From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@msx.upmc.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 21 2002 - 16:52:33 MDT
Colin Hales [mailto:colin@versalog.com.au] wrote:
Rafal wrote:
>> Hal Finney
>> These kinds of models suggest that causality can exist in a timeless
>> sense. So perhaps it is not so impossible to imagine consciousness
>> existing in the same way.
> ### Yes. Julian Barbour in his "The End of Time" advances exactly this
> kind of worldview.
> Rafal
I'm interested in how you think causality can exist in a timeless sense.
It seems contradictory.
I just can't envisage it. Doesn't causality _create_ time?
Absence of the flow of time surely means everything
happening simultaneously or nothing happening at all
(the two ends of a time axis meet and the axis contracts to zero length).
In this case, what is the place of an observer with a 'consciousness'?
### I warmly recommend Barbour's book. He makes a much better job of
explaining his ideas than I could hope to provide. Still, let me try a
little bit: the notion of causality applies to the internal structure of the
timeless elements of a configuration space describing all possible states of
the Universe. These elements contain "traces" of other elements -
substructures mathematically related to other elements, allowing grouping
these elements in a nonarbitrary way along a vector/axis, which we call
time. Conscious experience it then an attribute of some structures within a
subset of such elements, with the experience of the first human being
existing in the same way as our own.
I don't necessarily agree with what he says, I tend to believe that
conscious experience is the feeling of mathematics as it grows bigger - but
I am trying to cut back on fuzzy metaphorical mysticism, and stay clean,
rational and sober, so this is all I say for now.
Rafal
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