Excited to introduce the way forward for The Pressure of Light: a series of short posts and vids that continue to explore the ideas. Here’s the first:
The Pressure of Light Series on Consciousness and Time: Episode 1
A conscious mind is a strategy for navigating time. Since nothing in this universe is permanent and nothing happens the same way twice, all relationships observed by conscious minds are fictitious: contextual relationships, cause-and-effect relationships, or the idea that one event is an iteration of a repeating event. In this universe, learning is living, because in a universe of infinitely-heterogeneous events continuous learning is necessary for continuous comprehension of the universe. The concepts of context, causation, and repetition all create, for the conscious mind, artificial permanence. Rather than seeing the universe evolve as a whole into infinitely new states, a conscious mind perceives causal relationships and predicts similar causal relationships. A perceived cause and effect event will never happen exactly the same way twice, but in the near-future state of the universe it’s likely something will happen that a conscious mind can perceive, if they choose, as an identical cause-and-effect event. Conscious minds have evolved an ability to perceive permanence in order to predict how things will happen in the future.