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A small variant of this argument highlights the mystery of our perception of now: Does the universe exist in the past and future? Suppose the universe is akin

A small variant of this argument highlights the mystery of our perception of now: Does the universe exist in the past and future? Suppose the universe is akin to a sequential state machine or computer. You have the previous state, some rules which are executed by the machinery of the universe and the next state. In principle you could record all of the sequential states of the universe- each state is one page of a book for example. In all of this where does the sense of now come from? Is it in the execution of the rules? Why? Or is the existence of the state itself that leads to "now"? But this is implying that one page of the book (the "now" page) is somehow more special than any of the other pages. Why?

FeepingCreature 11y ago
A page is "special" in the sense that a location in memory is special when it's the current address. It's not the page, it's the relation between the page and the words on the page that are referring to the page. "Now" is a state of relation between a mind and a timeslice. This is confusing because the state is two-dimensional - time is a line from past to future, but each mind in each point on it contains a model of time that has its own past and future. The sense of ordering of time that arises in conscious experience is a side effect of causality - if you think about how brains work, the question "why is the present the present and not the past or the future" is actually incoherent, a confusion about mind instead of a confusion about reality. By definition, we perceive the present as the point at which we are "currently" introspecting about perception. Imagine somebody moved the entire universe and all matter in it thirty minutes into the future. Would you notice any difference? Brains run on physics. Every story in your mind has, by necessity, a purely physical narrative behind it.
throwupper247 11y ago
>Did or will the universe exist in the past or future Fixed. See, you just confirmed ThomPete's argument https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871743 you use the wrong tense and the whole logic falls appart. I didn't even read on.

FeepingCreature 11y ago

A page is "special" in the sense that a location in memory is special when it's the current address. It's not the page, it's the relation between the page and the words on the page that are referring to the page. "Now" is a state of relation between a mind and a timeslice. This is confusing because the state is two-dimensional - time is a line from past to future, but each mind in each point on it contains a model of time that has its own past and future. The sense of ordering of time that arises in conscious experience is a side effect of causality - if you think about how brains work, the question "why is the present the present and not the past or the future" is actually incoherent, a confusion about mind instead of a confusion about reality. By definition, we perceive the present as the point at which we are "currently" introspecting about perception. Imagine somebody moved the entire universe and all matter in it thirty minutes into the future. Would you notice any difference? Brains run on physics. Every story in your mind has, by necessity, a purely physical narrative behind it.

throwupper247 11y ago

>Did or will the universe exist in the past or future Fixed. See, you just confirmed ThomPete's argument https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871743 you use the wrong tense and the whole logic falls appart. I didn't even read on.