Originally posted by Boxing Pythagoras
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Originally posted by Boxing Pythagoras
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X - - - - - -
- X - - - - -
- - X - - - -
- - - X - - -
- - - - X - - (and so on...)
I.e in other words, the above is what we perceive to be happening, whether or not it actually corresponds with reality. I.e, it's this perceived movement of our consciousness from one brain state to the next that the proponents of the B-theory claims is an illusion of our mind/brain state. Appealing to the fact that a particular brain state is bound to a single moment in time does nothing to explain this perceived movement.
Originally posted by Boxing Pythagoras
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Instead, I'll raise another objection. I'll grant you that each particular brain state perceives itself to have arrived at the moment of time it currently is in because it has memories of previous moments in time. I will also grant you that it can only actively perceive outside stimuli at that particular location. What I will not grant you however, is that this is sufficient to explain why we have the illusion of being in a present that is continuously moving forward in time from one moment to the next. Your explanation fails to explain why our first moments of awareness is at the beginning of our lives, rather than at an arbitrary moment along the subset of moments of time which our lives occupy, it fails to explain why we perceive ourselves to be in the specific moment of time that we are currently perceiving ourselves to be in (i.e it fails to explain why you perceive yourself to be in the moment of time where you are currently reading this post of mine) instead of any other arbitrary moment of time in our lives, and it fails to explain why you perceive yourself to be in one moment in a specific state of mind/awareness and in the next moment in another state of mind/awareness.
Your explanation would account for nothing more than us having the memory of having traversed time and having traversed it in a particular direction (from the past to the present, or from a moment of time where entropy was lower to a moment of time where entropy was higher). But it fails to account for why we perceive ourselves to be at one particular moment of time, and it fails to account for why we perceive ourselves to be at that very specific moment of time rather than some other arbitrary moment of time and it fails to account for why that specific moment seems to be replaced with another moment, as if there really was a real and objective "present".
Defining the arrow of time as being in the direction of increasing entropy appears to be a completely subjective decision on your part. What reason for defining the arrow of time as being in the direction of increasing entropy do you have other than you having the illusion that you're moving forward in time towards increasing entropy? Or to put it another way, can you give an objective reason for defining the arrow of time as being towards increasing entropy, other than the subjective illusion of temporal becoming? Otherwise it would seem that you're taking an aspect of what you claim is an illusion, namely temporal becoming, and without justification applying it to an objective aspect of reality, namely time itself as it exists outside of our perceptions.
Originally posted by Boxing Pythagoras
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