. You take a step with every curve, both hands shaking as you continue dancing along the winding road. While conducting these kinds of operations almost unconsciously, the operator, like a cyborg, replaces their body with that of a car that weighs over a ton.
But a familiar tool doesn’t only serve to simply extend people’s capabilities. The brain of whoever is using the tool starts to recognize it as a part of the body. Naotaka Fujii presents an experiment in his Social Brains, where a laser pointer was directed round the bodies of monkeys while recording the reactions of their neuron groups.
“Nerve cells that only responded to visual stimuli of the hand when not holding a tool were now expanding the space to react to the visual stimuli when holding a tool, as if it was an extended part of the hand. In other words, the space that reacted to the stimulus of the laser pointer had expanded not only to the arm but to the tool as well. So basically, even if the tool wasn’t a part of the body, these cells showed a reaction towards the visual stimuli from the tool.” (pg. 124)
We all feel as though the tools we own are parts of our bodies themselves. This is not just something that takes place in labs. We feel emotional pain as if we’ve been hurt ourselves when a familiar racket gets damaged, or when a beloved car gets scratched. Let’s say someone is running around the room and swatting all over with a fly swatter. The emotional impact should be greater than the physical impact, even if it was an unintentional accident, if your chopsticks were swatted while in your hand than if they were just lying on the table.
The laser pointer experiment is the same using images on a screen.
“However, even in this case, nerve cells in the parietal lobe similarly reacted to visual stimuli given to the hand on the screen, and when it was able to use a tool, they expanded the area exhibiting visual response to the tools shown on the screen. In other words, these experiments indicate how body images can be placed anywhere in space, and depending on how you look at them, can possibly change any number of ways.” (pg. 125)
Body images can be placed anywhere in space, and depending on how you look at them, can change any number of ways. Even if this was a false reality of images on a screen, we still recognize them as body images. In other words, we all have the potential to perceive all of recognizable surrounding space around us as extensions of our own bodies.
As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, words too must be type of extended body. By manipulating voices and letters, we give meaning to the reality before us, evoking false realities from our memories. We vibrate our vocal cords to emit voices, which allow us to influence our surroundings in various ways. For example, if you say, “Can you get me that cup?” to the person next to you, you can draw a cup placed far from you without having to use your hands. When thought of in this way, it can be said that other people are also parts of your extended body. The following is from Introduction to Social Brains:
“If, you were to think of other people as an extension of that, and if the bodies of others moved freely at your own will, we would probably recognize them as being a part of ourselves. In other words, what we absolutely, without a doubt think exists –– the boundaries between ourselves and others –– seem to be weaker than originally thought.” (pg. 102)
Upon establishing the reality that we perceive, what sort of roles to do other people play? Mr. Naotaka Fujii conducted various psychological experiments by utilizing the online virtual space Second Life, and gave the following impression in Social Brains:
“Another thing that was interesting about this experiment, was that by displaying another subject in the virtual space with a separate avatar, I felt that the atmosphere of the virtual space changed at once. Even in a virtual space, atmosphere is formed. (omitted) In Second Life, avatars all have autonomous personalities. In other words, the social implications for individuals gathering here and individuals gathering in reality are not much different. That is why entering a conversation between five or so avatars sitting in a bar requires just as much courage as entering a bar in the real world where a bunch of regulars are hanging out at. (omitted) What struck me even more is that by other people existing in the virtual space, a real sense of distance was created in it. This sense of distance is not the type of feeling you get when a box as big as an individual gets placed in the virtual space, but one that made you feel that maybe there was a different type of distance between individuals than the mere sense of distance between an individual and an object.” (pgs. 195-196)
I myself have experienced online virtual space. It was a game (large-scale massive multiplayer online RPG) called MMO. Participants are made to install a huge amount of data in their computers to launch the game. Once it starts, a real townscape, an ocean, a beach and more are projected onto the computer screen. Your own avatar is in the middle of the screen, free to walk the world inside the computer.
