Philosophy Updates

When the West turned time into a line, it affected all kinds of things afterwards
https://aeon.co/essays/when-we-turned-time-into-a-line-we-reimagined-past-and-future

EXCERPTS: We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen line ahead. We ride an ever-moving arrow – the present. However, this picture of time is not natural. Its roots stretch only to the 18th century, yet this notion has now entrenched itself so deeply in Western thought that it’s difficult to imagine time as anything else. [...] Let’s journey back to Ancient Greece...

[...] Such views of time are cyclical: time comprises a repeating cycle, as events occur, pass, and occur again. They echo processes in nature. Day and night. ... Gould describes [the alternative view of a] linear understanding of history as an ‘important and distinctive’ contribution of Jewish thought. Biblical history helped power linear ideas of time. Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries...

[...] Yet in the 19th-century ... the linear model of time gained ground, and thinkers literally began drawing time as a line. [...] The last development stemmed from mathematics: theories of the fourth dimension.

Humans perceive three spatial dimensions: length, width, and depth. But mathematicians have long theorised there were more. In the 1880s, the mathematician Charles Hinton popularised these ideas, and went further. He didn’t just argue that space has a fourth dimension, he identified time with that dimension... (MORE - details)

RELATED: The occult roots of higher dimensional research in physics
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100 years of quantum mechanics: a new approach is needed
https://iai.tv/articles/100-years-of-quantum-mechanics-a-new-approach-is-needed-auid-3479?_auid=2020

INTRO: 100 years on from the birth of quantum mechanics, philosopher of physics Emily Adlam argues that the quantum measurement problem remains in urgent need of a solution. It continues to raise fundamental questions about why measurements yield definite outcomes, meaningful probabilities, and shared evidence. Adlam argues that the leading interpretations of quantum mechanics still fail to explain these basic features of measurement—threatening the whole edifice of scientific method and theory... (MORE - details)
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We're finally learning what it's like to die. And it's not as bad as you think...
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/near-death-experiences-brain-activity-nde

EXCERPTS: The last words Steve Jobs, the legendary Apple founder, spoke were simple: "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow." Their mystery is enticing – what did Jobs, the digital prophet who brought us the smartphone, see as he neared death? We’ll never know.

But stories of near-death experiences (NDEs) tantalise the living, and something unique seems to be happening inside our brains as we sense death approaching. [...] scientists have recently begun to explore what happens in the final moment of life by gathering data on brain activity from patients who are dying.

[...] Better understanding this activity could not only demystify the dying process – offering comfort to those who have lost loved ones or are nearing death themselves – but might also help explain some of the puzzles of consciousness as well... (MORE - details)
 
The most important quantum advance of the 21st century
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/most-important-quantum-advance-21st-century/

EXCERPTS: You can calculate the probability of a set of outcomes, but quantum physics gives us no way to determine what the outcome of any one particular quantum system will actually be, no matter how much you know about it. This fact about the Universe has spawned much outrage among physicists and philosophers alike since it was first noticed, which in turn has led to many proposed scenarios to attempt to resolve the feeling of discomfort that we feel when we encounter and ponder these properties.

[...] At the core of the argument is whether quantum states are “ontic” or “epistemic” in nature. These aren’t common terms that people use (even most physicists rarely use them), with the difference being as follows.
  • For ontic quantum states, those states would correspond directly to states of reality, with no room for additional knowledge about reality existing in some hidden, but unknown to humans, set of information-carrying variables.
  • Meanwhile, for epistemic quantum states, those states may correspond only to probabilistic states of knowledge about reality, but those states are allowed to be incomplete, where additional knowledge could exist in some type of hidden, information carrying variables.
With this background in mind, we come to the Pusey-Barrett-Randolph (PBR) theorem, put forth in a paper in 2012.

[...] What’s remarkable about this theorem is that it relies solely on three base assumptions made by the authors [...] If any of these assumptions are violated or invalidated, then there’s still wiggle room to argue that the quantum state is not a real object, or that quantum systems don’t have any physical properties at all.

