Friday, December 29, 2023

Consciousness Requires the Awareness of Time

I've always found Buddhism to be unsatisfactory at providing a purpose for life. Though the practice is a valuable exercise, which enables a clearer connection with reality (and the glimpse into the biases of perception), the concept of "detachment" precludes the understanding I have of reality across time.
 
Both memory and imagination stretch my awareness along a new dimension, time, which requires attachment. Without this attachment, time cannot be experienced. 
 
I also suspect that the awareness and experience of time is necessary for consciousness. Is it sufficient? I'm not sure, but my intuition says no.

Is this similar to the "recipe is not the cake" perception (or the "HTML is not the web page")? Is this the perception artificial intelligence will need to develop to become more human? I am so immersed in the experiencing of time that I am not even aware of the impact it has on my perception of reality.

This is where I will disagree with Philip Goff and his version of panpsychism. Most of the structures in the universe are incapable of consciousness, since they do not have the requisite ability to remember reality from one moment to another. Rather, most structures experience only "now", a reality without time.

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