The Illusion of Time (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Sunday, June 20, 2010, 22:52 (5051 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: I hope my previous paragraphs coincide with what you say here in these two paragraphs. -Indeed they do. The river image is an excellent one for time, and what you say about millions of states, "now", and continuity is the equivalent of what mystics describe as the interconnectedness of all things. However, I don't think the image works quite so well for life, because unlike time, the past, present and future of life don't just flow one way. I'd like to consider two quotes from your earlier paragraphs:-1) "The past only exists in what observations we humans choose to write down ... or in rare cases, are able to infer on things we DO know. Happened."-A great deal of our human culture is devoted precisely to our attempts to counter the flow of time. We do this not only by writing things down in the form of historiography, reports, diaries etc., but also through art, monuments, archives, museums. The concept of nationhood, for instance, depends on the retention of memories.*** As you've pointed out, what is retained is not the past itself but interpretations of the past, which is why history can be rewritten in accordance with current requirements. But whatever is retained REMAINS PRESENT, as I'll try to illustrate through the second quote: -"When you look downstream, you'll have a general idea [..] where your touch "influenced" the stream." -You may have influenced the stream, but the stream has also influenced you and continues to do so, because although the past may no longer be real, its impact is. A striking example is trauma.*** And as everybody now knows, our childhood experiences especially have a huge effect on our personality, even though we may not have a conscious memory of them. Sometimes, a psychiatrist may be able to "pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow" (of course, Shakespeare knew it all long before we did), but most of the past remains hidden and influential. It affects our present and our future. You could extend this collectively too. No matter what your views may be on the Israel-Palestine tragedy, you can't discount the traumatic effects of modern history on the Jews, from the pogroms to the Holocaust. And so although time flows onwards like a river, I'd suggest that in life there is also a contraflow, because the past ... no matter how unreal it has become ... exercises a never-ending influence on the present.-***All of this is the subject of two marvellous books on memory by Jan and Aleida Assmann that I keep referring to periodically. Infuriatingly, there have been more hold-ups, and so the books are still only available in German. I'll keep you informed. -For David: Like Matt, I find it impossible to conceive of a UI who can't remember what he designed. If from your reasoning you deduce that there is a UI, we can also deduce from our reasoning that he has a memory, since it's reasonable to argue that intelligence can't function without some kind of acquired knowledge. This really won't be of much use if you've forgotten what you learned! However, characteristics such as benevolence and omniscience are certainly in a different category.