time and processing speed

I can't help myself. The compulsive blogger strikes again. Last night's group was as interesting as ever. Pity Greg wasn't there at the end to participate in the discussion about practical experiments in weirdness. There was, I think, a half-baked agreement to record dreams. Perhaps this shoud be be narrowed down a bit, since recording dreams every morning sounds a bit like a new year's resolution to quit smoking and be more involved in social activism. Can I suggest this: we all  focus an intention on having a dream for the group, and record anything that seems like it might be significant. 

I had this dream last night. Nothing precognitory in this one, but worth mentioning since it was about the group. I was telling something to the group, something painful and sad that had happened to me, and I notice that there are tears in everyone's eyes, and I also see (in a mirror?) that there are tears in mine. I'm surprised and moved at everyone's compassion and readiness to show emotion. Reminded of the surprise I had seeing tears in Matthew Hayden's eyes at his retirement press conference - what, Matthew Hayden, the macho man, crying? I think it relates in some way to the discussion last night in which Stephen talked about baring our emotional souls, and Paul talked about his fear of insanity. Though we are hardly a bunch of Matthew Haydens, we're still a group of men, with the associated cultural baggage about showing emotion. Interestingly, in terms of going beyond the intellectual into the experiential, in my experience it's often when strong emotional intensity is present, when there is some kind of seismic psychologial shift, that 'paranormal' experiences happen. I'm not advocating we become a psychotherapy group or even worse a 'men's group', but I thought I'd share the dream and its associations.

An idea that occurred to me after the strange dream I mentioned in the group: is dream logic to day logic as quantum logic is to Newtonian logic? I.e., in dreams, many contradictory things can be simultaneously true, past, present and future blur in indeterministic fashion, and the whole thing makes perfect sense until you wake up, and waking consciousness collapses the wave function, forces a singular, unitary logic on everything. Is the quantum world the dreaming substrate of everyday reality?

Finally, to Paul's suggestion about the speed of time and processing speed. I like the idea, but the more I think about it, the less convincing it becomes. Here's why:

• As I said to Paul last night, this idea would not predict time stopping at the speed of light or inside a black hole singularity. Time should simply get slower and slower in proportion to the amount of matter or speed present. The 'processor' should not crash!
• Although the information processing model of physical reality  is getting very popular, isn't the idea of processing speed restrictions applying to physical systems taking the computer metaphor too far? You'd have to propose some kind of hidden CPU, like in The Matrix or something, churning away behind the scenes and getting bottle-necked when things get too fast. Where is the evidence for such a clunky arrangement? Basically, it turns the universe into a simulation, which seems to me to be topsy-turvy.
• Remember that slowing of time in a relativistic system is only one phenomena of several that apply. Others include shortening in the direction of travel and increasing mass. It's hard at first glance to see how these could be related to processing speed problems.
• Why should travelling at high speed mean more processing requirements? If an object is moving at high velocity through deep space, far from other objects and interactions, shouldn't time slow down less in this situation? And, in a simulation, high speed is not more complex to process than low speed. position+=1 is as easy to calculate as position+=1000000 (well, arguable, but the point is still clear). At any rate, there shouldn't be any particular ceiling to achievable speed, since processing requirements will rise linearly with velocity, if at all.

To me, those thoughts kill the theory, sorry. But I'm open to debate on the subject... :)

Finally, I'd be  interested in exploring the ideas about a 'right brain ontology' further, i.e., the problem of subjectivity and perception. Although qualities are much harder to agree on or communicate about than quantities, this doesn't invalidate them as genuine 'emergent properties'. If we didn't have a whole lot of common ground in the area of qualitiative perception, we would have no great artists, no art at all, since we would only ever be able to do what Martin says we should  be doing as artists, i.e., communicating with ourselves. (Synchronicity or coincidence that I forgot to mention: before coming to last night's group, I was reading that JD Salinger only ever wrote for his own pleasure, and in the end eschewed publication as an "invasion of privacy"! Martin, your literary kindred spirit!)

OK enough already.