This alone makes this no different from an ordinary game, but in this game, a real other person appears. Based on information sent from the internet, other people participating in the game just like you, are shown on screen as their own avatars. Limitations will arise due to the computer’s capabilities, but there were at least more than a few dozen people based on the avatars displayed on the computer screen, and when avatars that were in different locations or omitted from display were included, there were always more than a few thousand other people in one game.
The presence of other people changed the atmosphere of virtual space into something very lifelike. The following is from Social Brains:
“For example, when you actually spend time in a virtual space like Second Life, the stimulus directed at the avatar in the screen, which should not be directly connected to your body in the screen, feels like it comes back as feedback to your own real body. To give an example, when I was walking inside the virtual space, and another avatar came along and bumped into the shoulder of my avatar, it somehow felt like my own shoulder was getting bumped. Honestly, this surprised me.” (pg. 191)
When someone else’s avatar would come running towards me, even if it would go right through me if I didn’t do anything, I would still always move my avatar and get out of the way. You can’t help but not.
However, this strangely lifelike virtual space is obviously nothing more than images created inside a computer. This space makes you feel depth and height, and even makes you feel expanse, is just mere information projected onto the two-dimensional flat surface of a computer monitor. The only materialized parts of this vast world that you truly believe exists are the parts projected on the monitors of the participants who have accessed the game. These images are of the directions that the participants’ avatars are facing. In other words, the world the avatar sees is shown, processed based on the avatar’s point of view. So basically, the entity of virtual space is made up of the exact number of participant viewpoints. All other parts are asleep within the program. Therefore, the spurious reality of MMO is incomplete and one only of appearance.
However, this incompleteness is exactly what makes MMO so fun to play. Participants of the game can converse with each other, like in a chat. You can pick who you want to talk to, or you can call out to the any number of avatars that are there. If it’s within a somewhat pre-set group, you can even talk to someone who is in a place that should at least be a few minutes away. Each participant communicates their own points of view to others by turning it into linguistic information. “These hunting grounds are empty, hurry up and get over here,” “Another group just showed up… let’s go somewhere else,” and “ X X X showed up!” or something along these lines. In other words, the materialized parts on the monitor in front of you are not the whole of the spurious reality of MMO. By tying the viewpoints of other people with words, an incomplete world gets compensated with images, and this makes the participants feel a sense of presence and reality that makes one forget that they’re in a virtual space. Other people are one of the crucial factors in establishing a virtual reality.
Now let’s get back to discussing our own reality.
What is the entity of this thing that we recognize as reality? In order to investigate the entity of reality, Descartes thoroughly eliminated everything whose existence wasn’t certain, ultimately arriving at the conclusion of I think, therefore I am. In other words, you can question the existence of all sorts of things in this world, but you can’t ever question the existence of your own mind. However, what I seek here is not such a thoroughly investigated truth. It’s just the world that we’re looking at, that’s all.
I am currently sitting facing my desk. What I can see from here is the desk and my computer, and on the other side of the left-open sliding door I can see the television and bookshelf. This world seen from the viewpoint of myself as an observer is the entity of reality for me. It is nothing more, nothing less. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I question the existence of things that are placed where I can’t see them. I am aware of the refrigerator making low operating noises on the other side of the wall, I know there are a number of bins lined up for the separation of garbage, and they instantly come to mind.
However, if using the framework of this book, the world we can see firsthand, and even the one we can’t, are both just images similarly produced by our brains. There should be no need to explain that the image of an object placed somewhere we can’t directly see exists in our minds. Even if it’s in a range we can directly see, the color, direction, motion, and even the passing of time is produced in our brains. Of course, even without us observers, this external reality exists. It is not like the location with no visitors, the one that sleeps within the program in the virtual reality of MMO. However, the true external reality that has nothing to do with the brain is in a state of so-called chaos, with color, direction, motion, and the passing of time not existing in it. By us looking at the world before our eyes, the reality that we recognize everyday comes into existence.
Just like in the words of Naotaka Fujii, whom I introduced earlier, our brains are able to recognize not only familiar tools, but anywhere in space as extensions of our bodies. The reason we feel comfort when relaxing in a lived-in room is probably because the various things in the room feel like extensions of our own bodies.
