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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

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

egjerlow wrote: post #63
EGreg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fun…

> Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness,

Theseus's ship is not a problem for materialistic views at all. A function of matter configuration is not the same as a function of matter. In the same way, a wave on water is constantly changing its material makeup, and yet you can still call it "the same wave".

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

Rich, i.e. non-trivial. That is, no tautologies or something slightly above tautology in the depth of information.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#82

Post by everdev »

I was really impressed by this 4d toys video: https://youtu.be/0t4aKJuKP0Q

Now what if time is an illusion and similar to the video objects in life simply appear to be bouncing in and out of our 3d realm? That would look a lot like time.

But if we could see in 4d, we'd see that they're not really coming or going and could see all of their possible states at once.

It might be like being able to see an entire movie all at once rather than frame by frame.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#83

Post by latexr »

vinceguidry wrote: post #21
7373737373 wrote: post #4

The word 'illusion' should be removed from every dictionary. It's one completely unspecific, indeterminate and misleading word and most subjects or patterns of discourse in which it appears have the same properties. The title of this post also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime Just searching for "* is an illusion" returns - consciousness - choice - spacetime - the world - physical reality - certaint…

Illusion can be tricky to understand, but not impossible. It means that the referent is not the same as the representation. When something isn't an illusion, it means the referent is the same as the representation. We have different words for different kinds of illusion. I can show you an actual, physical chair, or a picture of a chair. The first is not an illusion, while the second is. You watch a real television sh…

> I can show you an actual, physical chair, or a picture of a chair. The first is not an illusion, while the second is.

If the picture of the chair is so good that one mistakes it for a real chair, yes, otherwise I wouldn’t classify it as an illusion.

On a tangential note, people enjoying this discussion might enjoy the beginning of chapter two[1] (or even the whole book) of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”[2].

[1]: https://rhetoricsuperhero.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/mcclou...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#84

Post by klank »

cobbzilla wrote: post #68

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;…

> if ... the entire universe is essentially one uniform mass, wouldn't that mass then collapse upon itself, in a kind of big bounce?

de Sitter space is a vacuum solution for Einstein's field equations.

What this means is that the stress-energy tensor is basically "canceled out" everywhere by the uniform energy distribution. That means no point in spacetime experiences any field influence. That means no gravity, that means no collapse, just stasis.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

egjerlow wrote: post #40
TeMPOraL wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is the algorithm. What you call "consciousness" is how the computational processes that are you see themselves. It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't understand the reasons.

Well, that's a bold claim, and it doesn't really say anything substantial, in my opinion. What does it mean to see yourself? Are the electrical impulses of your brain somehow registering themselves and then reflecting them to yet another part of the brain which.. does what exactly? Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief.…

> Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief.

It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?

> Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.

This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.

> And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.

Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#86

Post by CharlesColeman »

7373737373 wrote: post #72
negamax wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read The Last Question if you haven't

And watch this: Timelapse of the future - A Journey to the End of Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

> Physicists increasingly suspect that there may be multiple universes beyond our own, each with their own unique laws of physics.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#87

Post by tialaramex »

Zaphods wrote: post #49
TeMPOraL wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is the algorithm. What you call "consciousness" is how the computational processes that are you see themselves. It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't understand the reasons.

The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No. The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a comp…

> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.

The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance.

In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime.

You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What? Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I simply won't believe it".

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#88

Post by egjerlow »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
Zaphods wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No. The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a comp…

> The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions No, it's not because of that. It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces c…

> as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.

Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. These are datapoints, they're just unfortunately not datapoints that can be used for scientific inquiry. But then again, there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.

Regardless of this, there is a reason to assume a big metaphysical mystery, simply because consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#89

Post by barberousse »

cobbzilla wrote: post #68

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;…

This is strangely approaching Nietzsche's notion of Eternal Return of the Same with the caveat that he additionally speculated that if particles and their configurations are finite, then moments in lived experience necessarily repeat themselves "at some point". This to him was the most gargantuan challenge to the Christian moral tradition since this eliminates any notion of Providence as well as the more general moral notion of "You could've done otherwise" since there's no value to considering timelines, not even from a "Best Possible World of All Worlds" sense.

Re: Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

#90

Post by z2 »

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber." -Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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