Writing on a topic that I know next to nothing :-) Hopefully it will provide entertainment if nothing else. I have thought recently that consciousness, or any

Writing on a topic that I know next to nothing :-) Hopefully it will provide entertainment if nothing else. I have thought recently that consciousness, or any phenomenon that includes the awareness of the passage of time, is an illusion of memory. Imagine that you have only an instantaneous existence. Over time you move from one instance to another, changing state each time. In essence you are a state machine. At any given instant, your new state depends on your current state and new inputs (not only are you a state machine, but you are a regular expression!). Unlike a state machine with a fixed set of states and an infinite tape, you have a near infinite set of possible states and a finite tape. The way the state is constructed, it is possible to reason about the likely path you took to reach your current state. Of course, states you were in only a few iterations ago are easy to deduce while states that you were in a long time ago are much harder to deduce because there are many possible paths. Finally, let's imagine that you can partition your state. In other words, you can take a small part of your state (call it a sub-state) and you can deduce past sub-states that you would have had to pass through in order to reach this sub-state. With this in place, "awareness" could merely be the act of enumeration past possible sub-states. So you can "concentrate" on a sub-state and at any given instant deduce the sub-states that have lead to this position. Because your interface with reality would be the review of these possible past sub-states, it would appear from your point of view that there was a flow of occurrences that led to your current state. But all of the information you are processing is internal and so your awareness would be dependent upon the instantaneous state only. You could get very silly and imagine that if your movement between states was idempotent, that you could even execute the state machine out of order and it would still produce the same awareness of order and hence flow of time. If this were to be the case (and I have no real reason to believe that it is -- it's just an entertaining thought), I don't think it would be as discrete as I describe it. If you consider a neural network, it has a similar kind of state and a similar kind of "memory". Training the neural network creates outputs from inputs based on what had previously been input. One might imagine a kind of network that could walk backwards through "memorised" patterns by feeding the outputs back into inputs, but I don't think any such thing exists (and possibly it can't exist). Aside: I know about convoluted networks, but I don't think they produce the effect I am describing. Like I said, it's an interesting mental exercise, but not necessarily anything like what really happens.