On 27 January 2014 12:48, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com>wrote:
> Dear LizR, > : > "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..." > > What other implication does Hoyle's phrasing have? His entire discussion > of the pigeon holes is to point out that there is no a priori order of the > holes, it is a subjective delusion that we obtain because of our inability > to see the whole lot. > His implication seems to me to be that the subjective experience of time can be explained as a phenomenon caused by the order of the pigeon holes, together with certain rules linking them together. The rules are basically equivalent to thermodynamics (unsurprisingly, we wouldn't get consciousness in a universe without an entropy gradient). As one of his characters explains... John went on, 'All right, let's come now to the contents of the pigeon holes. Suppose you choose one of them, say the 137th. You find in it a story, as you might find one of those little slips of paper in a Christmas cracker <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cracker>. But you also find statments about the stories you'll find in other pigeon holes. You decide to check up on whether these statements about the stories in the other pigeon holes are right or not. To your surprise you find the statments made about earlier pigeon holes, the 136th, the 135th, and so on, are substantially correct. But when you compare with the pigeon holes on the other side, the 138th, the 139th,...you find things aren't so good. You find a lot of contradictions and discrepancies. This turns out to be the same wherever you happen to look, in every pigeon hole. The statements made about pigeon holes on the other side are at best diffuse and at the worst just plain wrong. Now let's translate this parable into the time problem. We'll call the particular pigeon hole, the one you happen to be examining, the present. The earlier pigeon holes, the ones for which you find substantially correct statements, we call the past. The later pigeon holes, the ones for which there isn't too much in the way of correct statments, we'll call the future. Let me go on a bit further. What I want to suggest is that the actual world is very much like this. Instead of pigeon holes we talk about states.' Note that the description he gives of the 137th hole applies to *all* the holes - so the present is whichever hole you happen to look in. From the subjective, "inside" view, all moments are the present when they're being experienced, and we only experience a flow of time because of their contents (a fact which Memento guy illustrates nicely, of course). This is a description of a capsule theory of identity. Hoyle introduces a flashlight, but then shows that the order in which the flashlight is used is irrelevant - the 1st person view from inside the pigeon-holes is of continuous subjective experience. In fact, the existence or nonexistence of the flashlight is irrelevant to the subjective experience. The flashlight was introduced so the characters could think about "sampling" each pigeon hole, as though they could somehow stand outside time - take the "bird's eye view". But of course in reality they can only take the internal, "frog's eye view". Hence, imho, Hoyle is saying that it is the order of the boxes and the laws relating their contents that gives rise to the subjective experience of time. -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