However, if all three of these assumptions are accepted, then the epistemic interpretation of reality is ruled out, leaving us with no alternative but to accept the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics as inherent to, and fundamental to, the nature of reality. That truly is profound, and why the PBR theorem stands tall as the most important development in quantum foundations of the 21st century so far! (MORE - missing details)

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What happens if science finally explains consciousness? A new study explores the consequences.
https://thedebrief.org/what-happens...usness-a-new-study-explores-the-consequences/

EXCERPTS: The most provocative part of the paper looks beyond the near future to ask a bolder question: what if consciousness science actually succeeds?

The consequences, researchers suggest, would ripple across science, medicine, ethics, law, and society. Clinically, better measures of consciousness could transform care for patients with severe brain injuries, advanced dementia, or disorders of consciousness, helping doctors determine not just whether patients are awake, but whether they are experiencing anything at all.

[...] Ethically, the implications could be even more profound. A reliable test for consciousness might inform debates about animal welfare, fetal development, end-of-life care, and the moral status of lab-grown brain tissue.

“A key development would be a test for consciousness, allowing a determination or informed judgment about which systems/organisms—such as infants, patients, fetuses, animals, organoids, xenobots, and AI—are conscious,” researchers note... (MORE - details)

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Forgetting history
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/forgetting-history/#more-15154

EXCERPTS: Engaging on social media to discuss pseudoscience can be exhausting, and make one weep for humanity. [...] one very common narrative that I have seen amounts to denying history, often replacing it with a different story entirely. At the extreme the narrative is – “everything you think you know about history if wrong.” Often this is framed as – “every you have been told about history is a lie.” Why are so many people, especially young people, apparently susceptible to this narrative?

[...] Another factor driving this phenomenon is pseudoexperts, who also can use social media to get their message out. Among them are people like Graham Hancock, who presents himself as an expert in ancient history but actually is just a crank. He has plenty of factoids in his head, but has no formal training in archaeology and is the epitome of a crank – usually a smart person but with outlandish ideas and never checks his ideas with actual experts, so they slowly drift off into fantasy land. The chief feature of such cranks is a lack of proper humility, even overwhelming hubris. They casually believe that they are smarter that the world’s experts in a field, and based on nothing but their smarts can dismiss decades or even centuries of scholarship... (MORE - details)
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‘A lingering in stillness’: philosopher Byung-Chul Han on the radical power of gardening
https://theconversation.com/a-linge...-han-on-the-radical-power-of-gardening-272812

EXCERPTS: Han is a rare thinker who [...] writes slim volumes, easily carried in a coat pocket, which brim with explosive diagnoses of contemporary ills while proposing new ways of living. ... Against the tide of self-help manuals focusing on positivity and success, he suggests “rest and contemplation are acts of resistance against a world that demands constant productivity. In pausing we reclaim our humanity.” In Praise of the Earth suggests the humble practice of gardening can offer one example of this kind of resistance. While he reflects on the deeper implications of gardening and thinking, Han’s book is also practical and personal. It is both a philosophical treatise on gardening and a diary of his experiences tending to his Bi-Won, Korean for “secret garden” in Berlin, over a period of three years... (MORE - details)

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Is the whole universe just a simulation?
https://theconversation.com/is-the-whole-universe-just-a-simulation-268177

EXCERPT: This argument would be even more convincing if you actually could run powerful simulations today, but as long as you believe that people will run those simulations someday, then you logically should believe that you’re probably living in one today... (MORE - details)
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In order to increase the probability enough to warrant belief, though, it really does matter that an internally convincing simulation be demonstrated as possible, and one that accomplishes that via tricks. Since even though a speculative "mother" level that makes our reality possible could have vastly more resources and fewer limitations, so it that could truly generate and maintain a complete universe like this... That is just not going to be possible in ours. If there is a Matryoshka doll situation of nested ontological domains, our world is surely about the last one -- the "stupid stratum" -- that could still engender its own half-competent simulations (again, via tricks rather than totality).
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Some companies claim they can ‘resurrect’ species. Does that make people more comfortable with extinction?
https://theconversation.com/some-co...eople-more-comfortable-with-extinction-273583

