If you disagree that the article proposes a solution to the hard problem, then what would you say the article is about? — Luke

A rehash of what's already been written about phenomenal experience in philosophy, except with fancy words and invention or creative license, which unfortunately is unwarranted since he was actually talking about biological and physiological activities. We have scientific records, no need to invent things.

Here again are passages lifted from the article -- passages are in quote marks: (I suppose I have to work harder because I'm in the minority of disagreeing with his "solution")

Let’s imagine, however, that as the animal’s life becomes more complex, it reaches a stage where it would benefit from retaining some kind of ‘mental record’ of what’s affecting it: a representation of the stimulus that can serve as a basis for planning and decision-making.

A mental record, in other words, a temporal perception, which has already been written about a thousand times by the likes of Descartes, Hume, A. Shimony, etc.

I believe the upshot – in the line of animals that led to humans and others that experience things as we do – has been the creation of a very special kind of attractor, which the subject reads as a sensation with the unaccountable feel of phenomenal qualia.

What are these attractors? He explains it in this passage:

And, I suggest, this development is game-changing. Crucially, it means the activity can be drawn out in time, so as to create the ‘thick moment’ of sensation (see Figure 2c above). But, more than that, the activity can be channelled and stabilised, so as to create a mathematically complex attractor state – a dynamic pattern of activity that recreates itself.

It means retrieving the information from memory. Mind you, bodily functions such as hunger is not memory based, nor the bowel movement ( I will explain it for those uninitiated, upon request).

What discussion title would you have used instead? — Luke

"Nicholas Humphrey's Seeing and Somethingness -- His Personal Account of What Goes On In Our Brain If or When We Have Sensations For Those Who Have Not Studied Or Read Or Understood Neuroscience".

Something.

If it were all just physical information processing and there were no experiential dimension, then there would be no one to find anything, nothing to be found, and indeed, no physicalists or physicalism, either. — Janus

If there were no experiential dimension then there would be no hard problem, but since there is, there is.

Consider what it would mean to say that there is no experiential dimension. Unless that possibility is conceivable, then the hard problem isn't conceivable. — sime

Why not?

Can you really conceive an absence of experience? — sime

Yes.

By definition, there does not exist empirical criteria for asserting self-unconsciousness in the present. So the proposition "I am presently unconscious" is presumably meaningless when taken in the fullest possible sense. — sime

Granting this, how does it imply that the hard problem is inconceivable?

Consider what it would mean to say that there is no experiential dimension. Unless that possibility is conceivable, then the hard problem isn't conceivable — sime

Can you really conceive an absence of experience? — sime

Dreamless sleep. A time in ones being, where there was no awareness of such. But one wakes up, and continues to experience, despite the lost time.

Perhaps the same in a coma. I'm less sure of that as I have had Dreamless sleep but never been in a coma.

Experts in meditation claim total absence of thought during trance. Again I cannot verify. But it seems possible to continue exist without directly experiencing that existence in a given moment of time. Ie to have "blackouts" or lost time. The failure or purposeful pause of memory.

For phenomenologists who consider first-personal phenomenological criteria to be the very essence of meaning, the question is circular and makes no sense from their perspective. Which is what i was getting at above. — sime

Perhaps the hard problem is inconceivable for phenomenolgists, but I'm not a phenomenologist.

Perhaps the hard problem is inconceivable for phenomenolgists, but I'm not a phenomenologist. — Luke

So what is your definition of unconsciousness? Is it a pure postulate, or something that reduces to empirical criteria?

If there were no experiential dimension then there would be no hard problem, but since there is, there is. — Luke

Right, and as I said if there were no experiential dimension there would be nothing else either, so putting the question as to why there is experience is really equivalent to putting the question as to why there is anything at all, or why there is something rather than nothing.

Have you read the article? It's not long.

I just skimmed through parts of it. It was interesting, but to be honest, I asked my question because based on what I did read I thought it unlikely that the authors suggested the notion that "qualia constitute the self".

Thank you for quoting the specific excerpt. However, I'm still not seeing why you think the author suggested that "qualia constitute the self". I think the authors would likely agree with the statement that, "If there were no qualia there likely would be no self.", but that is a different statement.

I don't see why it would be unreasonable to answer Chalmers with, "That's just the way evolution went."
— wonderer1

"That's just the way evolution went" does not explain the "adaptive end", the evolutionary purpose, or the biological advantage of the development of phenomenal consciousness. In other words, it does not answer the hard problem of why we have phenomenal consciousness. "Evolution did it" is about as explanatory as "God did it".

First off, I made that statement with the following sentence immediately after, "Unfortunately succinct perhaps, and I could suggest reasons to think that's the case, but I think this post is long enough."

Yes, I know I did not support my answer to Chalmer's question. I thought I made it obvious that I recognized that. I only have so much time to participate in these discussions, so I suggested an 'in a nutshell' answer.

Suppose miraculously I was able to produce an accurate account of every detail of the evolutionary path leading to humans. Would it then be unreasonable to conclude with, "So that's just the way evolution went?"

BTW, Do you think Chalmers is an evolution skeptic?

