Thank you everyone for your patience -- videos of talks from the FQXi conference on Time are now trickling through. The first videos are from the session on Choice ("Our experience of the future is based on choice. How do we choose? Can we choose?).
(For an excellent write-up of the biology talks from this session, as well as more on McDermott's and Roediger's talks that we covered from the Memory session, visit Scientific American, where George Musser has been blogging like an editor possessed since the conference. You'll also find posts from him about some of the other sessions.)
First up, bioengineer Malcolm MacIver talking about electric fish and the evolutionary emergence of choice. Watch this if you want to know why the Amazonian electric fish doesn't swim straight when hunting, but instead pitches its body at an angle of 30 degrees. The answer takes us to the difference between how aquatic and land animals find and catch prey, thanks to the difference between the speed of light in air and water, and to questions about how consciousness (and the ability to make choices rather than just react to surroundings) may have evolved. (MacIver's slides are here.)
[youtube: dRDfwsuBNb4, 560, 340]
Oh and stay tuned to the end of the video to watch an electric fish orchestra (yes, an electric fish orchestra. MacIver: "This is the first electric fish composition, I sort of wondered if people would do things more John Cage like than eighties covers of Duran Duran.")
Next philosopher David Wallace does that thing philosophers are well known for: He framed one of the central questions of this conference ("Given the time symmetry of the equations of fundamental physics, how come the macroscopic world has such profound asymmetries in time?") in a precise and articulate way ("How come the methods we actually use to derive the equations of macro-physics from more fundamental physics manage to produce time-asymmetric outputs from time-symmetric inputs?"). (Slides on the "The Logic of the Past Hypothesis.")
More here:
[youtube: V00xrwBIAP0, 560, 340]
Neuroscientist David Eagleman's talk covered "relativity in the brain" (slides here). He talked about ways you can trick people in the lab into thinking that something happened before it did, by getting them press a button that causes a flash of light. His team deliberately introduced a slight lag in time between the button press and the flash, and our brains apparently calibrate that time delay as "simultaneous." Midway through the experiment his team shortened that delay by a tiny amount, confusing people into thinking the flash had appeared _before_ they pushed the button, though it did not.
Eagleman also talked about why time flies when you're having fun and seems to slow when you're in mortal danger (something he tested by throwing people off a tower, thankfully not at this meeting):
[youtube: 0VQ1KI_Jh1Q, 560, 340]
Philosopher Simon Saunders' video is still to come. But as a taster, I'll leave you with some of the questions from his talk, which examined the passage of time, framed in terms of consciousness and worldlines:
"Why is a thought so long and thin?"
"Why is it that, in the geometry of space-time, we are so long and thin?" (Stein)
"Why are atoms so small?" (Schrödinger)
"Why should an organ like our brain . . . of necessity consist of an enormous number of atoms, in order that its physically changing state should be in close and intimate correspondence with a highly developed thought?" (Schrödinger)