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grishka • today at 6:56 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

We know nothing about the true nature of consciousness, and we can't describe time except through our own subjective experience of it. Spacetime might not even be the fundamental layer of the universe, it's just what we all collectively experience through consciousness. So until we figure out what we are, these questions will remain unanswered.


Replies

psychoslave • today at 8:25 AM

"What we are" and "how consciousness emerges and what it implies about itself and its relation to everything else" are two distinct considerations which only partially overlap.

For the second part, it's completely fine to dismiss the first question as irrelevant as "what is 'it' in 'it rains '". That is, language artifact are not evidence of ontological correspondance in actual things happening. So, "we", "being", and "me" can be regarded as illusions. The illusion itself actually happen, but it's more straight forward interpretion is generally misguiding.

The first approach on the other hand can lead to dismiss consciousness as relevant tool to reach some absolute substance which is postulated as ultimate reality. That is, there is some "being", and "I" and "we", just as there are actual ideal spheres in existence in a platonic sense.

Both don't give much credits to the most trivial intuitive interpretation of phenomena, but they kind of point to very different directions.