EXCERPT: In a new study published in Biological Conservation, we put this idea to the test. We found no evidence people will accept extinction more readily if they’re promised de-extinction. But it’s important to communicate about de-extinction efforts with care... (MORE - details)

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Gentle parenting is doomed to fail (Parenting needs to get real about evolution)
https://iai.tv/articles/gentle-parenting-is-doomed-to-fail-auid-3493?_auid=2020

INTRO: Children are active evolutionary agents adapted to extract the maximum resources from their environment, argues evolutionary psychologist Maryanne Fisher. She reveals why parenting fads like “gentle parenting” or “tiger parenting” that promise perfect harmony inevitably fail; and how we might better design social policy to support families as they actually exist, rather than as we wish them to be... (MORE - details)

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Why Aristotle would hate Valentine’s Day - and his five steps to love
https://theconversation.com/why-ari...entines-day-and-his-five-steps-to-love-275460

EXCERPT: Why do so many of us feel such pressure to offer grand gestures, buy pricey gifts, and go through elaborate displays of affection? Presumably, to prove our love. Valentine’s Day is a showy, one-day-a-year demonstration that promises to do just that. For the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322BC), however, this approach misunderstands the nature of love. For him, the true form of love wasn’t intense passion or grand gestures on one day of the year. Instead, it’s a steady commitment to help your beloved grow into their best version through everyday practices of care... (MORE - details)
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Computers can’t surprise
https://aeon.co/essays/sure-ai-can-do-writing-but-memoir-not-so-much

As AI’s endless clichés continue to encroach on human art, the true uniqueness of our creativity is becoming ever clearer...

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An existentialist philosopher on why we should not let fear dictate love
https://theconversation.com/an-exis...hy-we-should-not-let-fear-dictate-love-275455

EXCERPT: For the existentialist, however, this feeling of incompleteness points to a fundamental truth about being human. For them, we are this tension. We are thrown into the world we haven’t chosen, but we are still responsible for the sense we make of our lives. This is what the existentialists mean by the slogan: existence precedes essence - there’s no script of our lives. [...] For the existentialist, stories like Aristophanes’ cover over irresolvable tensions with being human rather than solving them. Think about the idea of finding “the one”. For the existentialist, behind this project is really one of putting the script back into our lives. Love proves that our lives have meaning... (MORE - details)

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Are the mysteries of quantum mechanics beginning to dissolve?
https://www.quantamagazine.org/are-...tum-mechanics-beginning-to-dissolve-20260213/

EXCERPTS: None of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. [...] It’s no wonder experts are as divided as ever about what quantum theory says about reality, a century after the theory was developed. But after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism, a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I’m excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful notions. [...] To my eye, Zurek has almost tied up the loose ends that have been confounding physics for 100 years, without invoking any substantially new or speculative assumptions. In doing so, he claims to unite the previously irreconcilable. Let’s see how far his approach takes us, and where the remaining mystery lies... (MORE - details)
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Why rational choice theory should not be the standard for good decisions
https://behavioralscientist.org/why...hould-not-be-the-standard-for-good-decisions/

EXCERPT: In Schwartz and Schuldenfrei’s book, they argue that rational choice theory is woefully inadequate as a normative standard. Rational choice theory, they write, requires us to quantify a decision in a way that strips away many aspects of the individual and the situation, which, far from being tangential to how we decide, are fundamental to it. In its place, they propose an alternative standard that puts reflection and judgment at the center of rationality... (MORE - details)

