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No, I think that's quite backward. The only reason you (not "we" as a species) believe in something called "time" is because you think you've experienced it. Yo

No, I think that's quite backward. The only reason you (not "we" as a species) believe in something called "time" is because you think you've experienced it. You may protest and say "no, here's a picture of yesterday," but that picture does not prove anything [1]. Your belief requires a series of (perfectly reasonable) inferences which could nonetheless be wrong. But most of all, it depends on the compelling feeling you have that time is passing. And that is an illusion. You may have a faint sense of what I mean by those words, but without inspecting your experience very precisely, it will probably remain no more than a curiosity. Time, space, matter, objective reality: these are all inferences that rely on your not paying close enough attention to a remarkable sleight of hand your consciousness is pulling on you. Once you manage to do this, it indeed becomes nonsensical to look for "explanations" of consciousness in terms of the very things it abstracted into seeming existence. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism

naasking 9y ago
Positions like Last Thursdayism, solipsism, brains in vats and other skeptical arguments were already addressed by Moore over a century ago. A rational belief is only justified by considering the ontological commitments it requires of us. So while I can't refute Last Thursdayism, given it's ontological commitments, it has such a low probability on the scale of possible explanations for reality that I need not concern myself with it (see Solomonoff Induction for justifying this logical ordering of hypotheses). As for the "feeling" of time passing being some kind of ontological test, I honestly don't know what you think this proves. This "feeling" is just the competition between signals from your perceptions and signals from your memory of your perceptions. Such a comparison is trivially present in any feedback circuit, which entails that something time-like does indeed exist.

naasking 9y ago

Positions like Last Thursdayism, solipsism, brains in vats and other skeptical arguments were already addressed by Moore over a century ago. A rational belief is only justified by considering the ontological commitments it requires of us. So while I can't refute Last Thursdayism, given it's ontological commitments, it has such a low probability on the scale of possible explanations for reality that I need not concern myself with it (see Solomonoff Induction for justifying this logical ordering of hypotheses). As for the "feeling" of time passing being some kind of ontological test, I honestly don't know what you think this proves. This "feeling" is just the competition between signals from your perceptions and signals from your memory of your perceptions. Such a comparison is trivially present in any feedback circuit, which entails that something time-like does indeed exist.