Next
Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 24 Jun 2013

Taken: 13 Apr 2012

0 favorites     2 comments    103 visits

See also...

Keywords

Mary Lamb •
Table •
Excerpt •
The Consciousness Instinct •
Author •
Michael Gazzaniga •

Authorizations, license

Visible by: Everyone
All rights reserved
103 visits

Photo by Dinesh

.........................
When in the breakfast-room we meet,
At the social table round,
Listening to the lively sound
Of those notes which never tire,
Of urn, or kettle on the fire.
.....................

Except: "Breakfast" ~ Mary Lamb
Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Physicists soon accepted the idea that what we perceive in the macro world as continuous (rather than billions of individual atoms), say a dinning room table, is merely a simulated averaging process in what the applied mathematician, physicist, and all around polymath John von Neumann later called “a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature.” He went on to say, “To simulation is such that man generally perceived the sun of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes.” What “the leveling law of large numbers” means is that the motions of all those particles together cancel one another out, and thus the table stays in one place and isn’t shimmying across the floor. When we see a solid table, however, it is an illusion, a symbolic representation, created by our brain, to denote what is really there. It is a very good illusion that delivers good information, which allows us to function effectively in the world. ~ page 170

THE CONSCIOUSNESS INSTINCT
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.