I can confirm that my mechanical восток амфибия loses about 20 seconds a day when I am driving my Alfa, 30 seconds a day on the armchair. Scouts honour!
I am loving the details that this discussion are teasing out for me.
I was reading the ASA article, and it was really different when I had this conversation in my head.
The nature of apperceptive awareness being before any label, thus also before intelligence? Maybe?. Of course that article is concerned with the feelings about what is sensed, but how about the recognition of what is seen?
What is “sensing” the infinitude, and what is “sensing” time doesn’t move?
Consciousness obviously, however when does intelligence kick in to call it that? Instantly, or is there a focusing for that to occur? Automatic?
Turns out, according to the bloke at the end on the 1971 experiment, that I would need to have sent my domestic grade watches around the world on airplanes for 100 years to get a 0.0001 second difference, which is outside of the capability of a domestic grade timepiece, ignoring the battery problem.
Edit: to get the effect to show up on a domestic grade stopwatch (1/100th of a second) it would need to be on a plane for 1000 years!
Aha…Yours truly(actually 
) had asked this to Richard :
Richard : …there have been more than a few peoples ask me (but as a ‘gotcha’ question, of course, in their minds) what sensory organ it is whereby the infinite nature of this physical universe’s space can be detected – whereupon I usually answer that it is simply a matter of apperceptive awareness (inasmuch it is ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being, which is ‘being’ itself, who automatically creates a boundary to ‘my’ awareness by virtue of being the centre of ‘my’ consciousness) – and it makes for a pleasant change to read what you have to say upon having gazed deeply into that velvety darkness betwixt the stars and thereby experienced for yourself ‘an infinite like abyss’ for a second or two.
(Incidentally, that ‘abyss’ description comes from an experience of that nature being a momentary loss of ‘self’ – or even partial loss more likely – as any such abyss-experience stems primarily from a (temporarily) non-egoic glimpsing of death-of-ego, rather than ‘self’-immolation/ ‘self’-extinction in ‘my’ entirety, as it is a feature of pre-awakenment/ pre-enlightenment experiences as well).
Please note that I am not suggesting for a moment that the human eye – be it partially/ fully ‘self’-less or not – is powerful enough in its reach, or receptive enough in its absorption, to be viewing infinite space in a measuring sense (such as estimating the distance to a mountain peak, say, ten miles or so away) as infinity simply cannot be measured.
The human eye is, rather, looking into infinity (when gazing deeply into that velvety darkness betwixt the stars) in the sense that there is no limit to its seeing ability other than its own physical capacity due to having evolved on a planet a short distance away, in astronomical terms, from its central star (aka the sun).
Apperceptive consciousness would be a good enough answer. Considering there is 100 billion neurones in the brain, with multiple connections between them, and structures within them science is still in the dark about, not to mention the multitude of neurotransmitters, hormones etc,
It isn’t an infinitude, but it sure is a whole lot of hardware!
This is an interesting question @Kub933. Some great responses too.
A similar discussion was brought up by a lecturer when I was studying Physics at uni, except the question was this “is cause and effect real” rather than actual lol.
The ultimate point the lecturer made was that we don’t know whether the universe is deterministic or non deterministic. I remember being unsatisfied by that at the time but at least it was an honest answer.
@claudiu I was going to post something similar about time but you beat me, lovely post though lol. It was AF that helped me get clarity of mind after my first PCE’S back in 2006 and I realised that time was always measured in relation to matter interacting with matter. I remember being fascinated by my own obsession with time, this moment was so novel because i had never done any form of now awareness or meditation before, I was always projecting in the past of future or just daydreaming lol. AF was my first experience of paying exclusive attention to now. I remember being shocked how many things I could do on auto pilot though.
Another thing I remember a lecturer saying that really blew my mind about ones frame of reference, if we had a coordinate system taking into account your house’s position in the galaxy from outside the milky way, due to the Earth rotating and wobbling and the fact the solar system is moving and the milky way too then your house is always somewhere new lol. Though we experience ourselves as somewhere the same. Which for me at the time tied into the jamais vu aspect of my PCE’s as well as I am not technically in the same place I was yesterday. The constant change of matter and energy in my body, my house, the suns position relative to the earth, the tilt and so on also added to that dynamic newness.
To reflect back on my depressed self writings and how I then started to view it was perverse. It is just like…yeah its just my same old house, same old Earth, same old solar system. Everything so dead, stale and bleak. Totally unable to remember my PCE’s or EE’s just caught in the feeling formed harsh reality.
When in actuality it is dynamic and vibrant.
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The only thing making it seem fixed is ‘my’ fixed concepts of cause & effect - outcomes & relations. It’s like we’re sitting there in our brains playing with dolls using particular concepts (the mom makes dinner, the dad goes to his job…) and then complaining that there is no dynamism, that nothing new can ever happen…
And then ironically, our greatest fear is if our little conceptualization game were to collapse
Which even more ironically is freedom
What a funny thing we are!
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