Let me put on my sciency-sounding mystical speculation hat:
Under the predictive processing framework, the cortex’s only goal is to minimize prediction error (surprise). This happens in a hierarchical way, with predictions going down and evidence going up, and upper levels of the hierarchy are more abstract, with less spatial and temporal detail.
A visual example: when you stare at a white wall, nothing seems to change, even though the raw visual perceptions change all the time due to light conditions and whatnot. This is because all the observations are consistent with the predictions.
As the brain learns more, you get less and less surprise, and the patterns you see are more and more regular. A small child can play the same game a hundred times and it’s still funny, but adults often see the first episode of a TV show and immediately lose interest because “it’s just another mystery show, nothing new under the sun”.
This means that your internal experience becomes ever more stable. This could explain why time seems to pass much faster the older you get.
Maybe, after you live long enough, your posthuman mind accumulates enough knowledge, and gets even less surprised, you eventually understand everything that is to be understood. Your internal experience is something like “The universe is temporally evolving according to the laws of physics, nothing new under the sun”.
At which moment your perception of time stops completely, and your consciousness becomes a reflection of the true nature of the universe, timeless and eternal.
I think that’s what I would try to do with infinite time, after I get bored of playing videogames.
Let me put on my sciency-sounding mystical speculation hat:
Under the predictive processing framework, the cortex’s only goal is to minimize prediction error (surprise). This happens in a hierarchical way, with predictions going down and evidence going up, and upper levels of the hierarchy are more abstract, with less spatial and temporal detail.
A visual example: when you stare at a white wall, nothing seems to change, even though the raw visual perceptions change all the time due to light conditions and whatnot. This is because all the observations are consistent with the predictions.
As the brain learns more, you get less and less surprise, and the patterns you see are more and more regular. A small child can play the same game a hundred times and it’s still funny, but adults often see the first episode of a TV show and immediately lose interest because “it’s just another mystery show, nothing new under the sun”.
This means that your internal experience becomes ever more stable. This could explain why time seems to pass much faster the older you get.
Maybe, after you live long enough, your posthuman mind accumulates enough knowledge, and gets even less surprised, you eventually understand everything that is to be understood. Your internal experience is something like “The universe is temporally evolving according to the laws of physics, nothing new under the sun”.
At which moment your perception of time stops completely, and your consciousness becomes a reflection of the true nature of the universe, timeless and eternal.
I think that’s what I would try to do with infinite time, after I get bored of playing videogames.