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An Easy Time for the Hard Problem

An Easy Time for the Hard Problem

unenlightened
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Posted 04/13/09 - 08:40 AM: Subject: An Easy Time fot the Hard Problem	#1
Dear Mr Chalmers, thank you for doing us the honour of giving some time to our forum; I hope you will find something of interest here. I would like to offer for your consideration a half-formed argument about the hardness of the hard problem, which although it has been implied in some of the discussions I have seen, has not to my knowledge been explicitly discussed. It has to do with the conception of time, and occured to me in the course of a discussion of freedom. It seems to me that a causal model, or a functional explanation, must always be based on a linear view of time. This implies that any such model can be represented in the form of a block universe. However, any such representation must necessarily take a 'God's eye view', and in doing so steps out of the universe, and in particular, out of time. What results is the time dimension becoming equivalent to another space dimension, and the model as seen from the outside is static. Now the act of observation, which equates to 'experience' as you use the term, takes time, and that therefore such a model implies another dimension of 'God's time' in which the dimension of universal time can be observed. But this immediately gives rise to another block universe of one higher dimension, and so ad infinitum. I take this reductio to imply that experience cannot be represented in such a model, but is always implicitly 'abstracted' to 'God'. To start from the other end, with experience, it again seems clear that personal experience is not in a dimensional time, but is momentary. The idea of time as duration and as a dimension comes from memory, and this is quite distinct from experience. Thus I think that any conception of experience requires an active, unfolding, and I suspect causally open conception of time, and is incompatible with a linear, and thereby static, causally closed, conception. Thus the actuality of experience itself, denies the causal closure of linear time; the world is unfolding itself creatively as experience in 'real time'. I hope brevity has not made this entirely incomprehensible.
...most of our actions are the result of the past, or according to a future ideal. That's not action, that is just conformity. J Krishnamurti "Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys

davidchalmers
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Posted 05/09/09 - 09:45 PM:	#2
Thank you for the ideas. I'll have to think about this. I think there is certainly something to the idea that many of our ordinary intuitions about the passage of time come from our experience of time. There may well be implications for the nature of time or the nature of experience or both, but sorting out these implications is a further very difficult question.

unenlightened
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Posted 05/10/09 - 03:27 PM:	#3
Well I have decided to be encouraged by not being blown out of the water immediately, to say something more, or perhaps the same things in a different way. David Chalmers wrote: If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”. So what is it like to be me, I ask myself? It's a puzzle to say anything about it, because whatever I think of turns out to be a feature of the world, or if not, then a feature of the easy problem. It is like there being a world of any sort at all, it seems. There is a brain in a body in a world; there are thoughts and memories and experiences. And all of these are things I am sometimes conscious of, and none of them are consciousness. All I can express here are thoughts, and if thoughts are part of the content of consciousness, then thoughts are not themselves conscious - it sounds paradoxical, and yet these thoughts, once expressed, will sit vacantly in cyber-space until some conscious being reads them. And then, if I can communicate clearly enough, something like the same thoughts will occur to the reader as occured to me - a shared awareness. Consciousness seems to have no features apart from its contents, no qualities, no dimensions; it is, as we say a 'point of view'. It is here, and it is now, and even that much is a feature of the world rather than of consciousness itself, and so I am forced to the position that there is not 'my consciousness' different to 'your consciousness', there is only consciousness being conscious of being me, or being conscious of being you - contents aside, it is the same thing. So if it is always and everywhere the same, I can say that it is that in reference to which all change occurs - that through which time passes. But for physics, time does not pass, it is all there equally in the equations. Physics only deals with the contents of consciousness - the observed and not the observer.
...most of our actions are the result of the past, or according to a future ideal. That's not action, that is just conformity. J Krishnamurti "Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys

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