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Gödel and the unreality of time

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Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#101

Post by komali2 »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #87
danenania wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an important consideration. A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. So we are left with something like Zeno’s paradox. We can get closer and closer and closer to death, but we will never reach the end. Could this lead to a form of eternal life? Your final living moment, subdivided endlessly, could play out as entire additional lifetimes in your experience.

>A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. As a former boxer who has been "knocked out", I have always speculated that feeling is akin to what death would "feel like" (that is, nothing at all). When you are knocked out (as aside from asleep) you have no experience. You don't dream, you don't feel has though time has passed - you don't feel anything. One second you are awake and aware and t…

This may not be everyone's experience, but I have been "lucky" enough to be choked out accidentally during some sparring sessions.

It doesn't always happen this way, but when it does it's insightful: I first get a very strong sense of "Wrong," as my understanding of the laws of physics vanish. If the choke has finished and I'm left standing but still going to black out, I'll probably topple at this point as I misunderstand gravity and forget about/lose control of my legs.

Enough of my ego will still be aware enough to have the thought "this is embarrassing, I've fallen," but it fades quickly as I lose understanding of why falling is bad, what embarrassment is, and what ground is. Then there will be a fading out of visual input (auditory goes before anything else), with my awareness quickly shrinking to a tiny ball of awareness, which visualizes itself as a bright speck of light surrounded by nothing. Panic will still exist and set in, as the speck loses subsystem after subsystem, not quite sure what is being lost but knowing things are, and feeling an encroaching blackness.

Eventually the only thing left is a feeble desire to not vanish, followed by nothing.

This might actually happen every time I get choked out, but only the right circumstances allow it to be "written" to memory.

It aligns with what friends have told me about near death experiences (heart attacks, overdose).

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#102

Post by gowld »

trgv wrote: post #55
taeric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being dead, like not being born, are both not being at all.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#103

Post by gowld »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #68
mcguire wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It gives to whom a single correct order of events and present state? Not to me. Only to "God", an entity external to the system.

Which is fine if you are a God (or programmer) building a simulation, but has no objective meaning to anyone inside.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#104

Post by gowld »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #49
goatlover wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will cease to have value when there's nobody left to value it.

It can value itself. After all, that's what it's doing now via us. It doesn't necessarily have to configure itself into something like a human to perceive and appreciate itself.

What is "it" when "it" is purely random noise? By definition and known physics, heat-death of the universe means there is absolutely no configuration.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#105

Post by gowld »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #28
Schiphol wrote: post #13

Folks 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…

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…

That's disproof of a binary notion of self. It doesn't disprove a statistical notion of self, which is a stronger sense of self than a purely uniform universal non-self existence.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#106

Post by gowld »

azeirah wrote: post #40
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

Has your perspective ever changed?

Have you ever had amnesia (loss of memory), or creation of false memory, via disease, injury, inebriation, or anesthesia? 99.99% likely you have.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#107

Post by gowld »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #45
azeirah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> _the fact that I perceive the world from "my" perspective remains constant_ That's only your perception because you have memory. If we copied your memories right now and put them in a robot body 3000 years from now, it would also have the illusion of a single continuous perspective.

And that robot would be me.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#108

Post by Karolus »

trgv wrote: post #55
taeric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think the safest assumption is that being dead will be exactly like not being born.

From a purely entropic and information theoretic standpoint, these are very different states and certainly not a safe assumption.

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#109

Post by gowld »

Ntrails wrote: post #33
SiempreViernes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The block universe doesn't mean a specific moment in time is all that is, it means that they all coexist. Dynamics in block universe is like reading a book: it seems things happen as you move your attention over the pages, but in truth the story was fixed before you even started.

Which is fine but it's not a meaningful change to the perspective of me on page 120 when I think "when we reach page 163 I will no longer feature in this novel". Our problems with death are, basically, ego. How you mentally model time and the universe doesn't take that away

M. Williams wrote a well-regarded treatise on this topic:

https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Book-Elephant-Piggie/dp/142313...

Re: Gödel and the unreality of time

#110

Post by vokep »

empath75 wrote: post #31
amplexian wrote: post #27

For those interested in the topic, I can't help but reccomend the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

I’m fairly certain that this isn’t covered at all in that book.

Not directly, but it is closely related. It still is likely to interest most who were interested by this article
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