Simultaneous Actions

[Truth_and_Liberty]

Thanks AJ for that explanation. You seem to be saying an action is a decision, and decisions occur at points in time. In other words, that actions (at least actions like writing and scratching) have no duration. Once the decision is made, the body ‘implements’ the decision, but since the mind is not controlling the body after the decision has been made (assuming the action has been ‘mastered’ according to your definition), it is merely behaviour that has duration.

I’m wondering what is happening between the decision points (actions) on your ruler. Am I not acting during these periods? Or am I deliberating (i.e. evaluating and comparing possible actions) during these periods? Is deliberation itself an action, the end being “to have made a decision”? Are deliberation actions the only kinds of actions that have duration?

[Truth_and_Liberty]

@nir

But I ask you, at the time you were observed ‘writing’ and ‘scratching’, was your mind a unity that acted in a way that externally could be interpreted as two behaviours or should your mind be interpreted as having undergone a sort of division, cleaving neatly into precisely two sub minds, each responsible for their own discrete parallel task? and thereby excluding an interpretation of a ‘super-task’ as far fetched?

I don’t think my consious mind divides into sub-minds. I can only think about one thing at a time. If at some moment my body is doing something totally unrelated to what’s in my consious mind at that moment, that just means either a) the behaviour was not guided by my mind at all (like breathing), or b) that my mind ‘set the task going’ and then withdrew, letting the body (perhaps with the unconsious mind) do the behaviour without any further input from the consious mind (like scratching).

@nir

At the least I think its reasonable to posit ‘cross-talk’ between such operational units, and as such I see it as more helpful than mystifying to interpret a super task as existing through which the subtasks are invoked and controlled.

I don’t know what you mean by ‘cross-talk’.

Would you say that in my example scratching is a subtask of the supertask writing? So a subtask might be defined as an action/behaviour that is not made impossible by some longer action/behaviour. So writing-scratching can take a supertask-subtask relationship, but writing-catching could not, since I cannot catch a ball and continue writing at the same time… not enough hands.

Also, is there a difference between the terms “task” and “action”?

[GREGDREW]

DD5 says: And also, chill out!

Fair enough, reading that statement now sounds much more cranky than I intended. I was just really exited to know what definition it was!

AJ really cleared that up nicely, thanks for the answers and trulib for bringing up a great question.

[Truth_and_Liberty]

@DD5

No two or more events can literally occur simultaneously. There is no finite resolution of time that one can use to actually determine simultaneous events. The term is mostly useful in everyday speech to describe multiple non-simultaneous events that occur at relatively close time intervals.

I don’t understand this. Are you using the above definition of simultaneous? Then your first sentence becomes ‘no two or more events can literally occur at the same time.’ Events is a very broad term. “Me typing” and “you reading” are two events, but surely these events can happen at the same time? I must be missing your point. Can you clarify?

@DD5

Synchronous on the other hand is a very useful technical and scientific term that can be precisely measured and applied. Synchronous events, in the technical and scientific use of the term, never occur simultaneously, but at a fixed time interval in relation to each other. The events can be years apart, but still synchronous. It is obvious that this concept can only apply to multiple devices, systems, or actors. Never to a single operating (or acting) unit.

But why couldn’t two synchronous events also occur at the same time? Like a machine screwing on a toothpaste cap and an identical machine next to it doing the same thing. The events are synchronous (by definition #2 and #3b) and if the two machines are also set into motion at the same moment, these synchronous events are happening at the same time (i.e. definition #1 as well). Unless your definition of synchronous is #3b, #2 AND NOT #1. Or maybe I am not getting your point here either.

[nirgrahamUK]

by cross-talk i mean communication by electronic or chemical signalling between sub-systems in the brain.

I switched to the language of ‘tasks’ because I have background in IT where a main program spawns ‘threads’ on which it performs ‘tasks’ and it tends to do so to fulfill some overaching task it has been programmed to accomplish. I can agree that we dont need to use that term when talking about human action for which ‘actions’ and ‘behaviours’ is probably enough.

[Amanojack]

@trulib

Thanks AJ for that explanation. You seem to be saying an action is a decision, and decisions occur at points in time. In other words, that actions (at least actions like writing and scratching) have no duration. Once the decision is made, the body ‘implements’ the decision, but since the mind is not controlling the body after the decision has been made (assuming the action has been ‘mastered’ according to your definition), it is merely behaviour that has duration.

Re: “no duration” - not zero duration, but generally relatively brief, yes.

Re: “behavior” - might be clearer to say “physical movements”

@trulib

I’m wondering what is happening between the decision points (actions) on your ruler. Am I not acting during these periods?

You’re not acting during those times, at least praxeologically speaking - or at least not performing any actions related to writing or scratching.

When we zoom in on the ruler, to see the finer structure of the individual decisions involved in writing/scratching, we may find that there are micro-decisions being made even more quickly. Instead of decisions about which word to type, they might be decisions about how exactly to place the fingers, etc. Things that are by now probably so fast for the average typist that they could long since have been called subconsious. But I mean conscious vs. subconscious only as a matter of speed, or more precisely, of duration in the short-term memory. In my normal state of awareness, anything that takes less than - say - a tenth of a second might usually go beyond my notice (or more precisely, I will notice it but then immediately forget it). So I think the answer about deliberations is that they are made up of little mini-decisions, and perhaps those mini-decisions are made of an even finer patter of micro-decisions, etc., in quasi-fractal fashion, on down to perhaps individual neurons or whatever it may be. But obviously as soon as I go beyond what I’ve actually observed in my own consciousness, it is pure theory and speculation.