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0 pointsroenxi2y ago0 comments

That is the big question, isn't it? We don't know enough about time to say. It is as philosophically plausible as any other idea that any particular thread of consciousness wends on infinitely in its own personal timeline, watching everything else decay and disappear until it is the last thing left. It is so implausible that the universe even exists for our statistical impossibility of self to have happened, it would be a bit of a chuckle if there was a third impossibility in the future.

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incompatible2y ago· 2 in thread

It seems a bit odd that we exist at all though, doesn't it? Surely the natural state, or the starting state, would be to have nothing, no time and no space. But then, how would anything ever happen?

But given that we exist, then perhaps things have always existed, before the apparent beginning of the universe that we can apparently observe? But if things have existed for so long, why are we in such a state of ignorance and imperfection? Surely given all this infinite time, something better would have been created by now?

But consciousness doesn't seem to be a "thing" with a physical presence in the real universe. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. Like a web browser running on a computer. Go to sleep and the web browser shuts down, wake up the next day and a new one is instantiated. Then there's no continuity of consciousness, it only lasts for a few hours, and we can return to wondering why I feel like I exist in a here and now, one moment in a possibly infinite timeline.

vintermann2y ago

> It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way.

People need to be more careful about that word "useful". Saying something is useful, is always implying a who it is useful for. Saying it's useful, but it's not useful for anyone, is as meaningless as saying something is useful, but it's not useful for anything.

(This was, as I recall, one of Kant's "categories of reason").

So by saying the brain creates something for a purpose, you're already assuming that the brain is a thing, and it's a thing that wants things. I'm not saying that's wrong, but given how hard it seems to not make circular arguments with it, maybe it isn't actually an empirical question.

incompatible2y ago

Useful from the point of view of helping an animal satisfy its needs, so allowed to survive by natural selection? Perhaps it's just a inevitable by-product of certain types of thought.

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