However, this real world that feels so natural to us, should be more extensive and abundant, and not just include the desk and computer before our eyes. The image I have is one of outside the room, it incorporates the entire apartment, out to the streets and utility poles outside, the rows of houses in the town, and finally expands to the corner of Kyushu, which is where I am now, as if on a map. The little school kids walking on the street, the birds chirping on a rooftop, the cat meowing on a fence, the many cars speeding down the road, all of these are a part of my reality. I may not feel a sense of affinity to these things as my own room, but they are in my heart, with a certain sense of reality.
This most probably is because words, and the presence of other people that share these words, are extending my body far beyond what is meant for one person.
Earlier, I cited an example of virtual space. In a spurious space where only the number of people accessing it and the images projected on the monitor are materialized, the many participants in the game connect their respective viewpoints by communicating with each other with words, creating a lifelike sense of reality. In that respect, the reality around us is no different from virtual space. We recognize the world around us by using words, and furthermore, we use them as means of communication, expanding our world by sharing our respective recognized realities with others. In contrast with the merely chaotic objective reality before recognition, a real world as extensive and abundant as the number of people in it is created in each of our minds, by the tying together of the respective perspectives of each person. The world is connected to ourselves through others and through words. Each and every one of us –– whether we are conscious of this or not –– participates in the creation of reality.
Epilogue
Husserl stated the following in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology:
“In and regarding our continuously flowing world perception, let us pay attention to the fact that we are not independent, but simultaneously connected to other human beings. All human beings possess their own perceptions, currentizations, and harmonic content, but then your own convictions lose their value, causing them to turn into mere possibilities, doubts, questions, and appearances. However, when living with strangers, anybody can get involved in the lives of others. In this way, the world generally does not exist for only individualized human beings, but does so for the human community, and moreover, exists by co-identifying perceptual things.”
(Sekai no Meicho (51) Brentano and Husserl, pg.537)
Words play the role in what Husserl calls the cooperation of perceptual things. We don’t only live just by sharing experiences and knowledge with words. When we recognize the realities in front of us, even the consciousness that does that cannot be established without the help of words. And when you doubt your own confidence, you can participate in the lives of others, and always regain confidence in yourself. By exchanging words with others, you can mutually regain the belief in these words, in turn regaining your own strength to live every day. In a community that uses this, words play the part of the foundation of perception, of which nobody can doubt.
But in modern society, this type of function for words is getting compromised.
Mr. Keizaburo Maruyama, who researches the afore-introduced Saussure, states the following in his Saussure’s Ideas:
“We’ve been surrounded by words since the moment we were given life on earth. We’ve been raised by words, we think things through with them, and we continue to establish relationships with others through them. Because we are too familiar with them and almost unconscious of them, we hardly reflect on words in any introspective way. Especially in this one-way onslaught of excessive information, we are prone to fall into this discommunication that occurs because of this excess, and there’s probably not a single person that hasn’t felt a strong distrust and despair towards words at some point, whether it’s feeling annoyed when they couldn’t be understood speaking Japanese to another Japanese person, or the flood of meaningless buzzwords, or the absence of real dialogue, and so forth.” (prologue)
The effects of the confusion of words don’t stop at the state of discommunication. It reaches our own reality-perceiving consciousness itself. In this present day of diversified values and information that comes and goes with a vengeance, the words being used by each person go through unpredictable changes. This means that the reality each of us perceives is simultaneously becoming just as chaotic. In order to deal with this situation, every one of us must watch our own words, and the words of others, and continue to live our lives while reacting positively to these changes.
But these changes will accelerate. The internet has made communication far beyond that of everyday culture and words possible. This means that the extraordinariness of our ordinary lives is will also accelerate. This also means that the function of words to serve as the foundation of perception will weaken even further. Where are we supposed to look to regain confidence in ourselves, to regain confidence in reality? Whereby should we live our lives by sharing reality with people with different words, culture and ideas? Of course, this doesn’t mean we’ll lose all means to share confidence in ourselves with others. Even science, backed by mathematics and physics, plays a role as a universal language, and as the foundation of perception, and actually functions as that. However, for each and every one of us, is there any perfectly natural way to ascertain our own lives?
