From: Menno Rubingh (rubingh@delftnet.nl)
Date: Sun Dec 19 1999 - 11:04:25 MST
John Clark, on Sun, 19 Dec 1999, Wrote:
> Time is a real as left and right or back and forth or up and down.
Agreed. I don't think Left, Right, Back, and so on, are Real, either. :-)
> And when I say ONLY in our minds I don't want to give the impression
> that means it's not important or not real.
Similarly for me when I say that "time" is only a mathematical concept that
lives only in my mind. These mathematical concepts are the building blocks I
do my reasoning with; I couldn't live as a [Zombie-being-mistakenly-regarded-
as-a-human-being] in this society anywhere near successfully if I did NOT have
these concepts bouncing around somewhere in my neurons.
> No. Time and position don't make it easier to think, they make it possible
> to think, therefore debating whether they are invented or discovered becomes
> moot.
We invent or infer the concept of "time", then DISCOVER by experiment and
experience that the concept is useful, i.e., that it gives us an advantage in
the survival struggle to use the concept in our reasoning. Then, we start to
believe in the concept, i.e., we start regarding "time" as God-given and
beyond-question Time, because it is tedious (and an inefficient drain on one's
energy) to remember every time that the concept is only an invention, and
because in daily life it doesn't pay off to have philosophical questions about
literally all the basic (but nevertheless, invented) concepts one uses, e.g.,
while thinking about the shortest way to the post-office.
> >I personally have never directly experienced time (let alone Time).
> I don't want to be rude but I really must say it, BALONEY!
How are you qualified to say that it is baloney for me to assert this ? Can
you look into my Zombie "mind" and see something there that is ''conscious''
of Time ?
Greetings, Menno (rubingh@delftnet.nl)
[ PS: I've invented an ad-hoc topic classifier 'ZOMBIE:' for the
'Subject:' line... Being very new on this list, I'm not sure whether
an appropriate classifier already exists. Would be helpful to
put *some* classifier, and the *same* one, in the Subject of all these
mails on "mind", "AI", zombies, qualia, etc.? (Which mails, by the way
I enjoy HUGELY -- thank you!) An alternative choice would be
'MIND:', perhaps. Something covering *both* human and AI brains. ]
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