Possibly we are just in one of the mathematical universes that happens to have an arrow of time—the arrow seems to arise from fairly simple assumptions, mainly an initial condition and coarse graining
You are misunderstanding the objection. It’s not just an arrow of time in the sense of order, such as increasing entropy, it’s the passingness of the time. An arrow can exist statically, but that’s not how we experience time. We don’t experience it as a simultaneous group of moments that happen to be ordered , we experience one moment at a time. A row of houses is ordered but not one-at-a-time, like a succession of movie frames.
The valence of pleasure and pain is not just a sign change, they serve vastly different psychological functions and evolved for distinct evolutionary reasons.
And the associate qualia? What’s the mathematical theory of qualia? Is it bottom-up …we have some mathematical descriptions of qualia, and it’s only a matter of time before we have the rest...or top-down...everything is mathematical, so qualia must be...?
I already explained one reason why we should experience time passing—we have memories of the past but not the future. This is because of the arrow of time. Cognition is a computational process that runs forward in time; the explanation is probably related to the fact that computers create heat, which means increasing entropy, and the forward direction of time is the direction in which entropy increases—but I think Aram has a better explanation. I am aware that this will not address the objection as it exists in your mind—you’re imagining that all of our qualia should somehow exist outside of time at the same instant—but I think this is just confused. How would you know if they did? What would that mean? You certainly can’t experience the future as you experience the past in any causally detectable way. Actually; I suppose that such a strange state of affairs is discussed in “stories of your life,” the inspiration for the movie Arrival.
I don’t have a complete theory of qualia, but this seems like an unreasonable demand from the level 4 multiverse theory in itself. The level 4 multiverse explains why thinking beings like us could find themselves in our situation. Why that “feels like” something in a first person way is a problem for any materialist theory, and the discussion of that problem is not new. Instead of getting into this, I addressed directly what the post actually claims, which is that the level 4 multiverse theory does not explain why pleasure and suffering have different valences, when they should be symmetric—the flaw in that reasoning is that there is no need for them to be symmetric.
You are misunderstanding the objection. It’s not just an arrow of time in the sense of order, such as increasing entropy, it’s the passingness of the time. An arrow can exist statically, but that’s not how we experience time. We don’t experience it as a simultaneous group of moments that happen to be ordered , we experience one moment at a time. A row of houses is ordered but not one-at-a-time, like a succession of movie frames.
And the associate qualia? What’s the mathematical theory of qualia? Is it bottom-up …we have some mathematical descriptions of qualia, and it’s only a matter of time before we have the rest...or top-down...everything is mathematical, so qualia must be...?
I already explained one reason why we should experience time passing—we have memories of the past but not the future. This is because of the arrow of time. Cognition is a computational process that runs forward in time; the explanation is probably related to the fact that computers create heat, which means increasing entropy, and the forward direction of time is the direction in which entropy increases—but I think Aram has a better explanation. I am aware that this will not address the objection as it exists in your mind—you’re imagining that all of our qualia should somehow exist outside of time at the same instant—but I think this is just confused. How would you know if they did? What would that mean? You certainly can’t experience the future as you experience the past in any causally detectable way. Actually; I suppose that such a strange state of affairs is discussed in “stories of your life,” the inspiration for the movie Arrival.
I don’t have a complete theory of qualia, but this seems like an unreasonable demand from the level 4 multiverse theory in itself. The level 4 multiverse explains why thinking beings like us could find themselves in our situation. Why that “feels like” something in a first person way is a problem for any materialist theory, and the discussion of that problem is not new. Instead of getting into this, I addressed directly what the post actually claims, which is that the level 4 multiverse theory does not explain why pleasure and suffering have different valences, when they should be symmetric—the flaw in that reasoning is that there is no need for them to be symmetric.