dxu comments on Timeless Control - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 June 2008 05:16AM

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Comment author: dxu 20 February 2015 05:06:10AM *  0 points [-]

My usual Block Universe analogy is a book. What time is it right now in Middle Earth? That question does not make much sense, although we coherently ask a reader, "What point are you at?" A page is a time-slice of that universe. We stand outside that universe the way a hypothetical observer stands outside time in a Block Universe.

This is a really old comment to be replying to, but the intuition pump presented here is so good (for me, anyway) that I marvel that I didn't think of it myself! I guess that's what separate merely understanding something and understanding it well enough to explain it.