Friday, November 16, 2007

Total Responsibility IV – Drug Interactions

At first glance, believing I am totally responsible for the state of the world might seem like a clear manifestation of megalomania. But there is nothing unique about me in terms of my total responsibility for the shape of the world as I perceive it. As of this writing there are over 6.6 billion human observers on this planet, each of whom is totally responsible for the state of the world as he or she sees it. This means that you are also totally responsible for the shape of the world as you perceive it.

This is possible because total responsibility for the state of the world is continuously moving between its causally consistent, temporally sequenced observers. For instance, though my uniqueness is shaping my perception of the world around me, the uniqueness of each being observing me (including my future self) is shaping its perception of me as an inhabitant of its world. In the context of the finite speed of light, my observers all reside in my future (beyond my perspective) and thus their uniqueness is responsible for how they see me; while everything that I am observing (i.e., the contents of my perspective) resides in my past, making my uniqueness responsible for how I see them.

To appreciate this, imagine that you and I are sitting in the same room, about 3 meters apart. Though we both think we are residing at the same point in time (“the present”) each of us is actually at least 1 x 10-8 seconds in the future of the person we are seeing across the room. This is because each of us is seeing the other using light that took that long to travel (at ~3 x 108 meters/second) from them to us (plus the extra time required for the light entering our eyes to be converted to the mental image in our brains).

In general I am displaced into the future from anything I perceive, by the amount of time it took the signal by which I perceive it to cross the distance between us and be processed into a mental image (as such, I reside about 8 minutes in the future of the sun that I see in the sky). These signal propagation delays insure that each of us only perceives phenomena that reside in our past and is being perceived by observers that reside in our future.

As a result, at this instant in time my uniqueness is totally responsible for shaping my perception of everything around me. The uniqueness of other observers who perceive me from my future will shape their perception of me (and thus this instance of me is not responsible for the shape of the world they see). My successor’s uniqueness will subsequently shape my perception of these observers if/when I observe them from their future (thus assuming total responsibility for the shape of the world I perceive then), and so on in a continuous game of total responsibility hot potato. This time-slicing scheme allows each of the potentially limitless temporal observers to be totally responsible for the shape of the world it perceives.

Note, I am aware that this scheme represents a fundamental violation of normal causality in that the future is shaping the past. There is a rational explanation of this that I will provide in a future post.

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