This page is intentionally left blank
Confusion about the reality of time comes from the fact that there are three entirely different things we call “time.” When we ask a physicist if time is real, we would get an answer about an entirely different phenomenon compared to the answer to the same question of a philosopher....
But, seriously, in the age of generative AI and summarizers, there's no need to pretend. We might as well just say the thing we want to say without the need for the reader to invoke a summarizer on it.
Agree.
But I want to show that the phenomenon I try to explain cannot be reduced to Growing Block Universe, unless the Growing Block Universe is infinitely dimensional, which is not something totally unimaginable, but isn't parsimonious either.
I think the experiment would not show either existence or non-existence of consciousness in an AI system.
Consciousness is a quale of self-awareness. Currently we have no theory explaining Qualia. We cannot claim or verify that we removed all qualia-influenced pieces of information from a certain body of knowledge, even if we remove all information suggesting self-referential generalizations.
Even if we somehow manage to acquire any qualia-free body of knowledge, when an AI in astonishment claims that it thinks it has all sorts of Qualia (including Consciousness) we wouldn't know whether it is because of the randomness in our learning processes and weight initialization or if it is... (read more)
But we don't know the map is 100% accurate.
Moreover, we know that it is certainly not 100% accurate, because we still have multiple gaps in our understanding. My point here is that we haven't encountered any physical process which would require "now" to be somehow special. It does not mean we won't encounter it in the future, but it is worth mentioning that we haven't encountered it yet.
That depends on how literally you take the metaphors of cursors and movement. The Growing Block Universe theory perhaps needs only one extra dimension.
For each point in th-dimensional universe to be special, there must exists a point in th-dimension of Growing Block Universe for which would be special.
I.e., if Growing... (read more)
There's a possibility that there might be nothing special about the present at all. I don't feel like there's something special about the region of space I occupy, and the illusion of time flow comes from the fact that I cannot say the same about the time.
My point is that difference between presentism vs. non-presentism might be purely linguistical and difference between "this thing existed in the past, but it doesn't exist any longer" might be just similar to "this thing is there, but it doesn't stretch all the way to here."
Confusion about the reality of time comes from the fact that there are three entirely different things we call “time.” When we ask a physicist if time is real, we would get an answer about an entirely different phenomenon compared to the answer to the same question of a philosopher.
The aim of this article is to reduce confusion when tackling the question of reality of time. It turns out that each of the three things we call "Time" can be compared with other more familiar things, giving us better intuition about the reality of each of them.
Spacetime is a four-dimensional manifold in which an observer perceives three dimensions as “space”... (read 536 more words →)
I agree, in education resources repetition serves a certain purpose and cannot be easily brushed off. The right amount of information density in education resources is an art, I'd assume.