Technoprovement: The Blog of Sam Jones

I’ve been thinking a lot about the brain’s relationship with consciousness lately. I realize that while I don’t recall my birth, its fairly assured that I did experience it, and consciously at that with all that screaming and crying that I’m positive accompanied the event. My ability to recall memories, and even my understanding of the world around me is undoubtedly a function of the facilities present in my brain. Yet, I was still conscious and existing at a time where those facilities weren’t yet performing. I existed, in a sense, without my brain.

So where am I going with all this you ask. Remember when you where a kid and years seemed to go a lot slower? Well, a new year in your life was a much larger percentage of your total conscious existence. From age 4 to age 5 (probably right around your earlier memories that you can recall) you experienced a total of 25% more lifespan. Now, one more year in your life results in a much smaller additional percentage. Your perception of time is completely based on this.

I think the clock begins to swing the opposite way as we approach death. As you go down to your last seconds of life, and then milliseconds and microseconds, your perception of time will spike to infinity like the limits we learned about in Calculus. You won’t be existing as part of the world we live in and understand now, because you step off that bus and approach infinity, but it doesn’t end.

It just stretches, forever.

(apologies to American Beauty)