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The (perhaps) unsolvable mysteries of consciousness
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...perhaps-unsolvable-mysteries-of-consciousness

EXCERPT: Scientists, Michael Pollan acknowledges, have subsequently discovered a lot about consciousness: the sentience of plants and animals, the origin and nature of feelings, ways in which we think, why minds wander, the value of a self, and efforts to transcend it. But to date, according to Pollan, no philosopher or scientist has solved “the hard problem” Crick promised to solve: connecting activities in the cranial cortex to a seemingly subjective and immaterial consciousness that “layers perception, memory and feeling” with qualities greater than information... (MORE - details)

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What if fundamental reality has mental and material aspects?
https://www.templeton.org/news/what-if-fundamental-reality-has-mental-and-material-aspects

EXCERPT: On the plus side, making scientific observations about the world leads to taking the material world seriously. I celebrate this. But because scientific observations cannot conclusively verify any immaterial dimensions of life, some are tempted to claim that fundamental reality is purely material. Nothing more. I disagree with that claim, as it results from specious logic and a certain degree of hubris.

For example, imagine a successful fisherman who boasts, “Anything that I can’t catch with my nets does not exist.” That’s patently false, but it employs the same logical structure as “whatever science cannot measure does not exist.” This claim is itself empirically unverifiable—more akin to a profession of faith than a “scientific” conclusion.

But the weakness of reductive materialism doesn’t compel us to adopt mind-matter dualism either. The dualist perspective rightly accounts for the subjective dimensions of our experience. So that’s a plus. But most versions of dualism still concede that nature is comprised mostly of entities that are entirely material... (MORE - details)
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The quantum world reveals reality is made of relations, not objects
https://iai.tv/articles/the-quantum...of-relations-not-objects-auid-3501?_auid=2020

INTRO: We assume that objects are more fundamental than the relationships between those objects. However, philosopher George Webster argues that quantum mechanics upends this common-sense picture. In the quantum world, relations like symmetry are more real than the particles themselves. But neither our everyday language, nor the language of logic favored by philosophers, can make sense of this. Webster suggests that we turn to the weird and wonderful language of Gilles Deleuze to truly comprehend the quantum picture of reality. (MORE - missing details)

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The Ur-“Conspiracy”: History of a Pseudoconcept
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/02/12/the-ur-conspiracy-history-of-a-pseudoconcept/

EXCERPT: There’s a lesson here that bears attention today, at the apparent twilight of the same modern world, when the fundamental problem we face involves the degree to which the truth must now compete with such a vast multiplicity of falsehoods that discovering truth itself becomes unviable. Consider that so much of consequence to our own heritage should have been so misunderstood for as long as the Rosicrucian manifestos; it seems that crucial facts can be effectively concealed from serious attention simply by being visibly subject to the unserious sort. Such facts are gradually imbued with a sort of de facto defense mechanism against scrutiny, whereby the mere act of taking an interest in them serves to discredit professional researchers and journalists... (MORE - detais)

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Losing faith in atheism
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/losing-faith-in-atheism

EXCERPT: Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand... (MORE - details)

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A famous enigma: "On Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography" and “The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève”
https://clereviewofbooks.com/isabel-jacobs-boris-groys-marco-filoni/

EXCERPTS: Until 2025, the name “Alexandre Kojève” was a paradox. A philosopher often invoked yet rarely read – a famous enigma. [...] This year, two intellectual biographies appeared in English at once: Marco Filoni’s The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève and Boris Groys’ Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography. Approaching Kojève from different angles, both restore him as a thinker in his own right. [...] Most importantly, Groys manages to wrestle Kojève’s original concept of the end of history from Fukuyama’s clutches, giving it new life: “After the end of history, the anti-consumerist, ascetic lifestyle becomes the revelation of nothingness as the only content of human existence.” In such a vision of posthistory, art is the tool to bring about this revelation of nothingness, not as a way to understand the world but to change it... (MORE - details)
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AI can now write convincing academic papers. There’s no more room for denial
https://writing.yaschamounk.com/p/the-humanities-are-about-to-be-automated

