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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Both of us are clearly ingesting time, it is simply another one of our inputs.

We are not ingesting time, we are in a certain sense creating it. We constantly observe the world and it changes over time but just observing the world alone is not enough to perceive time. You have to memorize the current state of the world as you just perceived it and later compare your new perceptions with the memory in order to determine that the world has changed in between.

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Observation is inherently a process with time. Without time, observation cannot be done. I’m not sure how observation without time could even be done, with the goal of observation being the measure from one state to another.

Sure, an observation itself takes place in time and over a period of time, but a single observation itself does not capture time. Imagine you would see the world through your eyes and immediately forget about it. The process of seeing itself takes some time as chemistry and biology do their thing, but you yourself would not be aware of time. You would see the world in one state and shortly after in another state but you would be unaware that it changed as you already forgot the previous observation. For all you could tell, the world could be a static timeless place.

I agree with what you say, but do not think it is true for humans. I think this may be true for thinking machines like ChatGPT which do not think, do not observe, unless we give it something to think about. E.g. the thinking machine is just a program which runs its program with our input. In the future, seeing machines will not see unless we give it something to look at.

Perhaps you are right, it is we who create time to observe.

Humans obviously have the capability to remember so it is hard to imagine what it would be like if we could not. For artificial neural networks it depends on their architecture and use, to be able to get a sense of things changing over time you need the ability to process information from different times at the same time. Therefore the network itself needs some memory that feeds back internally or some outputs of the network must be fed back into the inputs externally or the inputs itself must be from different times.

It's hard to imagine what it would be like to actually live as something that doesn't remember, but we do have some experience observing people who have lost the ability to remember through illness or brain trauma or otherwise.

In general it seems like attempting to live in human society without memory is a pretty traumatic experience. Or it would be, if you could remember experiencing it.

It's also very hard on the people around you.

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