I think I must improve my English significantly to understand the question :)

Apologies Martin - I must have phrased this terribly. I will try to rephrase.

Sorry, I didn't mean it as an objection to your question and I really believe that my misunderstanding is my fault. In general, I am very interested in multidisciplinary questions and problems. What do you mean by "delta accel"? This is the point where I got lost :) And what does it mean that we "appreciate it in awareness"? And I have no idea what the "pre-scalar magnitude is". I understand the word "aperiodic", but I don't know what object/entity is aperiodic in your considerations? Sorry for these trivial questions...

Hi Martin, no worries :) Thank you. By delta acceleration, I mean an awareness of the rate of change absent of an absolute dimension for either space or time. Since typically we describe acceleration as change in distance (or some other dimension) over some period of time (a unit of duration), what units should I use to describe a (continuous) valential appreciation that things in awareness seem to be changing more rapidly or less rapidly?

So far my understanding is that we tend to divide meanings of things by changes relative to last known "states" in time (by state I mean last known or least/most known prior awareness). I read in Hawking's book we do not consider either space (distance/extents) or time (the rate of change of anything) as absolutes. So I just wondered what projecting dimension we use to appreciate change relative to self. My guess is stochastic potential (since likelihood is kind of visceral and intuitive). But again - apologies! I am unfamiliar with the terminology I need to ask the question.

Mr. Meinecke,

Your description of acceleration, is in fact a description of speed. In physics, acceleration is the change of velocity over time. Velocity incorporates the concepts of speed and direction.

Is the term 'delta accell' something that Hawkings has written about. Would give me a citation to it? I might be interested in it. And then we might discuss it.

-Bob Dwyer

Thank you Robert, am very appreciative. I kind of see that absent of a vector of anything, we can't really know much about its future (or past by inference). But somehow - especially in consciousness studies in psychology - we can still "divine" that things are recurrent ("loci"), have pasts and futures, and can be "dimensioned" (where by dimension I mean any imaginary metric that persists to allow us to trace a history of something changing or unchanging). Thank you for describing my dilemma better than I do - speed is scalar magnitude, velocity is speed and direction, and acceleration is a derivative of velocity. (This part actually I am guessing from Dr. Susskind's free videos on relativity).

And this is where I get "fuzzy" - what is beneath a scalar magnitude but still appreciable anyway? It's got me wondering - in Brief History of Time, Hawking explains there is no absolute of space /or/ time, which is all we have (that I know of) to describe the above (d/dt, where the numerator is a kind of "spatial duration" and the denominator is a kind of time duration). That is, a "rate" of change for anything. But somehow we can tell anyway, that things in our conception are "arriving slower or faster" or departing the same way. Susskind described this as positive and negative acceleration, so I looked up a few things, and am sort of stuck on the apparent appreciation of change absent of either (predictable) magnitude or (predictable) direction. My only guess - it's a stochastic kind of thing (arrival of likelihood). Thank you for listening, apologies I have so little background to go on.

You wonder "what is beneath a scalar magnitude but still appreciable". This is an intriguing question. I think '3 meters', '10 seconds', and '5 miles per second' are examples of scalar magnitudes. But, when you ask what is beneath them, I don't know what your looking for. Can you give me more of a hint?

I have read the introduction to your RATE OF CHANGE-OBSERVANCE to get a better idea of your thinking. I'll read some more.

Dear Lonny,

Your question is, I suspect, too profound for people to easily catch on to, or to see that the terminology you use hides nothing other than a simple puzzlement about our experience of acceleration. I think you are re-voicing one of the great puzzles raised by William James in the later chapters of Principle of Psychology. We sense both movement and acceleration **at a time and at a place** yet this cannot be right since both movement and acceleration are always at more than one time and more than one place - or are they?

I would divide my thoughts into two here. Firstly, I do not think the absence of absolute space and time in physics matters. If I am in an elevator and sense a 'falling' downward acceleration that I have learned is in fact just the slowing of the upward rise of the cage at the 39th floor the sense of falling comes to my consciousness from a tiny flow of endolymph in my left vertical semicircular canal (the right side was damaged in infancy) that bends the hairs of hair cells and generates an electrical current. It is confirmed by a very slight 'unsqueezing' of the skin of my soles that also generates electrical currents in deformation receptors and other things. All these effects rely on relative space and time - things get nearer or further apart over maybe 100 milliseconds. So the body is using clocks and rulers to measure in relative terms without telling you it is doing it.

Secondly, all these effects get collated somewhere in the brainstem and give rise to some axonal signals that carry the message 'I'm falling'. They may carry a message 'Jesus!, I'm falling fast'. The falling is here and it is now, because these messages are always about here and now. And as Einstein said, there is no here and now in physics. Moreover, the Jesus! type message is not twice as long as the other one - not twice as anything. It is just a different signal in a different nerve fibre, or more likely set of signals in a set of fibres. According to some rules we have no understanding of these signals give a sense of 'delta accel' or falling but that sense is not something that can be subject to rulers and clocks - it exists in a space and time that have a here and now and which have **no metric**. You cannot put a ruler across your visual field, you can only put a ruler in the metric space that your sensed visual field is a non-metric sign of. If you sense five red roses in a row there is a sense of a distance between them but we have no reason to think that this arises from five signals each a certain distance apart. It is more likely to involve, for instance, a signal for 'there are five of them' and one for 'they are in a row'. The only rule we seem to have for this interface is that there ought to be enough possible signals to account for all the possible sensed scenes and that the signals should combine in a systematic way.

So the question of what is beneath a magnitude but still appreciable is a very important and interesting one that takes us out of the metric world of current physics totally and into the strange incommensurable relation between metric space and time and sensed non-metric space and time. This is the central question for the twenty-first century, on which we are still making not much of a start! Ironically, William James posed it in 1890 but everyone put it aside as too difficult. This time we are not entitled to bottle out.

Thanks so very much Jonathan - this is what I was hoping for. I actually have James' "Time Perception" chapter (and Zimbardo, and quite a few others) - so you are right there, for me.

Yes, now I have something to work with, thank you. The unit concept can only be conceived at the "outer boundary" of either sense -- not the element of acceleration -- that's what I hoped but was unsure. When we are aware, we "feel" there is an "all" and a "some", and the "some" changes with respect to the "all" - but whether temperature, or touch, or altitude, or any elevation (up or down of anything), all we know is the relationship between this relativity has "changed". The idea of a stable metric (dimension or unit of dimension relative to a linear expectation that there is a dimension) is a reliance on something unchanging which itself is only known to us as a change /differential/ initially. Kahneman has great thoughts on it, too. Thanks again Jonathan.