On Apr 22, 2:02 pm, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > I was with you up to that last sentence. Forward or backward, we just > experience increasing entropy as increasing time, but that doesn't > warrant the conclusion that no process is required and an "instant" > within itself has an arrow of time.
It seems to me that each instant DOES contain within itself an arrow of time, in the form of memories. Later instances are related to earlier instances by virtue of having memory-information about those earlier instances. That's what ties the various "states" together. The nature of the computations that might transition you from instant to instant are not relevant. What matters is where you end up, not how you got there. If a transition causes you to assume a state that contains no information about earlier events (i.e., no memory of these events), then you have lost a crucial part of what makes you who "you" are. If you save your brain state at time A and then you save state again at a subsequent time B, there is a relationship and an objectively measureable degree of correlation between the information contained in the two saved data sets. It is, I think, the degree of correlation between states that provides the illusion of a "flow" of consciousness. This has nothing to do with the type of computation that could be used to "transition" between the two data sets. Again, it seems to me that the arithmetic logic that Bruno refers to just serves to "describe" the relations between datasets. It doesn't "produce" consciousness. If there are many "algorithms" that could be used to transition from state A to state B, it seems to me that all of them would produce the same conscious experience. If you end up at "state B", then it doesn't matter how you go there...your "memory" of the experience will be identical regardless of what path you took. And since all states (not just A and B) exist platonically, then every possible "process" can be "inferred" to connect them in every possible way. But I don't think this means that the processes are the source of consciousness. They are just descriptions of the ways that states could be connected. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