2,500 years ago, when the Greek philosopher Zeno came up with a number of paradoxes based on the inherited views of his teacher Parmenides, they were probably just simple logic for him. Maybe these paradoxes were made up with the same intentions as Socrates’ midwife. They are a kind of fable to raise the self-awareness in people. In Plato’s Parmenides, there is a description of when Socrates listening to Zeno lecturing when he was younger.
There is a theory that Achilles and the Tortoise is actually Parmenides’ idea. Achilles and the Tortoise is a totally unrealistic parable, and having learned from that, Zeno probably racked his brain to come up with as many puzzling paradoxes as possible. But when he came up with the Paradox of the Flying Arrow, Zeno himself is sure to have looked up. When he saw people walking down the street and when he watched the movement of his own hand, when he heard the sounds of the wind and the voices of people conversing, he undoubtedly remained silent, upon realizing that all of this was happening in what was the present, a moment without duration.
It is said that after this, upon rebelling against the oppressive monarchy, Zeno was arrested and executed.
Time and reality only exist as a result of our recognition.
Even if this was fact, our daily lives would hardly be affected by this. The Sun would rise as always, and we would get out of bed and start our days as always, and when the Sun sets we would get back in bed, as always.
However, people would sometimes come to a standstill, and like Zeno 2,500 years ago, probably watch the reality around them. Try idly watching time as it passes right before your eyes. Try peeking into your mind, and really think about the words that continue to remain there. And send these thoughts out to those who you share this passage of time with, with the many others on this Earth that create reality with you. People’s minds will change, little by little.
This is the final hypothesis that this book presents.
Additional Bibliography
Yoshihiko Ikegami. (1984). An Invitation to Semiotics. Iwanami Shoten.
Motoyoshi Irifuji. (2008). Does Time Exist? Kodansha’s New Library of Knowledge. Kodansha.
Yoko Ogawa and Kazuo Okanoya. (2011). Scientifically Studying the Birth of Words. Kawade Books. Kawade Shobo-shinsha.
Lawrence M. Krauss, translated by Michio Yoshdaa. (2012). Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. Hayakawa Shobo.
Pegio and Yukio Gunji. (2008). The Identity of Time: Deja vu, Causal and Quantum Theory. Kodansha Sensho Métier. Kodansha.
Yoichi Sakakihara. (2009). Limitations in Brain Science: What Have We Learned from Brain Function Imaging? Kodansha.
Katsuhiko Satoh. (2011). A Book on Enjoying the Theory of Relativity: A look into the Wonderful World of Einstein. PHP Library. PHP Institute.
Shinsuke Shimojo. (1999). What is Consciousness? The History of the Brain, Errors of Perception. Kodansha’s New Library of Knowledge. Kodansha.
George G. Szpiro, edited by Teruo Nagase and Shima Akiko. (2007). Poincaré’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles. Hayakaawa Shobo.
Seiji Takeda. (2002). An Introduction to Phenomenology. NHK Books. Japan Broadcast Publishing Co., Ltd.
Shogo Tanimura. (2014). Nikkei Science Supplementary Issue 199: Paradox of a Quantum — Paradox of a Photon. Nikkei Science inc.
Nicholas Humphrey. (2012). Should Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Kinokuniya Shoten.
Seiya Negami. (2009). The Topological Universe: The Complete Edition. The Road to Solving Poincaré’s Conjecture. Nippon Hyoron-sha.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, translated by Katsuhiko Satoh. (2011). The Grand Design. X-Knowledge Co., Ltd.
Nikkei Science Supplementary Issue. (2010). Perception is Fantasy: The Brain Science Behind Perception as Discussed by V.S. Ramachandran. Nikkei Science Inc.
Kenichiro Mogi. (2009). The Theory of Relativity Explained. PHP Science World Shinsho. PHP institute.
Yoshimasa Yoshinaga. (2009). Achilles and the Tortoise: Examining the Paradox. Kodansha.
Yoshifumi Watanabe. (2010). Time and Happenings. Chuokoron-shinsha.
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