Interesting aesthetic question raised by Caledonian’s comment: “not beckoning, but drowning” versus “not wading, but drowning”. I think the latter would have worked much better, but presumably C. thought it too obvious and wanted to preserve more of Stevie Smith’s semantics. :-)
Arthur, what would keeping a time coordinate buy you in your scenario? Suppose, simplifying for convenience, we have A → B → C → B [cycle], and suppose each state completely determines its successor. What advantage would there be to labelling our states (A,0), (B,1), (C,2), (B,3), (C,4), etc., instead of just A,B,C? Note that there’s no observable difference between, say, (B,1) and (B,3); in particular, no memory or record of the past can distinguish them because those things would have to be part of state B itself.
I think David Deutsch has a similar unsorted-pile-of-block-slices view of the world. I don’t know if either was influenced by the other.
Interesting aesthetic question raised by Caledonian’s comment: “not beckoning, but drowning” versus “not wading, but drowning”. I think the latter would have worked much better, but presumably C. thought it too obvious and wanted to preserve more of Stevie Smith’s semantics. :-)
Arthur, what would keeping a time coordinate buy you in your scenario? Suppose, simplifying for convenience, we have A → B → C → B [cycle], and suppose each state completely determines its successor. What advantage would there be to labelling our states (A,0), (B,1), (C,2), (B,3), (C,4), etc., instead of just A,B,C? Note that there’s no observable difference between, say, (B,1) and (B,3); in particular, no memory or record of the past can distinguish them because those things would have to be part of state B itself.
I think David Deutsch has a similar unsorted-pile-of-block-slices view of the world. I don’t know if either was influenced by the other.