EXCERPTS: There has long been a divide between those who believe that artificial intelligence is an enormously transformative technology and those who believe that it is hopelessly overhyped. Never has that divide been more enormous than in the last weeks. [...] Don’t believe me that the AI-induced crisis of the humanities is upon us? Take a look at the political theory paper Claude wrote up in a couple of hours for yourself... (MORE - details)

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Can digital computers ever achieve consciousness?
https://www.templeton.org/news/can-digital-computers-ever-achieve-consciousness

EXCERPTS: Is functionalism correct? An increasing number of philosophers think it is not, and in a recent peer-reviewed article, my co-author Corey Maley (University of Kansas) and I argue that if it isn’t, there are reasons to think that digital people would experience nothing. This, we argue, is because consciousness is analog, not digital. [...] So, it’s probably false that digital beings can have minds. To use a once-common but now somewhat outdated phrase, digital ‘minds’ can fake it, but they can never actually make it. Conscious experience is fundamentally analog-digital beings are not. What is it like to be a ‘digital person’? Probably nothing-or static on a TV screen... (MORE - details)

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Is AI really ‘intelligent’? This philosopher says yes
https://theconversation.com/is-ai-really-intelligent-this-philosopher-says-yes-271721

EXCERPT: Intelligence, he argues, is a property of systems rather than beings, and function is its primary indicator. A rock does not function, but a kidney does. This is demonstrated simply by cutting them in half. The rock becomes two rocks, but the kidney is no longer a kidney.

So does a kidney have intelligence? Or an amoeba? Or a leaf? These questions are opened up, along with the question of whether Large Language Models have intelligence, which may a better way to frame it than asking whether they are intelligent.

Agüera y Arcas is not alone in taking an affirmative position... (MORE - details)

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I’m a philosopher who tries to see the best in others – but I know there are limits
https://theconversation.com/im-a-ph...-in-others-but-i-know-there-are-limits-273446

EXCERPTS: My field, philosophy, offers a tried-and-true answer to what we need to do in order to understand people and texts from very different backgrounds and cultural assumptions than our own. We need to be charitable.

Charity in this sense isn’t a matter of giving money to those who need it more. Instead, it’s seeing others in a favorable light – of seeing the best in them. [...] Interpreting someone charitably doesn’t require agreeing with them. But it does require doing our best to find merit in their point of view.

Of course, people and ideas don’t have unlimited merit. We can err by failing to see the merit of someone’s point of view – or we can err by finding merit that isn’t really there.

But the idea of charity is that it’s worse to make the first kind of error because it prevents us from getting along and learning from one another. By seeing the best in someone else and in their ideas, we can learn productively from engaging with them. Protagonists are people we can learn from and cooperate with... (MORE - details)
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C C said:
EXCERPTS: There has long been a divide between those who believe that artificial intelligence is an enormously transformative technology and those who believe that it is hopelessly overhyped. Never has that divide been more enormous than in the last weeks. [...] Don’t believe me that the AI-induced crisis of the humanities is upon us? Take a look at the political theory paper Claude wrote up in a couple of hours for yourself
Click to expand...
Many threads on this, at the dot net website. Many leaving me with the sense that an arms race is underway between cheating students and teachers with AI buster software. As some put it, the threat to young minds is existential.
 
