4 ms·

I don't think the frozen block view of time necessitates a belief in anything traveling along a world line (how would you express the speed at which it travels?

• drostie 12y ago
  The "speed" of consciousness would just be in terms of the subjective rate of experience. But yes, that's a significant problem with appealing to this sort of attitude outside of this 4D world (you have to invent some notion of time which applies to souls but not matter). It is true that you can "step back" from the world-line and insist that every part of it is conscious, but that takes a really radical position on our own conscious experience of the progression of time, one that's actually distinctively Buddhist, if you can believe it. (There's a lot of Buddhist speculation about how the mind is a series of "aggregates" rather than one temporal whole; the idea is that you are no more identifiable with the you-of-twenty-seconds-ago than a candle's flame as it has exhausted a new quantity of vaporized oil: in a metaphorical sense we say that both "are the same" but we don't really mean much by it. In general though, saying that "the whole worldline is conscious" abdicates our notion completely that time progresses, and instead says it's all illusory (we have a local sense of progression even though nothing progresses). I think that the reason that this is unpopular is simply because if such an illusion exists, it has an interesting asymmetry with other illusions: you can't actually shake it. (It has some other problems, like: it's hard to see why natural selection would assemble those world-lines into something which have these feelings, given that they don't seem to do anything -- and of course natural selection becomes just a metaphor to describe a pattern in how the lines are structured, rather than a force which changes the world, so it's hard even to phrase the question much less answer it.)