Subconscious Storytelling

"The" is the most frequently used word overall in the English language, followed by "be," "to," "of," and, "a," "in," "that," "have," and "I," according to the "Concise Oxford English Dictionary." The most used noun is "time," and on the list of top 25 nouns there are many more time related words, like "year," "day," and "week."

_{Image by geralt - source: Pixabay}

Another rather remarkable, and maybe disturbing fact about our word-usage is that "war" lands at number 49, while "peace" doesn't even make the top 100... And that "man" is at number seven, while "woman" sits at number 14... But that's for another time.

Time is central in our understanding of the world around us, hence the prominent place in the list of most used nouns. Humans are considered special, when compared to other animals, because of their ability to incorporate time in their understanding of the world, especially over large periods of time; we are able to remember the past, extrapolate possible futures and choose our actions such that we realize the future that suits us best, as well as actions that avoid futures we don't find that attractive. We experience the passing of time, we feel our experiences unfolding in a linear way, in which things happen one after another, B following A and C being caused by B.

The problem is that this linear succession of events is being presented to us by our consciousness, and with "time" and "consciousness" we're talking about subjects that are basically still a mystery to us. There's no generally accepted scientific definition for either of these. When it comes to time, there are two main schools of thought called "eternalism" and "presentism." In presentism, neither the past or the future exist, only the "now" is real. The general consensus however is that of eternalism, largely due to Einsteins block model of the universe, in which past, present and future exist together in four dimensional space-time.

Whichever model is right, it's through our conscious experience that we are aware of the passing of time. Presentism and eternalism are both plausible when looking at our conscious experience of time, as it's true that only our experience of the present is real, but we also have the ability of mental time travel, the capacity to reconstruct in our minds past events, as well as imagine possible future scenarios. And we know that of all possible future scenarios, imaginable or not, one of them will become our present reality...

_{colour changing card trick}

All of the above is true only under the assumption that we indeed experience reality in a linear way, and that's another problem. There is lots of evidence that we do not experience reality in a linear fashion, that we can not consciously understand reality if that reality is presented to us in a linear, sequential succession of events. The easiest way to understand this is, again, language. When we read or hear a sentence, we do not, in our conscious minds, consume them word by word or syllable by syllable. Take the sentence "the mouse pad is next to the keyboard" and then "the mouse is hungry." The meaning of the word "mouse" only becomes clear after reading the following words; it seems that the subconscious mind first assembles parts of reality, to then offer them to the conscious mind only after there's enough information to make sense of that reality.

We know that colors don't exist; in the natural world there are only electromagnetic waves of different lengths, of which a tiny small bandwidth is interpreted by our brains as visible light and colors. But my perception of green differs from yours; the color exists only in our heads, as part of the world-model, the interpretation of reality presented to us by our consciousness. Reality seems like a story told to our consciousness by our subconscious minds. The fact that all fundamental laws and equations of physics are reversible in time, has many believe that time is indeed only an illusion of our minds. That the sequential modeling of events is somehow gives us an evolutionary advantage.

This is all in accordance with the widely accepted view that our brains are constantly trying to predict the future, even fills in our field of view to include things, or exclude them, we don't consciously pay attention to; watch the above video to experience how good we are at excluding things, and how blind we actually are. For a deeper dive into the relationship between enigmatic consciousness and incomprehensible time, please watch the Google talk by Dean Buonomano linked below. Fair warning; my brain hurt a little, but it was worth it.

_{Dean Buonomano: "Your Brain is a Time Machine" | Talks at Google}

---

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep steeming!

Recent articles you might be interested in:

Latest article >>>>>>>>>>>	I've Got Nothing To Hide
Einstein On Socialism	I'm Not Racist
All Opinions Are Equal	The War On War
Fleeting Essence Of Identity	Hitchen's Razor On Capitalism

Thanks for stopping by and reading. If you really liked this content, if you disagree (or if you do agree), please leave a comment. Of course, upvotes, follows, resteems are all greatly appreciated, but nothing brings me and you more growth than sharing our ideas. It's what Steemit is made for!

I am a proud helpinaut! @Helpie is looking for new members! Helpie has been growing nicely and we are always on the lookout for new valuable members. We are very supportive and community oriented. If you would like to be scouted for @helpie , please drop a comment on THIS POST or contact @paintingangels on discord at paintingangels(serena)#3668.

Just for Full Disclosure, I'm invested in these crypto-currencies:

Bitcoin | Litecoin | EOS | OmiseGo | FunFair | KIN | Pillar | DENT | Polymath | XDCE | 0x | Decred | Ethereum | Carmel | XYO



@helpie is a WITNESS now! So please help @helpie help you by voting for us here!