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All history is counterfactual history
https://grecowansley.substack.com/p/all-history-is-counterfactual-history

EXCERPT: In my last post on Why I am Not a Humanist, I warned against a tendency to implicitly assume that just because some question was discussed in the past by writers in the humanistic tradition, it can be responsibly addressed today using solely humanistic methods, rather than natural and/or social science. Today’s post will be something of a sequel to that last one, in which I zoom in on what I think is a mistaken way of drawing a particular social science/humanities boundary in thinking about the study of history... (MORE - details)

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Consciousness researchers need Spinoza
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-researchers-need-spinoza-auid-3502?_auid=2020

INTRO: The mind-matter problem still haunts us to this day. The question of how and why consciousness and the physical world interact and influence one another remains a mystery. In response to this problem, the philosopher Spinoza argued that nature is constituted by something more fundamental than either the mental or the physical: something that contains both. Philosopher Jordi Galiano-Landeira here argues that Spinoza’s philosophy is panpsychist – matter contains mind – and that integrated-information theory can help solve some of the remaining problems with panpsychism... (MORE - details)

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Science has shattered our worldview again and again: While philosophy only watched?
https://openquestionsblog.substack.com/p/science-has-shattered-our-worldview

EXCERPTS: Science has shattered our worldview again and again. Meanwhile, what has the very oldest form of inquiry been doing? Philosophy is supposed to question fundamental assumptions, but when it hasn’t been actively impeding science, it seems only to look on, with admiration and envy, from the sidelines. [...] I used to accept this picture of science and philosophy. I now think it is an illusion. Philosophy was a silent partner all along.

[...] Philosophy helped build the epistemic foundations that made scientific revelations possible. It defeated the authority of religion and tradition, allowing any claim at all to be interrogated. It gave us logic and probability theory, both necessary to draw scientific inferences. Even empiricism—the idea that our knowledge of the world is mediated by the senses—was co-authored by science and philosophy. Philosophy built science yet continued to inhabit it... (MORE - details)

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Mexistentialism
https://aeon.co/essays/the-lesson-of-mexistentialism-the-strength-of-uncertainty

EXCERPT: Mexican philosophers, especially those of the existentialist tradition – what I’ve elsewhere referred to as (M)existentialism – seem to have a person like my father in mind when they talk about what it means to be Mexican. They talk about a type of person who understands or recognises the meaning of the phrase ‘nothing is certain’. This person understands or recognises their nepantla – that they are in between spaces, times, destinations, life and death – and so they recognise their indeterminacy, instability and radical uncertainty, what Mexistentialists call zozobra.

In short, they are sure of one thing: that ‘nada es seguro’. That’s my father. Thinking of my father is one reason why I think it’s important to read Mexistentialism now, or to read it in times of crisis. When we do, not only are we gifted with vocabulary that can help us articulate our current crisis – words like accidentality, zozobra, nepantla and relajo – but it helps us understand how our crises and our philosophies are intimately tied to one another, how historical trauma shapes or informs our perspectives, and why our perspectives matter in the first place... (MORE - details)
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Reality is not a controlled hallucination
https://iai.tv/articles/reality-is-not-a-controlled-hallucination-auid-3517?_auid=2020

INTRO: The idea that 'reality is a controlled hallucination' has been recently popularised by figures such as neuroscientist Anil Seth. But this claim, which purports to be hard, down-to-earth science, is, in fact, bad philosophy. Philosopher and author of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, Evan Thompson, here argues the 'controlled hallucination' hypothesis brings nothing new to the table regarding the problem of consciousness. And there is a circularity problem: if the theory claims that reality is a hallucination, then that theory itself is part of the hallucination... (MORE - details)

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Consciousness is the hidden architecture behind fundamental and quantum physics
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousne...ntal-and-quantum-physics-auid-3523?_auid=2020

INTRO: Physics, and science as a whole, attempts to paint an objective picture of reality. Consciousness, experience, and subjectivity are forcibly pushed out of this picture. Even where science is empirical, this empiricism rarely involves a consideration of human consciousness, but rather the readings of some mechanical measuring device, or some hypothetical abstracted sum of all perspectives - a God's eye view or view from nowhere. But phenomenologist of science Harald A. Wiltsche paints a different picture. Physics, even in the form of quantum mechanics, has its origins in the phenomenology of human consciousness. No matter how hard scientists try, it can never escape those origins, and to truly move forward, it must understand and embrace them... (MORE - details)
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Is time a figment of our imaginations?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/mar/22/is-time-a-figment-of-our-imaginations

EXCERPTS: . . . Time is elusive in other ways, too. We have no sensory organs for detecting it, nor any dedicated brain areas for tracking it. Our experience of time can vary hugely: minutes drag if we’re bored or uncomfortable; hours race if we’re excited or having fun; we can easily be fooled about how much time has elapsed...

