On 27 Jan 2014, at 01:36, Stephen Paul King wrote:
Like I have written previously, I am past the point of buying the
idea that there is a Reality out there independent of us that we
passively come to experience. I am tired of explanations that ask us
to believe that change is an illusion that somehow persists.
Is that not contradictory? You are asking us to believe in a time
independent to us, and to not believe in a reality independent to us.
Bruno
Can we try a different set of concepts?
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 7:28 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
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. 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.
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Kindest Regards,
Stephen Paul King
Senior Researcher
Mobile: (864) 567-3099
stephe...@provensecure.com
http://www.provensecure.us/
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