It can’t be that it’s static. Time doesn’t exist, at least, not as a basic part of physics.
Still, it seems like the universe is doing the calculation. After all, where else would the output come from?
This makes me wonder, if we were in a universe exactly like this one, except that the laws of physics specified everything exactly, and it matching this universe was a total coincidence, would people have subjective experience?
This makes me wonder, if we were in a universe exactly like this one, except that the laws of physics specified everything exactly, and it matching this universe was a total coincidence, would people have subjective experience?
The problem here is the ‘total coincidence’. This is analogous to watching a video of someone being tortured that was randomly generated. No one is being harmed and it only seems like it because of a massive coincidence. There is still enough data to specify the brain state it your scenario so, given our current knowledge about the brain, it is more likely to have conscious experience than the videotape one. Even with the naive concept of time, it would be very hard to define what constitutes a calculation, and it looks even harder without one.
What does it mean, “specified everything exactly”?
This sounds like a slightly modified (at most) version of timeless physics. A function would deterministically assign arrows to each N-dimensional set of coordinates without even looking at its neighborhood, and this function just happens to define an N+2D surface. Points on the surface would still show the relationships we call causality, and by assumption they still exhibit the functional equivalent of our consciousness.
If you mean Many-Worlds does not apply to that reality, well, we don’t know for sure that our reality doesn’t work by Bohmian mechanics. Maybe we should give this a larger probability. In that case I don’t see myself changing my own probability of having subjective experience.
It can’t be that it’s static. Time doesn’t exist, at least, not as a basic part of physics.
Still, it seems like the universe is doing the calculation. After all, where else would the output come from?
This makes me wonder, if we were in a universe exactly like this one, except that the laws of physics specified everything exactly, and it matching this universe was a total coincidence, would people have subjective experience?
The problem here is the ‘total coincidence’. This is analogous to watching a video of someone being tortured that was randomly generated. No one is being harmed and it only seems like it because of a massive coincidence. There is still enough data to specify the brain state it your scenario so, given our current knowledge about the brain, it is more likely to have conscious experience than the videotape one. Even with the naive concept of time, it would be very hard to define what constitutes a calculation, and it looks even harder without one.
What does it mean, “specified everything exactly”?
This sounds like a slightly modified (at most) version of timeless physics. A function would deterministically assign arrows to each N-dimensional set of coordinates without even looking at its neighborhood, and this function just happens to define an N+2D surface. Points on the surface would still show the relationships we call causality, and by assumption they still exhibit the functional equivalent of our consciousness.
If you mean Many-Worlds does not apply to that reality, well, we don’t know for sure that our reality doesn’t work by Bohmian mechanics. Maybe we should give this a larger probability. In that case I don’t see myself changing my own probability of having subjective experience.