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DanArmak comments on An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity - LessWrong
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A literal moment in time has zero duration; you can't "experience" it in the normal sense of the word. To think the thoughts you outline above ("in the next few moments...") you need to pick some kind of time-granularity. But why, and how do you pick it?
If you deny existing as a subjective person over time, then it seems you ought to deny existing for any length of time at all.
You are right that this is a flaw if you take what I wrote literally. I intended the "moment" thing to be bit of a metaphor for something a bit more unwieldy to describe.
Why do you come to this conclusion? Consider the equation q(t), where q is a function of all my qualia at time t. Even though q(t) is a continuous function, it's still meaningful to talk about what's happening at time t. Alternatively if you like to think of qualia as happening over an interval, you can also take a "Derivative" of sorts, q'(t), and talk about what's going on in an arbitrarily small interval around time t.
Your original comment describes a process of thought and self-introspection. But you can't have thought without the passage of time. In fact a lot of things require the concept of time: for instance the concept of utility (or desires, goals, etc.) as observed in someone's actions.
At a durationless moment in time, there is a certain configuration of matter that makes up your body, but there isn't any thought or behavior going on. You can't talk about utility as you do without assuming the connection between self-instances over time, but that connection is what you're trying to get rid of.
Help me understand your argument better:
I hold out a ball and drop it, and it accelerates towards the ground at 10 m/s^2
At t=5, time stops.
If we compared reality(t=5) to reality(t=0), we would know that the ball has traveled 125 feet from where it was.
If we unfroze time, the ball would be moving at 50 m/s.
If we unfroze time, teh ball would be accelerating at 10 m/s^2.
If we unfroze time, my utility function would be u(t=5).
If I understand your argument correctly, you are essentially arguing that just because we can't talk about velocity, acceleration, and utility functions while time isn't flowing, it's not meaningful to say what velocity, acceleration, and utility functions are at a given moment.
I think that Dan's point was simply that the process of, for example, comparing two world-states (such as t=5 and t=0) in order to calculate the distance traveled by the ball between those states requires non-zero time to complete.
TheOtherDave is right. To expand on that, I also tried to make the following point. You were trying to do without the concept of "a self that persists over time". You said:
My point was that you cannot literally experience the present moment. You can experience only lengths of time. Where there is no passage of time, there is no subjective experience.
So while you were trying to start with a "self" that exists in the moment and extract the logical linkage to that self's successors over time, I pointed out that this bridges short durations of time to long ones, but it doesn't bridge single moments of time to even short durations. And so, restricting yourself to short periods of time doesn't resolve the issue you were discussing, because you still have to assume the existence of a self with subjective experience that persists over that short period of time.
I'm afraid I still don't see... isn't that still analogous to saying you can't have something like "velocity" in a single moment?
Where exactly does the analogy between subjective experience at a given time and velocity at a given time break down here?
Not really - pick them all! Let a thousand (overlapping) time-periods bloom. Let any history-fragment-persons who endure long enough to make a decision, favor whichever history-fragment-length they like.