Consciousness: relationship to time (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 15, 2018, 20:51 (2198 days ago) @ David Turell

This author defines it as a conscious series of snapshots. Don't think it adds much to the discussion:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/do-we-actually-experience-the-flow-of...

"Time is a contentious topic in physics. Some physicists, such as Julian Barbour, argue that it doesn’t even exist. Others, such as Carlo Rovelli, hold that it arises as a secondary effect of deeper quantum processes. Yet others, such as Lee Smolin, maintain that time is the sole fundamental dimension of nature. And because the laws of physics are time-symmetrical, much debate has gone into figuring out why we seem unable to travel back in time.

"All this theorizing is motivated by—and attempts to make sense of—our subjective experience of the forward flow of time. Indeed, our reliance on what we think we experience as the flow of time goes so deep that some philosophers take it for a self-evident axiom. For instance, writing for this magazine, Susan Schneider claimed that the flow of time is inherent to experience—so much so that, according to her, “timeless experience is an oxymoron.”

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"the experiences of remembering the past and imagining the future, as well as that of reading this essay right now, all exist simultaneously in the present snapshot of your conscious life.

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"The flow from snapshot to snapshot is a story you tell yourself, irresistibly compelling as it may be. Neuroscience itself suggests that this flow is indeed a cognitive construct.

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"You see, whether time flows forward, or doesn’t flow at all, or moves back and forth, our resulting subjective experience would be identical in all cases: we would always find ourselves in an experiential snapshot extending smoothly backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, just like the desert road. We would always tell ourselves the same story about what’s going on. A mere cognitive narrative—based purely on contents of the experiential snapshot in question—would suffice to convince us of the forward flow of time even when such is not the case.

"The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion. All we ever actually experience is the present snapshot, which entails a timescape of memories and imaginings analogous to the landscape of valley and mountains. Everything else is a story. The implications of this realization for physics and philosophy are profound. Indeed, the relationship between time, experience and the nature of reality is liable to be very different from what we currently assume, as I discuss in my upcoming book, The Idea of the World. To advance our understanding of reality we must thus revise cherished assumptions about our experience of time. "

Comment: I've left out lots of verbiage. His conclusion is just as ours in the past. Time is a conscious construct of flowing snapshots. we recognize before and after and we cannot get to t he future until it happens.