Take Lara, who suffers from a condition called akinetopsia, in which events no longer progress smoothly but in sudden jumps. When she pours tea, the liquid appears as a frozen column in the air, before suddenly overflowing the cup. One man with psychosis described repeatedly reliving the same half hour...

[...] Rather than being mere mistakes or distortions, these effects reflect something deeper: the role we all play in creating our own time. [...] Time, then, is less a universal truth than a feature of how we interact with the world. This insight is reflected in the way some indigenous communities experience time... (MORE - details)
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The brain itself is the sensory organ for detecting time or the appearance of it. Via antecedent information being stored in memory, it compares that with new information and discerns a difference between the two (interpreting that as change). Each of those cognitive distinctions is an island unto itself, only presenting itself as real. Granted, though, the narrative part of consciousness usually isn't paying attention to each automatic discernment of difference and so the assessment of "temporal passage" can subjectively seem to vary.

One thing about akinetopsia is that it illustrates how -- even if there was an objective flow, where time is speciously treated as if a substance flowing through a structure -- we would not be experiencing that mind-independent rate but instead the brain's retarded representations. There are subatomic events measured in zeptoseconds and "smaller" time units that the brain's milliseconds in duration snapshots of consciousness would extend over and not capture (even if we could peer down to that substrate unaided).
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Reality cannot be turned into mathematics
https://iai.tv/articles/reality-cannot-be-turned-into-mathematics-auid-3529?_auid=2020

INTRO: For centuries, scientists and philosophers—from Leibniz to today’s AI visionaries—have dreamed of mathematizing reality, fully describing the world in equations that a machine can compute. But this is a dangerous illusion, argue mathematician and biochemist Jobst Landgrebe and philosopher Barry Smith, whose work on scientific modelling has been utilized by institutions like the US military and the National Institutes of Health, making him one of the world’s most highly cited philosophers. Natural systems like the climate and the human brain, they contend, can never be fully captured by models, because they are fundamentally irregular and unpredictable. True progress depends on flexible heuristics, which allow us to intervene in reality without needing an exhaustive description of it. (MORE - details)
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The inner life we’re trading away
https://bigthink.com/philosophy/the-inner-life-were-trading-away/

KEY POINTS: Neuroscientist Christof Koch argues that our culture’s obsession with “doing” over “being” has left us unable to distinguish between intelligence and consciousness — a confusion that helps explain why so many people mistake sophisticated AI for something with an inner life. Machines can perform the same tasks as intelligent humans without experiencing anything at all. Koch suggests that a future dominated by brilliant yet unconscious machines could steadily drain human existence of meaning. The antidote, Koch argues, is to cultivate reflective self-consciousness: the practice of pausing, looking inward, and examining your own thoughts and feelings. It’s a capacity no machine can develop for you. (MORE - missing details)

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Theories are never true, they are only more or less useful
https://iai.tv/articles/theories-ar...only-more-or-less-useful-auid-3531?_auid=2020

INTRO: We think our theories about reality – whether in physics, philosophy, or psychology – should aspire to be faithful descriptions of how reality actually is. But philosopher of science Manuel Delaflor makes the case that this aspiration is incredibly dangerous. Instead of thinking our theories map onto an underlying reality, Delaflor asks us to stop worshipping our models, even though we cannot stop modelling any more than we can stop breathing. Evaluating our theories by what they can do, and not by what they claim to be, will make us far more productive and happier. (MORE - details)
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Studies on animal minds suggest consciousness is not computation
https://iai.tv/articles/studies-on-...sness-is-not-computation-auid-3535?_auid=2020

