Comment by meroes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meroes | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe this will change your mind slightly?:

There's a bouncy ball in a box with pressure sensing walls. Each wall feeds the pressure data to HDD physical storage. The ball is released from the top wall at some random angle toward the bottom. The storage devices spin at 100prm and in sync.

Looking at the data from the 6 storage devices, I would see the first entry is from wall_ceiling, recorded at plate rotational angle 0pi. Then the next entry in the collection is from wall_floor say at 1pi. Then wall_left at 1.5pi then wall_ceiling again at 2.1pi, then wall_right at 3pi.

The ball-sensor-storage system alone never needed a "flow of time". The data printout at the end is just a piece of paper with a few columns of numbers. A function is also a column of numbers. And so is a circle or any other polygon.

You may think the printout went from 1 entry to 2 entries to 3 entries...that surely was a flow of time. No. A flow of time is the subjective feeling of a continuous you "flowing" through time. It is entirely internal. The printout system does not have a flow of time. It has time, but again, Barbour is arguing time is extra baggage which is unneeded when you have the motion of the particles - as above. It adds nothing. At each step the printout is entirely given by the behavior of the other particles in the system. Why not our brain states too? When you see "blue" you are seeing 480nm wavelength photons hitting your retina and cones. When you feel continuous, each brain state of yours is kind of a running average of your previous brain states (memories). Or something like that. Maybe some kind of recursive build up of memories at each instant.

But you say you must "flow" even for brief moments to perceive something. Even if it's in discrete steps that's fine with you. But you have to be willing to go one step further to get their arguments. There is only assemblages of particles. And somehow certain assemblages lead to self-reference and awareness, of which we call conscious experience and "flow of time".

Can a function "feel" something? Who knows. But the course of human scientific endeavor has taken us very far from where we started.

> It has time, but again, Barbour is arguing time is extra baggage which is unneeded when you have the motion of the particles - as above. It adds nothing.

This is the part that seems suspect: it seems like motion is taken to be fundamental, but time is not. This seems just as arbitrary as taking time as fundamental, and motion as derived (simply the totality of positions at different points in time).

But overall, given the position and momentum of a particle at step 1, can you predict its position at step 6 without knowing some quantity that is equivalent to the length of time between step 1 and step 6? And if you do require such a quantity, does it matter whether we use time or something else?

> A flow of time is the subjective feeling of a continuous you "flowing" through time.

Sure, but there is much more to time than this human subjective experience. A lot of our knowledge of physics relies on the notion of time to actually function. It's true that we already know that some of our fundamental physical theories are flawed (since they are currently incompatible with each other), and perhaps removing time from them COULD be a necessity for unifying them, but this is far from a given.

I very much doubt you could reformulate special relativity without ending up with a concept that is completely isomorphic to what we think of as time.

Note that a physical representation of a continuous "you" is a much more dubious concept than time itself, and I think it is one that is anyway incompatible with most physical theories/interpretations, as arguments like the Ship of Theseus or teleportation have shown forever.

I appreciate the effort, but it doesn't matter how many times I read your post, I don't see what's being accomplished there and it honestly feels both condescending and unneccessarily complex at the same time. Even in your example, there is clearly state change (how could there not be).

In particular it's the casual anthropocentrism that doesn't sit right with me, but it's so much more. You're mostly concerned with human perception and philosophical aspects that have roots in human feelings. If your main objection to the existence of time is that it doesn't fit in with your definition of consciousness, that means we're not even remotely talking about the same thing. We might use overlapping words, but that's it.

Consciousness is not a scientific concept.

Penrose did a lot of damage trying to legitimize it with his quantum woo, but it's fundamentally incompatible with scientific considerations outside of psychology.

I appreciate your criticism! I never read much of Penrose, and find a lot of what he says outside of mathematics to be questionable. I also think I have an incredibly loose idea of consciousness and remain fairly uncommitted. I actually have little interest in making great claims about consciousness, I just have to use it because the idea of the flow of time is made to be a "conscious" (experiential) illusion instead of ontologically, mind-independently real by this very interpretation of the maths of physics. This is hardly my idea though, and I have been paraphrasing people like Harvey Brown, Tegmark, and Barbour the whole time. And the idea of a static block universe dates back to early 1900's, and eternalism back to antiquity. If I have failed and come off pretentious, that's my fault and not theirs. I apologize for that.

Of course there is state change. Of course the sun will rise tomorrow. Of course a state machine will evolve deterministically based on some inputs.

Those are all described mathematically. But the mathematical laws of physics alone must then be interpreted in some way to describe reality. I mean look at the debate over which interpretation to apply to the same maths of QM for an example. Physics is not mathematics, it applies explanations.

And what these physicists above argue is that the math of the laws of physics does not necessitate an ontological, mind-independent flow of time to the universe. That we do experience a flow of time is not under question. We do. What is under question is that since the laws of physics (i.e. the math) works without an ontological flow of time (note: flow of time is a different idea than "time" or "arrow of time", neither of which I am arguing about here. We are only talking about the flow of time), why and how do we experience/perceive one?. Well, they say, through the sequentialism of memories and physical, sensorial data. Nothing woo. And if you are worried about physicists talking about experience - don't we experience a photon registering on a detector or a magnet deflecting electrons up vs down? Those come through empirical experiences. The flow of time would be an experience in a similar form as redness is. It has an empirical origin (e.g. photons on our cones) that leads to an experience.

So no one is denying the flow of time as experience. Just like you can't deny "redness" or "hotness". They are experienced by us, but some also think we can explain them in naturalistic, scientific ways. And that will require a neuroscience perspective on some level. I only bring in consciousness to the extent needed, as it is intimately connected to our perceived "flow of time".

We have to keep clear, "time", "flow of time", and "arrow of time". In earlier posts I did say Barbour thinks "time" is a redundant term; needless baggage on top of just caring about particles and relations to other particles. That in turn morphed into how we can recreate the experience we all have of time-flowing if there really are only particles and forces - no magic of the mind. To explain that, I had to talk about how the flow of time might not be ontologically real. And neuroscientists and physicists will then have to show how our experience is reducible to particles and forces (or fields). A tall task but a totally naturalistic, scientific one no? No woo. Put off defining consciousness and the mind and how they emerge from particles, but allow for it to be what ultimately is responsible for experience, within a "timeless" universe.

Is this not a justifiable position? If you disagree, I would be interested where you feel it goes wrong (if you feel like sharing). If you think we can do physics without referencing to experience I would also be interested.

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