Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sell illusory time for illusory money in the simulation, so espresso is illusory too, I'm afraid.
You haven't shown that "Illusion" is transitive
Nothing is real in the simulation, I believe.
Gödel and the unreality of time
51–60 of 132 posts
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#52Folks are asking about the practical import of time not passing---if indeed it does not. I know of this rather substantial one: my fear of death, and I guess that of other people too, depends on the notion that my own annihilation in time, and that of everything I care about, is absolute and definitive. Existence no longer has me as one of its inhabitants, and that's that. This picture is in its turn grounded on a pr…
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#53I once saw a fridge magnet that said "time is natures way of making sure everything doesn't happen all at once," and it's stuck with me.
The concept of time not being "real," can be useful as an exercise for modelling problems where to fully explore the problem space, you need to decouple your solutions from needing them to occur in an order or sequence.
From an engineering perspective, "removing" time means you can model problems abstractly by stepping back from a problem and asking, what are all possible states of the mechanism, then which ones are we implementing, and finally, in what order. This is different from the relatively stochastic approach most people take of "given X, what is the necessary next step to get to desired endstate."
More simply, as a tool, time helps us apprehend the states of a system by reducing the scope of our perception of them to sets of serial, ordered phenomena.
Whether it is "real," or an artifact of our perception is sort of immaterial when you can choose to reason about things with it, or without it. A friend once joked that math is what you get when you remove time from physics.
I look forward to the author's new book.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#54Folks are asking about the practical import of time not passing---if indeed it does not. I know of this rather substantial one: my fear of death, and I guess that of other people too, depends on the notion that my own annihilation in time, and that of everything I care about, is absolute and definitive. Existence no longer has me as one of its inhabitants, and that's that. This picture is in its turn grounded on a pr…
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain
Cute, but I think there is a substantial difference between not born and dead.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain
Cute, but I think there is a substantial difference between not born and dead.
I don't know why you think that. I think the safest assumption is that being dead will be exactly like not being born.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#56Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#57I once saw a fridge magnet that said "time is natures way of making sure everything doesn't happen all at once," and it's stuck with me. The concept of time not being "real," can be useful as an exercise for modelling problems where to fully explore the problem space, you need to decouple your solutions from needing them to occur in an order or sequence. From an engineering perspective, "removing" time means you can…
If I remember correctly, the full form of that joke is that time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once and space is nature's way of preventing everything from happening in Cambridge.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case the view in question (the B-theory of time) is supposed to be backed up by science: e.g., the Gödelian models in the OP, but, much more than that, the relativity of simultaneity. The RoS is really non-negotiable, and still entails that the actual world does not have a Newtonian absolute present.
While the RoS indicates that observers won't agree on the order of distant events, I don't think that it eliminates the possibility of an absolute present moment. You could simulate a system with relativistic physics just fine with a single global clock, just by adjusting the local simulation refresh rate to account for time dilation. Players might disagree on the order of events and the amount of time that had passe…
What is the benefit of the global clock, in that case?
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#59Folks are asking about the practical import of time not passing---if indeed it does not. I know of this rather substantial one: my fear of death, and I guess that of other people too, depends on the notion that my own annihilation in time, and that of everything I care about, is absolute and definitive. Existence no longer has me as one of its inhabitants, and that's that. This picture is in its turn grounded on a pr…
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain
There are links to Epicurean and Taoist philosophy.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#60Folks are asking about the practical import of time not passing---if indeed it does not. I know of this rather substantial one: my fear of death, and I guess that of other people too, depends on the notion that my own annihilation in time, and that of everything I care about, is absolute and definitive. Existence no longer has me as one of its inhabitants, and that's that. This picture is in its turn grounded on a pr…
Whether all moments of time exist in a hypothetical fashion or not, only one now exists to me subjectively - or at least so my memory of my subjectivity claims. Further, memory itself gives the impression of irreversible time.
Entropy gives the impression of irreversible time, as well.