Russell,
To be fair, I should elaborate on my earlier post about amnesics and
psychotics. If I consider the actual cases I have seen, arguably they do
have *some* sense of the passage of time. Taking the first example, people
with severe Korsakoff Syndrome (due to chronic alcohol abuse) appear to be
completely incapable of laying down new memories. If you enter their room to
perform some uncomfortable medical procedure and they become annoyed with
you, all you have to do is step outside for a moment, then step back inside,
and they are all smiles again, so you can have another go at the procedure,
and repeat this as many times as you want. While you are actually in their
sight, however, they do recognise that you are the same person from moment
to moment, and they do make the connection between the needle you are
sticking into them and the subsequent pain, causing them to become annoyed
at you. So they do have a sense of time, even if only for a few seconds.
The second example, the disorganised schizophrenic, is somewhat more
complex. There is a continuum from mild to extreme disorganisation, and at
the extreme end, it can be very difficult to get any sense of what the
person is thinking, although it is quite easy to get a sense of what they
are feeling and it would be very difficult to maintain a belief that they
are not actually conscious (you really have to see this for yourself to
understand it). Usually, even the most unwell of these patients give some
indirect indication that they maintain some sense of time. For example, if
you hold out a glass of water, they will reach for it and drink from it,
which suggests that they may have a theory about the future, and how they
might influence it to their advantage. Occasionally, however - and I have to
confess I have not actually tried the experiment - there are patients who
seem incapable of even as simple (one could say near-reflexive) a task as
grabbing a glass of water. With treatment, almost all these people improve,
and it is interesting to ask them what was happening during these periods.
Firstly, it is interesting that they actually have any recollection. It is
as if the CPU was defective, but the data was still written to the hard
drive, to be analysed later. They might explain that everything seemed
fragmented, so that although they could see and hear things, the visual
stimuli did not form recognisable objects and the auditory stimuli did not
form recognisable words or other sounds. Furthermore, the various perceptual
data seemed to run into each other spatially, so that it was not possible to
distinguish background from foreground, significant from insignificant.
Catatonic patients, on the other hand, may (later, when better) describe a
state of total inertia, being stuck in the present moment, unable to move
either physically or mentally, unable to even imagine a possibility of
change from the present state, aware of everything going on around them as a
kind of extended simultaneity.
--Stathis Papaioannou
>On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 11:02:18PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> > Dear aet.radal ssg,
> >
> > I think you missed my point about the amnesic and psychotic patients,
>which
> > is not that they are clear thinkers, but that they are conscious despite
>a
> > disability which impairs their perception of time. Your post raises an
>...
>
>As I said before, I think this is a valuable contribution, but not
>something I know how to deal with at this point in time. Presently,
>these psychotic patients account for only a fraction of conscious
>observers (assuming they are conscious as you say they are). Quantum
>Mechanics only requires that most observers have their own time like
>domain, not that all of them do. I'm still not convinced that TIME
>isn't a necessary property of observerhood, as opposed to a likely
>contingent one, but there the debate stagnates, as I'm not an expert
>in psychiatry.
>
>I did want to throw one more po thought. Even though standard QM is
>based on continuous time, nowhere does TIME require time to be experienced
>continuously. It could just as easily be the Cantor set, say. Might not
>the time experienced by these psychotic people be a fractal set like
>that, or are you saying they have absolutely no sense of time at all?
>
>Cheers
>
>--
>*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
>is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
>virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
>email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
>may safely ignore this attachment.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
>Mathematics 0425 253119 (")
>UNSW SYDNEY 2052 R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
>Australia
>http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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Received on Mon May 09 2005 - 23:24:21 PDT