For those curious, the paper (or at least a paper) on the subject:
Gödel and the unreality of time
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#62got reminded of the book "Siddhartha" by hermann hesse
"After listening to the river, Siddhartha’s biggest insight is that time is an illusion and that life is not a continuum of events, but instead is omnipresent. Eternity springs from the world’s unity. Understanding the past and the future as part of the present is a major component of achieving enlightenment."
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You haven't shown that "Illusion" is transitive
Nothing is real in the simulation, I believe.
That's a different point than the one you were making!
And I didn't mean illusory in opposition to real. Is the pleasure I derive from an illusory steak in the Matrix not real?
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#64Folks 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…
How do you decide that your new view is valid and is not based on your need to lessen the fear of death. I have problems with this with every new thing I try to use to make death more palatable, be it religion, philosophy or anything else. I just cannot believe in anything because I feel its just a convenient way to make the fear smaller. How can any view be valid if its based on self interest?
What's wrong with self interest? That's a serious question.
I don't mean that in a nihilistic, nothing is true, everything is permissible way. Nor do I mean it's ok to arbitrarily pick fantasies to believe, especially if that leads us to imposing the consequences of those beliefs on other people. There are few beneficial delusions. The question is, what do you care about in life and what are your goals.
How you choose to think about things is a tool you can use to help you on a productive path. If a certain way of thinking helps you maintain an even keel mentally, then that can be useful. It doesn't take blind faith, you don't have to exclude the possibility of alternate explanations, keeping an open mind is fine, but if this is a plausible possibility then why not take some comfort from that? It doesn't necessarily mean you're compromising any of your principles to do so.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Can't we value things that will exist in a future where we no longer belong?
We can value whatever, but eventually there won't be anyone left to do the valuing. Impermanence doesn't stop us from valuing, but impermanence does guarantee that value won't last. Which may or may not bother us now, depending on how existentially grumpy we feel in the moment. But luckily, those feelings are impermanent as well.
All true, but of course the point of the idea we're discussing here is that there may not be any reason to assign special weight to the value of things in the present or the future, over the value of things in the past.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#66I 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…
What does the idea of time not being real have to do with thinking about a system across different points in times in its evolution?
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a better way to look at your mortality, I think, which is to realize that your conception of self is flawed. Try this as an exercise: determine precisely which part of you is "you", the part that if it were to change or cease to exist would make you a different person. What you'll find is that there isn't one. Every part of what you are has changed and evolved over time. Then ask yourself why it is that peopl…
There's one conception of self that I consider fairly constant, my ability to consciously perceive what's going on around me. Despite the fact that all of my body's cells get replaced completely every 7 years, _the fact that I perceive the world from "my" perspective remains constant_ Apart from that, I don't believe in a self. I assume, that when I die, this perspective goes away as well, I consider death to equal a…
Have you really been continually conscious throughout that time though?
Recent thinking about this in neurology is that we are not. We're not concious most of the time we are asleep, and in fact are unaware of our own thoughts much of the time we are awake. Arguably when we are 'lost in the moment' or acting on instinct or training there's really not much conscious cognition going on because frankly it just gets in the way. It seems likely that conscious thought is something we only do as and when we need or want to, but we spend much of our time in an 'animal' state.
Have you ever been reading a book and someone had to poke you to make you aware of them? The auditory processing parts of your brain were simply not functioning. We switch on and off different faculties of the brain all the time, and immediate conscious awareness of the present is just another one of those.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It gives you a single "correct" order of events, and a single present state.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a better way to look at your mortality, I think, which is to realize that your conception of self is flawed. Try this as an exercise: determine precisely which part of you is "you", the part that if it were to change or cease to exist would make you a different person. What you'll find is that there isn't one. Every part of what you are has changed and evolved over time. Then ask yourself why it is that peopl…
There's one conception of self that I consider fairly constant, my ability to consciously perceive what's going on around me. Despite the fact that all of my body's cells get replaced completely every 7 years, _the fact that I perceive the world from "my" perspective remains constant_ Apart from that, I don't believe in a self. I assume, that when I die, this perspective goes away as well, I consider death to equal a…
> I assume, that when I die, this perspective goes away as well, I consider death to equal a total loss of consciousness ability to percieve.
The perspective goes away, but the ability to perceive is not part of the perspective. An old telescope goes offline, but the scientist is still there, peering through other telescopes. The body dies, but that which experiences the world through it doesn't.
This is from "the perennial philsophy" (cf. Aldous Huxley), if you want to look into it, though a bit esoteric and not easy to find a contemporary simple explanation of it.
Re: Gödel and the unreality of time
#70Folks 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
Here's a different take, another thought experiment Re: death, from Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death:
“We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.”
[Edit: Frued->Freud]