Unknown comments on Timeless Beauty - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 May 2008 04:32AM

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Comment author: Unknown 28 May 2008 06:08:29PM 3 points [-]

Caledonian, you are completely wrong. Even if having an experience requires more than a single instant, it surely does not require more than a second: and a brain could arise and persist even for a full second, with sufficient luck, within a heat dead universe (or in other chaotic circumstances.) So you can look at a sequence of brains: brain 1, having experience A; brain 2, remembering experience A and having experience B; brain 3, remembering experience A & B and having experience C; and so on. There will be many, many, more sequences of such brains that remember incredibly disordered events than sequences that remember ordered events.

The fact that we do not have such experiences shows that the dust theory is false, whether you like it or not, and whether or not you think its premises are incontrovertible.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 28 April 2014 05:50:30PM *  -2 points [-]

Upvoted for correctness. Consciousness does not appear to supervene on subjectively long periods, but subjectively short periods are still objectively long, ie trillions of microphysical events can occur during the 0.1 s or so that constitute a subjective Now (specious present).