On 26 January 2014 23:03, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 25 Jan 2014, at 14:15, David Nyman wrote: > > On 25 January 2014 09:21, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Maybe the difference in intuition is because she doesn't think about it >> in Hoyle's "universalist" way, although ISTM this is implicit in the >> heuristic (i.e. the "guy" is the unique and non-simultaneous "owner" of the >> experiences in all the pigeon holes). Without the flashlight, I think what >> people do is think of themselves as situated in some pigeon hole or other >> and then, as it were, imaginatively "select" some continuation sequence of >> pigeon holes from there. >> >> >> Yes. But we can still believe in the "universalist view", through the >> amnesia and the return in the universal baby state, which then can be >> related to the universal consciousness of the universal person. In that >> sense we are right now the same person, but relatively amnesic of all >> particularities which distinguish us. >> > > Yes indeed, it is the amnesia that "compartmentalises" us. But it's the > "right now" that strikes me (and, I presume, struck Hoyle) as something of > an an equivocation, at least in the pigeon hole analogy. > > > I gues that's why some people want time, if not present-time, as a > primitive. I can understand the feeling, but I think that with comp it is a > sort of delusion. > > Watching "Memento" gives some idea of what's really going on, by showing what life would be like after a partial breakdown of how the brain fools us into thinking we have continuous existence. It isn't too much of a stretch from imagining living in 5 minute segments to realising that we could equally well live in instants, with all of our memory being what's there right now, what's available to us in that instant, that pgeonhole. After all, logically, given the assumption of locality in physics, that's all we'd *expect* to be available.
"'Because, like all of us in our daily lives, you're stuck with a grotesque and absurd illusion.' 'How's that?' 'The idea of time as an ever-rolling stream. The thing which is supposed to bear all its sons away. There's one thing quite certain in this business: the idea of time as a steady progression from past to future is wrong. I know very well we feel this way about it subjectively. But we're the victims of a confidence trick... Fred Hoyle, "October the First is Too Late" -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
