Is this because you think of your stream of consciousness as somehow like a reel of film? All the individual pictures could be cut from the reel and laid out any which way but the implicit order is always there. I can understand this because all the spatio temporal relationships for the actors in the film remain "normal" i.e obey the laws of physics. Deutsch argues similarly in the Fabric of reality. In my work I often come across the idea of a foliation of hypersurfaces which is really a set of 3D pictures "stuck together and stacked in the direction of the time coordinate of the world at a given instant of time. In MW interpretation though I guess that the stacking is less certain as in the block universe idea but that's another issue. Is this analogy similar to how you feel the "obvious" experience of time being normal?
Best Nick On Jan 4, 2:51 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2010/1/4 Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com>: > > > I think you give an excellent explication of the problem, Stathis. However, > > one thing about it that still worries me is the role of time. You say the > > mapping need not be consistent even moment to moment, and yet the mapping is > > a timeless Platonic object. To be a timeless object the the moments need > > some timeless representation. In Bruno's theory time arises from the > > computational sequence. But in the mapping, time is just a relation of > > similarity (closest continuation) of states. So three states which when > > ordered by closest continuation are XYZ may have been computed in the order > > XZY. So I find myself seeing the hardwareless computer as a reductio > > against consciousness=computation thesis and support for Peter's view that > > ur-stuff and contingency are fundamental. > > It always seemed to me obvious that I would experience time normally > if the computations or other physical processes generating my stream > of consciousness were chopped up and played out of sequence, > backwards, simultaneously or whatever. It could be happening right > now: I have no way to know if the seconds of my life are running > sequentially or all in parallel during a single second of real time. > The two problems that many seem to have with this idea is a feeling > that there needs to be some sort of mechanism for singling out the > time slice that is the "now", and a feeling that the time slices lack > a causal glue to connect them together. But maybe I'm missing > something, because these objections never seemed to me to be problems. > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
