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Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

nautil.us

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Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#61

Post by 7373737373 »

ZeroFries wrote: post #56
hunta2097 wrote: post #5

I live by a couple of (vaguely related) principles: a) Consciousness is just your brain trying to anticipate the future. b) Your brain compresses (normalises?) repetition in memories. So even if day to day events happen at normal speed, the years seem to fly by when you reflect on them. If your life seems to be flying-by then maybe you need more novelty.

Sorry to be blunt, but that's not a very good response to the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Unfeeling matter becomes feeling when its changes are related to the future? How does that work?

From the Integrated Information Theory link below:

Intrinsic existence: To account for the intrinsic existence of experience, a system constituted of elements in a state must exist intrinsically (be actual): specifically, in order to exist, it must have cause-effect power, as there is no point in assuming that something exists if nothing can make a difference to it, or if it cannot make a difference to anything. Moreover, to exist from its own intrinsic perspective, independent of external observers, a system of elements in a state must have cause-effect power upon itself, independent of extrinsic factors. Cause-effect power can be established by considering a cause-effect space with an axis for every possible state of the system in the past (causes) and future (effects).

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#63

Post by egjerlow »

EGreg wrote: post #47
egjerlow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we need to 'feel' anything from the inside? We could operate perfectly well as 'machines' without having this 'feeling'. Also, consciousness isn't a feeling. It is what makes it possible at all to have a subjective experience of feelings in the first place. And that is mind-blowing the more you think of it.

How do you know that what you say about consciousness isn’t just a language game you play where you define words in terms of other words that are hardly connected to anything? “What it is like to be a bat” “What it is like to experience something” After having seen descriptions of all the physical components of experience: “It is Qualia! What it is like to see red” Having been described all the differences between se…

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. I would certainly say consciousness is 'something more', and that this something more has to be something non-material (or at least using 'materials' that have wildly different properties than what we observe using the scientific method).

Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness, for, by that account, consciousness should be a function of your material makeup, and yet, it remains constant despite change in both what makes up your cells and the specific configuration of those cells.

As for RICH I don't know what that means.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#64

Post by vinceguidry »

7373737373 wrote: post #43
davebryand wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An enlightened yogi, Hindi, or Buddhist would say that the physical chair is also an illusion.

Why, do you think? Because they reasoned that in the mind, everything can refer to anything else?

Enlightenment is the destruction of the perception that there is a separate watcher apart from the watched. Non-duality. Not-two. Just one. Since illusion requires three elements, the non-dual is just one element, there is no illusion.

Any time you step 'outside', like if you look at a chair, you're dwelling in illusion. Mind generated a 'tag' for the thing you're seeing. It's not really a chair, it's a bundle of atoms. But there's no bundle of atoms, that's also a tag generated by mind. The mind itself isn't what you think it is. Everything is an illusion.

Tricky to understand until you realize there's no such thing as enlightenment, it's just a religious dogma. Enlightened yogis are no different than the rest of us.

One can train the mind to perceive fewer distinctions, this is yogic practice. You can even arrive at a state of mind that you can call enlightenment. But the lie is revealed any time you open your mouth. The state of mind that is being trained is an illusion like everything else.

Real yogis understand this and do it anyway. Fake yogis try to fool you into believing that you can truly get rid of everything and 'merely exist'. It's not an illusion at this point, it's a lie.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#66

Post by egjerlow »

Falling3 wrote: post #57
egjerlow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would your brain need consciousness to anticipate the future? A computer, which has no consciousness, would be able to do the same.

Who said our brains _needed_ consciousness to anticipate the future? The only claim I've seen is that it's (part of?) the particular mechanism our brains happen to use. This is akin to asking why birds need to flap their wings to fly when we have airplanes that can fly with fixed wings.

What I'm saying is that consciousness doesn't add anything to the art of 'predicting the future', and plays (as far as I can see) no discernable role in this art.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#67

Post by 7373737373 »

dqpb wrote: post #60
7373737373 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because consciousness is unitary (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory ), it would be intuitive if all consciously accessible information converged at a single physical location. In this theory, simple feed-forward networks aren't conscious. From what I've read about ego-death, it doesn't seem necessary to consciously sense the self-concept, which would be self-awareness.

I wouldn't put much weight behind ego death

I don't understand. Do you think its necessary to have a self-concept in order to exist intrinsically?

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#68

Post by cobbzilla »

I find this quote fascinating:

"What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium; de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."

I am not a cosmologist, but if all of space reached thermal equilibrium, if space does have any mass (perhaps a tiny amount from the dark energy it contains?), and the entire universe is essentially one uniform mass, wouldn't that mass then collapse upon itself, in a kind of big bounce?

If that is true, then time never really ends, it just "slows down" a lot (not much can happen, and not terribly quickly) until the next sparkup, whereupon time speeds up dramatically (inflationary theory).

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#69

Post by nikolasavic »

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/073521610...) is an amazing and eye opening book on the topic of time. Carlo, a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity, slowly peels back the layers of the conceptual onion to get to some pretty strange fundamental truths about time.

As a side note, the Audible book is read by Benedict Cumberbach and is a delightful listen.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#70

Post by loblollyboy »

Whatever time is, our favorite way to 'pass' it is by generate entropy. Chemistry explains inorganic things, those inorganic things become increasingly complex, eventually able to reproduce somehow, so you look to biology for explanation. You get evolutionary biology which might kind of explain how we came to be (super-self aware beings, capable of perceiving things, like time for example, or creating the internet to share ideas, or cars to commute). Then social/behavioral sciences attempt to explain us specifically. But even more fundamental than that first step (chemistry) is physics and math. And physics and math tell us that we are moving to a state of more entropy. Sometimes it feels like this is the best explanation for why we behave the way we do (driving to jobs we hate to do nothing important, making nuclear bombs, etc.).

End result is we're fked!

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