Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!LOYVAX.BITNET!PGOETZ
From: PGOETZ@LOYVAX.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: I got rhythm
Message-ID: <19880915011053.7.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 15 Sep 88 01:10:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 33
Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu

Date: Fri, 9 Sep 88 10:12 EDT
From: PGOETZ%LOYVAX.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject:  I got rhythm
To: AILIST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU
X-Original-To:  AILIST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU, PGOETZ

Here's a question for anybody:  Why do we have rhythm?

Picture yourself tapping your foot to the tune of the latest Top 40 trash hit.
While you do this, your brain is busy processing sensory inputs, controlling
the muscles in your foot, and thinking about whatever you think about when
you listen to Top 40 music.

If you could write a conventional program to do all those things, each task
would take a different amount of time.  It would "consciously" perceive
time at varying rates, since a lot of time spent processing one task would
give it less time of "consciousness" (whatever that is.)  So if this program
were solving a system of 100 equations and 100 unknowns while tapping its
simulated foot, the foot taps would be at a slower rate than if it were
doing nothing else at all.

I suspect that the same would hold true of parallel programs and expert-
system paradigms.  For neural networks, an individual task would take the
same amount of time regardless of data, but some things require more subtasks.

It comes down to this:  Different actions require different processing
overhead.  So why, no matter what we do, do we perceive time as a constant?
Why do we, in fact, have rhythm?  Do we have an internal clock, or a
"main loop" which takes a constant time to run?  Or do we have an inadequate
view of consciousness when we see it as a program?

Phil Goetz
PGOETZ@LOYVAX.bitnet