Red Alert! Shields up!

Here is a fascinating article on how we actually do, as well as how we alternately could and perhaps should, perceive our movement through time.

Welcome to the Future Nauseous
Venkatesh Rao (Venkat), 09 May 2012
ribbonfarm: experiments in refactored perception (blog)

[Teaser] “Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present. They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives…There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined...There are mechanisms that...prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak...The two beaten-to-death ways of understanding this phenomenon are due to McLuhan (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”) and William Gibson (“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”)...What is missing in both needs a name, so I’ll call the “familiar sense of a static, continuous present” a Manufactured Normalcy Field.”

I am highly resistant to change (nearly infinite ohmage), so I have constructed my normalcy field with a surface tension so taut, it requires a very powerful thrust to penetrate. A “future entity” will slowly but inexorably distend my bubble inward, until I suddenly take notice of the intrusion. At that point, the entity pops through the membrane, into my statically contrived present, and thus into my immediate consciousness. More often than not, I don't initially recognize this entity, which is usually discomfiting, and sometimes terrifying. My pattern-matching subroutines quickly engage the full capacity of my coprocessor, heating it up to the point at which one can smell wood burning.

Just because I may ultimately identify this entity, does not mean I will have adjusted to it.  I sit in my easy chair for a time, furtively glancing at the unwelcome presence, profoundly uncomfortable with the perturbation it has rudely visited upon my fragile emotional equilibrium. You might even say my anxiety produces the nausea mention in the title. Entropy eventually damps the disruption back into a newly balanced state. I can then stop looking at the thing, and get on with my life.

In the article, Venkat deals with the incorporation of such entities into one's normalcy field. However, just because I have been forced to embrace the change, I don't have to like it. Pardon me while I go barf.