213
Essays on Infinite Lifespans
Manfred Clynes
As we readily surmise today, different animals (conscious
machines) have different timeconsciousnesses. There is noth-
ing absolute about our timeconsciousness. On a different
galaxy, say, a living being could exist to whom night and day
would be a flicker. Our timeconsciousness is purely relative to
our being human.
TIMECONSCIOUSNESS SCALING
This invites the consideration of scaling of timeconscious-
ness. We will learn it from how the DNA does it. And
redesigning ourselves for long life we can take advantage of
variable timeconsciousness scaling.
What is the timeconsciousness scaling of a computer? Or,
what is the timescaling of a computer? The computers idea
of time is that it has no idea of it at all. All it knows is a
series of numbers, the time stamps. What the time interval is
between these numbers is entirely arbitrary. We can increase
the duration of a computers tick (computing cycle) and the
computer would not know: all its answers would be the same.
Any calculation it can do at any tick size within its techno-
logic ability will provide the same answer. A string of ones
and zeros cannot give either it or us the experience of time.
A flaw in the Turing test is that it leaves out time. And as long
as we are modeling ourselves along the lines of a computer as
we understand it today, we will have no timeconsciousness at
all. And that means we would not be conscious.
Zeros and ones, numbers, cannot replace the uniqueness
of time for us. Indeed it can in a four-dimensional matrix,
in Minkowskis representation, and for Einstein it requires
an imaginary axis to distinguish it from spatial dimensions.
But numbers cannot tell us about the experience of time, nor
for that matter of space. Our brain and our nervous system