INTRO: We’re often seduced by the idea that the mind is a computer, and that consciousness is just a matter of running the right code. But philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, renowned for his work on octopus minds, disagrees. Fresh research into animal minds—from bees to jellyfish—suggests that consciousness arises not from software but from electrical oscillations moving rhythmically across cell membranes in living brains. And those oscillations, Godfrey-Smith argues, are unlikely to be reproducible in artificial hardware. Perhaps, then, only living brains can truly be conscious. (MORE - details)
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C C said:
KEY POINTS: Neuroscientist Christof Koch argues that our culture’s obsession with “doing” over “being” has left us unable to distinguish between intelligence and consciousness — a confusion that helps explain why so many people mistake sophisticated AI for something with an inner life. Machines can perform the same tasks as intelligent humans without experiencing anything at all. Koch suggests that a future dominated by brilliant yet unconscious machines could steadily drain human existence of meaning. The antidote, Koch argues, is to cultivate reflective self-consciousness: the practice of pausing, looking inward, and examining your own thoughts and feelings. It’s a capacity no machine can develop for you.
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Hear, hear! This dovetails well with Jaron Lanier's warnings about people altering their thought processes too much towards what computers do. Lanier called it "digital dehumanization."
 
C C said:
Fresh research into animal minds—from bees to jellyfish—suggests that consciousness arises not from software but from electrical oscillations moving rhythmically across cell membranes in living brains. And those oscillations, Godfrey-Smith argues, are unlikely to be reproducible in artificial hardware. Perhaps, then, only living brains can truly be consciou
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This underscores the important feature of wet brains, which is that they are a hybrid of both digital and analog activity. Any artificial platform would likely need that hybrid architecture if it hopes to reproduce the causal structure of a biological one.
 
How the human brain builds our sense of time
https://www.sissa.it/sites/default/files/attachments/news/SISSA_press_release_Time_Perception .pdf

PRESS RELEASE: How does Jannik Sinner manage to hit the ball at exactly the right moment, with remarkable precision? And how do we, in everyday life, perceive the duration of events around us? The answer lies in how the brain constructs the perception of time, as shown by research published in PLOS Biology by Valeria Centanino, Gianfranco Fortunato, and Domenica Bueti. Starting from what we see—such as an approaching ball—temporal information is processed by the brain through progressively more complex stages: from the occipital visual cortex, to parietal and premotor areas, and finally to frontal regions.

Using high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and measuring time perception in healthy volunteers, the researchers shed light on what happens in the brain when we estimate the duration of a visual stimulus. “Our results show that time perception is not a unitary process, but the outcome of multiple processing stages distributed across the cerebral cortex,” the authors explain. “Each stage contributes differently, from encoding physical duration to constructing the subjective experience of time.”

In an initial stage, occipital visual areas encode duration through gradual (monotonic) neural responses: the longer the stimulus, the stronger the neural response. This information is then transformed in parietal and premotor regions into selective (unimodal) representations, where distinct neural populations respond preferentially to specific durations, enabling the “readout” of time. Finally, higher-order regions, including the frontal cortex and anterior insula, are involved in the subjective categorization of duration, shaping how time is perceived.

The PLOS Biology study goes beyond identifying where time is processed in the brain, proposing instead a mechanistic model of how temporal information is processed.This new framework not only advances our understanding of time perception but also opens new avenues for investigating how the brain constructs subjective time—and why this experience can sometimes be distorted.
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COMMENT: Naïve realism infests temporal perception as much as anything else. Philosophy of time should take into account the mediating brain and the chunk sequence of countless neural operations and electrochemical interactions that just one milliseconds-long snapshot of change is riding over or dependent on. The latter is a slow, extended phenomenal "elephant" compared to the rate of the substrate that makes it possible, and not an objective standard to be projecting "out there".
 
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