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For all you know you don’t even experience time going forwards. At any given instance, how do you know that you “experienced” the past second. What if your cons
by b_tterc_p 8y ago
For all you know you don’t even experience time going forwards. At any given instance, how do you know that you “experienced” the past second. What if your conscious experience is just an instance at that point of existence? You can’t point to recollection of the past second because that recollection happens through time as well. What if that’s just an illusion of the brain state at that time?
Did Descartes really think?
- halgir 8y agoAlso known as a Boltzmann Brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- rexpop 8y agoI am very grateful to be introduced to this concept. During--and occasionally since--a particularly traumatic psilocybin trip some years ago, I had the distinct understanding that my consciousness had only just been put together (or, rather, re-arranged from another, very alien form), memories and all. It is comforting to have such bizarre experiences reflected in others' thought experiments. Classically, we understand our neurological arrangement to be a function of each last instant's without discomfort. It's another thing entirely to consider how we might have been arranged from wildly different previous states. Although there's no compelling evidence to support it, neither is there a way to disprove it, I'm afraid.
- AgentME 8y agoA really strange thing about Boltzmann brains is that if you suppose their existence, then the question "Am I a Boltzmann brain?" becomes complicated. It makes sense to ask "Is there a human thinking the thoughts I am thinking?" and "Is there a Boltzmann brain thinking the thoughts I am thinking?", but if you suppose the answer to both is yes, then when you ask the question "Which one am I?", there's no pure logic you can follow within your mind to answer that question, because both the human and the Boltzmann brain are in the same mental state and any logic either of them follow will be followed by the other, and any logic that comes up with a definite answer must be flawed because it comes to a wrong answer for at least one of them. Of course, it's not particularly useful to consider the Boltzmann brain version of yourself because a Boltzmann brain's decisions don't have any consequences. Time is better spent considering decisions by the consequences of the human taking them. Maybe this implies that you should choose to define "yourself" to refer to both your mental state combined with the ability to make decisions of consequence, and then you can safely disregard the strange kinship you may have with a Boltzmann brain. Though now this line of thought invites interesting questions about how to define what makes a decision consequential, and what exactly makes human decisions consequential...
- acchow 8y agoI see consciousness as the threading together of alternate futures where the Boltzmann Brain doesn't collapse out of existence.
- FakeComments 8y ago> Did Descartes really think? For the purposes of his proof, yes: Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. The witness of a doubt is the witness of a thought is the witness of a thing, hence a thing must exist. Descartes at that point in his argument doesn’t make any assertion to the nature of reality, merely that each of us can be sure that something exists, even if our interpretation is completely wrong: the very act of doubting existence is witness to existence. People project their own model of self into those terms, but it’s merely trying to make a broadening categorical argument and not a particular interpretation of what the objects normally represented by those terms are or how they behave (eg, times exists). A static Descartes with the experience of currently doubting is sufficient witness for the proof, which Descartes would have himself experienced directly — the cogito is a witness to that experience of Descartes.
- pierrebai 8y agoAny explanation that denies everyday's experience might be fun but mostly useless. That we cannot give a clear explanation of our perception of time does not deny it. Electricy existed before humans could explain it.
- 4BxHkLgUVBG 8y agoThere is no future. Only present
- HNLurker2 8y agoThere is no present just a discrete plank scale time that you can be ignorant and call it arrow of time, or be present and try not to fall in the illusion of continous flow.
- eternalban 8y agoI don't think the discreet model by itself explains the arrow but it is imo a part of the puzzle. As you are very likely familiar with the 2-slit experiment, I am of the view that 'information' [?] flows from both directions of what we perceive as 'arrow of time'. The act of choice constrains the possible pathways and that reduction is what we call 'state collapse'. So without measurement at the slits, all possible pathways are active and naturally we perceive them as an 'interference pattern'. As soon as we close the door on 'choice' flow from 'future' has no other possible path way other than the single open slit. This we note as the 'particle' modality of the experimental setup. That answers the so-called 'paradox' of the experiment but still doesn't address why we perceive an arrow of time going forward. Now returning to the 'discreet' aspect, I posit the 'computation' of the 'virtual smooth construct of perceived reality' is what we are registering as a forward movement in an inherently timeless universe. It all seems to be inexplicably bound up with the phenomena of consciousness.
- HNLurker2 8y ago(Not expert) Does this have to do with Feynman's one electron universe (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe) that goes back in time?
- eternalban 8y agoPrecisely what set those thoughts in motion for me a few decades ago.