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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from time
  • Made this page while struggling through Weird Studies/Courses/Bergson. Doesn't quite work; time is too pervasive a concept to be a topic. Bergson's biggest idea is to posit a theory of lived (or real, but that is contentious) time (durée) vs scientific time (see block universe ).
from Free Will is Incoherent
  • Assume a block universe, that is, that time is real, concrete, and singular. Past and future are just as real as Now, even if we can't know them [as] directly.
from Weird Studies/Courses/Bergson
  • Some trashing of the block universe . Not so sure it is so easily dismissed.
from Henri Bergson
  • His doctrine of time is necessary for his vindication of freedom, for his escape from what William James called a “block universe,”
    • Did not know James had IP on that concept.

block universe

11 Dec 2022 - 29 Oct 2023
Open in Logseq
    • A cosmological view of time as simply another space-like dimension. All times past present and future exist at "once", they are just different slices through a single 4D block.
    • Good and Real lays out this theory and its consequences in some detail.
    • Free will doesn't make any sense in such a cosmos, nor does it provide much support for personal experience of the Now, nor the perception of time as flowing.
    • William Burroughs called this "the prerecorded universe" and viewed himself as fighting a war against the very idea.
    • This is wise: Timeless Control — LessWrong
      • When you take a perspective outside time, you have to be careful not to let your old, timeful intuitions run wild in the absence of their subject matter. In the Block Universe, the future is not determined before you make your choice.  "Before" is a timeful word.  Once you descend so far as to start talking about time, then, of course, the future comes "after" the past, not "before" it.
      • One must avoid mixing up timeless and timeful thinking.  E.g., trying to have "Determinism" acting on things before they happen.  Determinism is a timeless viewpoint, so it doesn't mix well with words like "before".