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bramflakes comments on Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive? - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 31 October 2014 11:11PM

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Comment author: bramflakes 01 November 2014 01:25:12AM *  3 points [-]

I had to re-read this several times before I understood the point of what you were saying. It has a lot of important things missing, in particular:

Why bring time into this? Intuitions 1 and 2 collide in the same way regardless of whether the two mind-states are causally connected (e.g. I'd still feel that a sufficiently-similar-to-me simulation in some place outside my light cone is still me, somehow, even though I don't have any of his qualia).

How does B-theory solve this problem?

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 01 November 2014 05:48:48PM *  1 point [-]

Why bring time into this?

I'm not sure that I understand the question. The post started out being about time. Time wasn't "brought into it".

Intuitions 1 and 2 collide in the same way regardless of whether the two mind-states are causally connected. [...] How does B-theory solve this problem?

I think you're right that the intuitions collide regardless. In my experience, B-theorists reject Intuition 1. B-theorists incline to say that you are a temporally extended object, and that your present awareness is just one time-slice of this 4D object. That is, they allow that you contain, within your 4D extension, several self-aware parts that are not aware of one another. Two such self-aware parts are you-today and you-tomorrow.

(Here, I'm using "aware" to refer to the kind of immediate awareness that you have of your current experiences. Normally, even the most vivid memories lack this sense of immediateness and so are easily distinguished from present experience.)

Comment author: bramflakes 01 November 2014 09:07:37PM 1 point [-]

B-theorists incline to say that you are a temporally extended object, and that your present awareness is just one time-slice of this 4D object. That is, they allow that you contain, within your 4D extension, several self-aware parts that are not aware of one another. Two such self-aware parts are you-today and you-tomorrow.

I'm an A-ist and that's what I think. I don't see how it's incompatible with A-ism.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 01 November 2014 09:32:33PM 1 point [-]

I probably should have used the terminology of "presentism" and "eternalism" instead of "A-theory" and "B-theory". Do you consider yourself to be a presentist?