They say that there's a brief interlude, measured in milliseconds, between the moment a thought arises in the cellular goop of our brain and the moment our conscious mind becomes aware of that thought. That gap, they say, swallows up our free will and all its attendant niceties. After the fact, we pretend that something we think of as "our self" came up with something we think of as "our thought," but that's all just make-believe. In reality, they say, we're mere automatons, run by some inscrutable Oz hiding behind a synaptical curtain. The same thing goes for sensory perception. What you see, touch, hear, smell are all just messages from the past. It takes time for the signals to travel from your sensory organs to your sense-making brain. Milliseconds. You live, literally, in the past. Now is then. Always. As the self-appointed chronicler of realtime, as realtime's most dedicated cyber-scribe, I find this all unendurably depressing. The closer our latency-free networks and devices bring us to realtime, the further realtime recedes. The net trains us to think not in years or seasons or months or weeks or days or hours or even minutes. It trains us to think in...

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/06/real-realtime.php