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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I'm stuck with a related philosophical problem, perhaps somebody here can help me out.

The problem is that consciousness happens "now", but "now" has only a meaning in an inertial frame of reference, and simultaneity in physics depends on the chosen frame of reference.

To phrase it differently, you generally don't feel what you felt yesterday, or what you feel tomorrow. You only feel (or experience) what you are feeling at this very moment. But if one (mathematical) point in the brain is conscious, by the time it has communicated to another point in the brain, that "feeling" has been lost to time.

So either consciousness happens only at distinct (mathematical) points in the brain, or, somehow, consciousness can span a short non-zero time interval. You experience not just "now", but also briefly in the past and perhaps into the future.

This seems contradictory, so a better way of looking at it is needed.

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This is a very interesting point.

The article takes "consciousness" to mean the contents of awareness, and not awareness (subjectivity) itself, so from my point of view it doesn't even begin to touch on the "hard problem".

One interesting clue is that, as you point out, subjectively "it" is always now and you are always here. Whatever "you" are, you're the origin-point in spacetime for the contents of your awareness.

This is true even when you are dreaming, which seems significant.

We know that phenomenon that are too fast or too slow cannot be perceived, and I think you're right that that indicates something important about how subjectivity functions.

Mmm, I think your brain smears consciousness over a short rolling period of time. It has the machinery in there already because it has to coordinate signals from your extremities which can take a hundred or more ms to propagate to the brain.

You might find this experiment interesting [0] where a scanner can see that you've made a decision slightly before you're conscious of the fact that you've decided. Also Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang) has an interesting, if not especially scientific, post [1] looking at the brain and consciousness from something of a distributed systems (Erlang bread & butter) perspective you might find interesting. (That said, since I sometimes wake up 1-5 minutes before the alarm, I don't completely buy his explanation, but it's still an interesting read.)

[0] http://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/ [1] http://joearms.github.io/2015/03/02/Waking-Up.html

I'm not sure why you assume consciousness happens "now". I would argue consciousness intuitively includes more time than that, perhaps even your entire conscious lifetime, as when you are conscious that includes your identity which would include your memories and hopes.

My narrow physicists' answer is that conciousness doesn't just happen "now", it happens _here and now_ -- and that isperfectly well defined in all relativistic frames of reference.

A broader -- and much more speculative answer -- is that concious experience "is happening" (English tenses are not approriate for this discussion) all over the time-space. But at each point along the trajectory (history) of an intelligent being, there exists an unsually coherent, understandable description of a part of that experinece.

Our catch-all description for such descriptions is "what Mr X is experiencing now".

I think it was a similar thought that inspired Heidegger to write his Being and Time[1]. But I have to admit while I tried to get the basic ideas I finally gave up on all philosophy.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

To me it seems like the battle that Wittgenstein postulates was lost in the first place. Most philosophy is nitpicking about linguistic idiosyncracies without any real physical or metaphysical value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Time

> The problem is that consciousness happens "now"

Well, if it doesn't? Rather, you have a statechange between two times and you don't know when the change happened any more exact than that.

The notion of the now is just a placeholder of a state, for future reference. It's an abstract idea anyhow. But thought arises from statechanges, seeing how nothing would happen if everything stayed the same.

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