While discombobulating a sporadically, hideously dysfunctional fsm today, it occurred to me that I know exactly what that circuit feels. If it has a sense of purpose, that is, and cares about the outcome. Now, a state machine sleeps most of its life, waking only briefly, regularly, to check its context, do its simple task, update the context, and then goes back to sleep. We don't think much about this; that's just what a FSM does. Except when the bookmark gets shredded and displaced.
It occurred to me that I've felt this, personally, and it wasn't pleasant. Without boring you with the (illegal in this country) details, my clk got jumbled while vacationing in a resort in the Caribbean, on that big island just south of that other big one. Yeah, that one, the one that sings songs about ...
I became aware of this, being lost in time, not through any direct sensation or measure. The whole point is that I was then completely unable to sense or measure time. It came to me as an overwhelming nausea of spatial disorientation. I was lost, in other words, while walking the short, mostly straight walkway from the hot tub to my rented room. The sensation was that I had been putting one foot in front of the other for at least half of forever -- there's the temporal displacement -- and surely, I must be there by now. (I had in reality walked about 20 yards.) In the early tropical night and in the strange to me surroundings, I was hopelessly lost and unable to reorient myself through other means.
And so I've wondered over the years since, just how we measure time and navigate from place to place. Watching the sleeping jugheads around me drive the interstates, for example, I'm certain they've dialled down their clks, and are no longer completely aware of where they are.
So, there it is. The inescapable conclusion is that neurons are biological FFs and LUTs. We operate on a clk -- unmeasurable internally, since it also happens to drive the measurement devices -- driving the simple FSMs we built to keep our place in the four dimensions. We lose our place in three -- gravity takes care of the fourth -- when the bufg gets whacked.
I'm thinking right now, at the least, that perhpas I shouldn't have been so eager to poo-poo the poor guy and his FPGA everywhere idea recently. We
*are* the ultimate culmination of FPGAs.