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Timeconsciousness in Very Long Life
to store the state of all matter in the universe. As the age of
individuals mounts into millions of years relatively more and
more matter will be needed to store the memories. Eventually,
Freud notwithstanding, a selective erasing of memories may
need to take place a hot political issue of the very distant
future.
More serious would be the problems posed by our emotions
and their communication. As I have shown, the expression
and generation of emotion by communication such as ges-
ture, dance, and music is highly time dependant. Time forms,
which we call sentic forms, form the vocabulary of our inher-
ent language of emotion communication and generation.
Shape (in time) is quality. What happens to those under time-
consciousness transformation?
Take laughing as an example. Can we laugh in our dreams,
on a different time scale, and yet experience laughter? A fast
thinking person still laughs at similar rates of has than a slow
thinker, even Marvin Minsky. The difficulty lies in the mys-
terious so far unexplainable inherent connection between the
time form and the quality of feeling that it embodies. Speed
up timeconsciousness by a factor of 10,000 and laughter
would have to be speeded up in a similar ratio. Simply as a
motor control problem, even if we are greatly downsized, this
appears to be unrealizable (atoms within our brains do not
now move many thousands of times faster than our arms).
The inertia of matter, which we cannot remove, will conflict
with the speed of thought, which in essence is free from mate-
rial considerations of inertia, that is the speed of computation
vs. the speed of motion: the speed of electrons and of photons
versus that of protons and neutrons leptons vs. hadrons.
The duration of orgasm seems to be more fixed in us than the
duration of thinking. The inherent time-link of a sigh, of a
caress, of a joyous leap all seem part of our nature we would