Managing time when time doesn't exist

> We’re not just experiencing time—we’re creating temporal experience through the very act of being conscious, quantum beings embedded in reality’s information processing systems.

sure, but in exactly the same way rocks are embedded in reality's information-processing systems are creating temporal experiences (erosion, melting, etc)

Great catch. You're absolutely right, that phrasing was misleading in a way that accidentally privileges consciousness over other physical processes.

Consciousness being a purely physical process comparable to rocks eroding from water or whatever is an unproven and still debated presumption.

Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.

> Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.

And what would be a non-religious opposite point? The human brain seems to be pretty physical, unless each has some magic attached to it that enables consciousness?

One could argue for "emergent" dualism without arguing for an immortal soul, for example - the physical complexity collapses on death, so too does the emergent consciousness with it.

Property Dualism is probably the most palatable to materialists, especially non-reductive physicalism. Basically, the idea that mental properties are irreducible to physical ones 1:1, but may still map to physical reality. Or that all mental states may map to physical states, without mental states themselves being physical (the things itself not really "existing" outside of the qualitative experience of the conscious entity).

I know that to many materialists that just means that the physical state (of the brain or GPU vram) is the consciousness, but dualism is imo sort of like saying one thing can't be two things at the same time, at least when it comes to consciousness - the vram state is real and correlates to a conscious state, but the conscious state still exists non-physically.

I also understand that many of us don't want to think that consciousness is "something special" or have aversions to anthropocentric theories, but I believe we shouldn't completely write off the possibility that something really is special about consciousness until we solve it, or at least get anywhere close to solving it, which we evidently haven't done at all because we're not even theoretically sure of a good path to make an artificial version of consciousness. It's not like we lack the compute and are waiting for technology improvements, we just don't know how to do it.

So what you are saying is that consciousness is a property that emerges from a complex neural network that our brain is, and that makes sense. And indeed, in that case, consciousness would not be a physical thing since properties are not physical objects. But that would also mean that consciousness cannot invoke any quantum mechanics, which supports the original point that creating temporal experiences does not require a conscious being.

> we just don't know how to do it

As far as I know, there is no proof that consciousness exists, aside from the fact that everyone personally perceives it. In other words, one has no proof that another is conscious.

Claude effectively claims to be conscious, why should we not believe him?