Human being, subject of Qualia
Vasyl Dotsenko(Vasyl Dotsenko)
3 entirely different things we call “Time”
But we don’t know the map is 100% accurate.
Moreover, we know that it is certainly not 100% accurate, because we still have multiple gaps in our understanding. My point here is that we haven’t encountered any physical process which would require “now” to be somehow special. It does not mean we won’t encounter it in the future, but it is worth mentioning that we haven’t encountered it yet.
That depends on how literally you take the metaphors of cursors and movement. The Growing Block Universe theory perhaps needs only one extra dimension.
For each point in th-dimensional universe to be special, there must exists a point in th-dimension of Growing Block Universe for which would be special.
I.e., if Growing Block Universe grows in th dimension, we can say that and at the point it grew all the way up to , making special only from the perspective of , but not globally special across the entire Growing Block Universe.
In turn, in order to make the point special, we need a non-special point in th dimention, and so on up to infinity.
I.e., if Growing Block Universe is -dimensional, the “Growing” part would be only th-dimensional, and th-dimension part would be static.
Qualia are not necessarily illusory. If you put your hand on a hot (objectively) stove, it feels hot subjectively.
I’m not claiming that Qualia is illusory. On the contrary, Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum” suggests that qualia might be the only thigh for which we can claim with certainty that it is not illusory.
I suggest entertaining the possibility that Cursor of Time itself might be illusory, making us think at every point in time that this moment is somehow special and that the time “flows”.
I.e., if (and that’s a big if) Cursor of Time is indeed an illusion, it would mean that “now” is no more special than “here.”
Agree.
But I want to show that the phenomenon I try to explain cannot be reduced to Growing Block Universe, unless the Growing Block Universe is infinitely dimensional, which is not something totally unimaginable, but isn’t parsimonious either.
There’s a possibility that there might be nothing special about the present at all. I don’t feel like there’s something special about the region of space I occupy, and the illusion of time flow comes from the fact that I cannot say the same about the time.
My point is that difference between presentism vs. non-presentism might be purely linguistical and difference between “this thing existed in the past, but it doesn’t exist any longer” might be just similar to “this thing is there, but it doesn’t stretch all the way to here.”