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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.
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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 subj…
It's successful at explaining everything that can be explained in material terms, yes! Science is really good at it.
>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.
I cannot see how any one of those things you mentioned have to do with the utter strangeness that is subjective experience? I'm not saying a brain cannot perform computations, if that's what you're getting out of this. Why you mention a computer I don't know - there is nothing that indicates a computer has subjective experience and nothing about a computer makes me believe that creating subjective states is something that can be done with atoms alone. And that is what is 'magical' about this line of reasoning.
>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.
See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.
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.
I got this worldview from Hawkins & Blakeslee's book On Intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence
One side effect is it changed my strategy (coping mechanisms) for reality, truth, beliefs from Popperian to who has the best prediction engines. This has allowed me to disengage from contemporary rhetoric (culture wars) about science (eg creationism), allowing me to better relate to certain friends and family.
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;…
The main point of thermodynamic time is to describe the idea that time appears to be moving forward. According to fundamental physics, as far as we can tell, time is symmetric (with a few caveats). So going forward in time should look similar to going backwards in time, just like going to the left in deep space is the same as going to the right. But the fact that we are in a pocket of high entropy means that time has an apparent direction.
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This is true. You also need to take into account how each day is a smaller and smaller percentage of your life which might be why kids think summer vacation lasts forever but it flys by for parents.
This explanation comes up frequently in these discussions. It makes a certain amount of sense on its face, but is there any evidence that this actually affects our perception of time?
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> 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 wh…
I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen.
> there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.
There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality. And to be clear - I'm not saying that as someone who has Faith in Science (as opposed to religion). It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense.
> 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
But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.
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 mora…
I don't know much about Nietzsche, but this statement does not seem correct. One can have infinite configurations of a finite number of particles. The only way a finite number of particles would imply finite configurations would be (a) space is finite, and (b) space is not continuous. That is, if you imagine the universe as composed of discrete slots in which particles must exist, and the number of slots is finite, then his idea makes sense. But, is there a reason to think this?
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> 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 subj…
> 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? It's successful at explaining everything that can be explained in material terms, yes! Science is really good at it. >This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing i…
Personally, I don't see a basis to believe there's something more to it. I'd look at the cluster of atoms in your brain and say this is anger. This is the computational process that is anger in your brain. I don't see a meaningful difference between this and doing the same to a computer - I could point at a cluster of atoms and EM fields in the CPU and say, "this is factorization of numbers; this is how the cryptographic routine this CPU executes manifests". Why would there be anything else here?