I don’t see how you can be so confident. My explanation is so nice and tidy. Yours on the other hand requires some artifact to jump sequentially through time inhabiting different bodies (or the same body sequentially) to provide consciousness. Call it a ghost in the machine, or a soul, or what have you, but if you are going to posit the existence of such an artifact I think you should at least be able to describe its properties. How much does it weigh?
My explanation requires no such artifact, and completely does away with the need to define a concept like time.
So, unless you are prepared to define time, and explain the mechanism for this sequential consciousness jumping entity you propose, than occam’s razor suggests that my thesis (alternate future Scylla’s thesis, actually) is the superior one.
Interesting, so if I place a chicken in a refrigerator set to absolute zero thus stopping all motion inside the refrigerator, than time does not exist inside the refrigerator?
We don’t actually observe this, we just think we do, in the same way that people of yore used to think the Sun circled the Earth.
If that is true, than you realize that you are the one that killed the cat, by observing it, and collapsing its probability wave into a negative outcome.
The middle section isn’t mine - it’s Fred’s. I don’t hold to it at all. I only argue that:
The fourth dimension of the Universe, which is commonly called the temporal one, actually exists, if only as a mechanism for separating the physical objects at t=0 from those at t=1.
There is no way whatsoever of knowing what our “spark of consciousness” is doing in relation to this dimension except for the bare fact that I know there is an Aspidistra-consciousness in existance at this moment…now. It may indeed be proceeding linearly from one instant to the next and that’s no worse a speculation than any other (though also no better)
Future events do not influence past events. The arrow of causality is one-way only.
Doesn’t this imply that nobody would ever die in an unforseen accident? Since 99.99999% of future selves would be yelling at you ‘Fuck, don’t step that way you’re going to be brained by the falling meteor…AAAAARGH!’
Fundamentally that’s just a semantic argument. If you arbitrarily call it “time” than I guess time does exist. But if it’s just another coordinate why bother calling something new?
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There is no way whatsoever of knowing what our “spark of consciousness” is doing in relation to this dimension except for the bare fact that I know there is an Aspidistra-consciousness in existance at this moment…now.
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No. That’s just an illusion. That experiment is a self-refuting one, because it’s intrinsically false. You can’t think that thought in a plack interval. Unless you can, it’s not true. You just feel as if it were true because of the connectedness of past you’s thinking that thought across trillions of planck slice universes. That feeling is simply the sum of that equation.
Actually it’s worse, because you’ve added another factor into the explanation which itself needs to be explained. My explanation requires no such factor which makes it superior (unless you can explain yours.)
For example, if we both observe a twig in a garage, I may say the wind deposited it there when the garage door opened. You may say that it was put there by an invisible giant red dragon.
My explanation is superior because you cannot produce or demonstrate the giant invisible red dragon, but we can both feel the wind.
Your “consciousness” is a giant invisible red dragon.
"Future events do not influence past events. The arrow of causality is one-way only.
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If that were true, than you would be perfectly willing to stab yourself to death. You are probably unwilling to do so, because you consider the future that would produce (a dead you) to be an undesirable one.
That unfavorable future has influenced your present because you seek to avoid that universe where you die bleeding of self-inflicted stab wounds. Therefore you do not stab yourself.
In this example the future has just influenced the past (thank goodness, it saved your life!)
So, be very grateful you communicate with the future. You do so only slightly differently than you do with the past. You remember only one past but are aware of many different futures.
No. In fact, this would be such a highly improbable outcome that it would be exactly the opposite. Only .0000000000000000000001% or so would be yelling that. It would just suck if you turned out to be one of those.
As you lay there, dying, regarding the highly improbable meteor hole in your sternum, you can take consolation in knowing that your alternate selves have escaped.
Actually, it would mean that people only died in unforeseen accidents. The odds of being struck and killed by a meteor are vanishingly small, so only a vanishingly small percentage of the possible universes would contain Scyllas being brained by a space rock. On the other hand, no one would ever undertake an action that was certain to kill him, because the overwhelming number of possible universes would be telling him not to take that obviously fatal action. In other words, Scylla’s theory is neatly disproven by this website.
Er, but it took me something to read your refutation, and I’m pretty sure what it took was time. Not all that much, understand, but I wouldn’t mind having it back.
I’m gonna have to think about this for a while longer, whatever ‘a while longer’ may mean.
Oh, so now you are adding new conditions onto your objection? That’s hardly fair. I doubt it’s accurate either. Let’s see:
That’s an assertion you have made. I can refute with a refutation, which I already did .
Heh. That is intrinsically nonsensical statement. Without time, there is no “at once” and no problem in the first place. You only need time to prevent things happening “at once” if you’ve already posited time. Take time out of the equation and you have none of these problems.
Without time there is no future and past, hence no problem. Again, positing time creates the problem you are trying to solve by hypothesizing the existence of time.
Not if I inhabit a universe where I take an elixir that keeps my vibrant. So, nope.
If you happen to be close to the path of the meteorite though, surely the 50% of selves who happened to step left would be going AARGHnonono and teh 50% who stepped right “whew, dodged a bullet” thus prompting you to step right infallably?
In other news, my precognition is currently infallibly seeing me not blowing off the scheduled IT group meeting in two minutes so I believe I will not be continuing with this conversaiton for a while…
No. It couldn’t work like that. If it did 50% wouldn’t have stepped left. This assumes that we are only dealing with the subset of selves which consider meteorite perforation an unfavorable outcome.
Only a very few would have stepped left.
Good. Hopefully you stick to this, and don’t represent one of those few who know better but blow off the meeting anyway and get fired.
The whole thing about time being a dimension (in the sense of the spatial dimensions) comes from Einstein’s special relativity. Roughly, there is some mixing up of what constitutes a separation in space and what constitutes a separation in time, depending on your frame of reference.
Consider two events, let’s say lightning hitting the ground in two different places. Relative to one frame of reference you might say “Both lightning strikes happened at the same time, but were a meter apart.” But in another frame of reference you might say one happened slightly before the other, and that they were slightly more than a meter apart. The interval in spacetime, however, is unchanged between the two frames.
I don’t think denying the reality of time addresses this issue.
Take a clock for instance. Time does not make a clock run. Fast, slow or “on time”.
A clock runs by a mechanical process that has nothing to do with time. It merely measures time. A gauge by which to standardize the passage of events. Whether that event is sitting watching the clock or hitting the stationary bike for 30 minutes.
