iwdw comments on Timeless Beauty - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: iwdw 29 May 2008 02:25:57AM 0 points [-]

It's impossible for me not to perceive time, to not perceive myself as myself, to not perceive my own consciousness.

You've never been so intoxicated that you "lose time", and woken up wondering who you threw up on the previous night? You've never done any kind of hallucinogenic drug? You don't ... sleep?

Those things you listed are only true for a fairly narrow range of operational paramaters of the human brain. It's very possible to not do those things, and we stop doing them every night.

The sensation of time passing only seems to exist because we have short term memory to compare new input against. Disrupt short term memory formation -- by, say, getting extremley drunk, or getting a head injury -- and you lose the sensation of time passing.