I just skimmed through parts of it. It was interesting, but to be honest, I asked my question because based on what I did read I thought it unlikely that the authors suggested the notion that "qualia constitute the self". — wonderer1

If you haven't read the full article, then how are you in a position to question my reading of it? You think that your ability to guess about the parts that you didn't even bother to read is better than my actual reading of the article? If you think it's unlikely for the authors to suggest that "qualia constitute the self" then read the bloody article and find out. Have you read it all yet?

However, I'm still not seeing why you think the author suggested that "qualia constitute the self". — wonderer1

Explain why you think "qualia constitute the self" is not implied by the article:

Then, imagine if you were to lack qualia of any kind at all, and to find that none of your sensory experience was owned by you? I’m sure your self would disappear. — the article

I think the authors would likely agree with the statement that, "If there were no qualia there likely would be no self.", but that is a different statement. — wonderer1

Firstly, that isn't a quote from the article. Secondly, how does your statement "if there were no qualia there likely would be no self" not imply that "qualia constitute the self"? I might be wrong about it, but it seems to me to be strongly implied by the article.

Yes, I know I did not support my answer to Chalmer's question. I thought I made it obvious that I recognized that. I only have so much time to participate in these discussions, so I suggested an 'in a nutshell' answer. — wonderer1

Oh sorry, I didn't realise you were busy.

BTW, Do you think Chalmers is an evolution skeptic? — wonderer1

I don't consider myself a Chalmers expert by any stretch, but from what I've read, no, I don't think Chalmers would be sceptical about evolution.

A year later, what's the status of this potential solution to the hard problem?

It seems to me that you do not mean by "reality" what most of us mean by it. — Dfpolis

You're probably right. I understand the definition you provided. However, it causes me some conflicts if you're saying that reality is reality, and that definition can apply "throughout" all "forms".

What about this? Mediated reality and Ultimate Reality.

Mediated reality is encountered by us and has effects, but (I say here) is mediated by minds re-presentation of Ultimate Reality. So when I look at an apple. There is the real apple which I would have seen had my sensation not been mediated by mind's re-presentation of "apple" (fruit, shape, red, eat, doctor away, rotten at the core, not pear, not orange, not wax etc).

If someone, more skilled than I, were able to pursue that properly, they would unveil the absence all along, of a so-called hard problem. The physical state is acting physically. The mental so called state is a mediated reality such that, it is ultimately not real like the physical state, but a system of fleeting and empty projections. Nothing "other" has arisen in the brain's place. Rather, the organism is no longer "attuned" to its feelings and drives, as such, but rather these re-presentations evolved to monopolize the triggering of all feelings and drives.

It seems like at one time happy was a certain pleasant feeling the human animal would get if satiated, bonding, no threats, etc (I hypothesize); and that, now (since Mind "emerged") happy is an infinite possibility of sentences beginning with the Subject, "I": I am happy because I. But the fact is, the animal is still feeling tgat certain pleasant feeling, only "I" think the feeling is in the sentences, I am happy because I.

This is what I mean by the "experience" is not Real but mediated/constructed and projected, displacing what is "really" real.

figurative sense ('the object of the enquiry'.) If you designate it as a real object then you're reifying. — Wayfarer

I agree; not real; specifically not real.

What I'm drawing attention to is that even the undeniably objective always occurs to a subject. — Wayfarer

It might be that my reference to the Body as real, reads like an empiricist or conventional physicalist. I think they are correct but their reasoning is no less constructed than that of an Idealist, or whatever my own is, which is not empricist.

My reference to Body as real has built-in to it the recognition that the real cannot be spoken of. The instant I communicate, it is Mind and therefore that "qualified real" but not ultimately real.

When I reverse the order in your quote, it is not to say that Mind is just organic functions in some dogmatic scientific sense. I'm saying this process which mediates so called objective reality (I don't use "objective") is the very same process arriving at the determination that "it" is independently real, for some, the ghost in the machine.

I'm saying the [awesome] being is tge machine. The ghost is there, has an effect, but structurally*, is fleeting code.

*if I'm not mistaken, either earlier, or in that other thread, you "admitted" to not requiring any comment regarding the structure of Mind. And I think, once we recognize that its structure is signifiers in memory constructing and Projecting "stories", we can better understand those philosophical conundrums, the hard problem, among them.

Your intuitions in the first part of your response seem to align with mine. I also describe knowledge as a "projection" of reality. It is a projection in two senses. One is that it is a dimensionally diminished map of reality -- like the architectural projection of the front of a house there is more that it does not show, than that it does show. The other sense is that it is a projection of power, for it is us being aware of the object acting within us. The Hard Problem arises because an object acting on our senses does not mean that we are aware of it. We know this because much sensation is unconscious until we choose to attend to it.

So we have a sensory projection that we can adapt and/or respond, but in addition, in some cases there is more than that. There is awareness, thought and judgement with its possibility of falsehood. At the level of sensation we do not judge, we respond. Errors are ineffective responses, not falsehoods. At the intellectual level, we judge, affirming or deny this of that. The result (our new intellectual representation) either reflects reality adequately for our purpose or not. That implies that we have purposes, not just needs.

But if qualia constitute the self, I see two issues immediately for the view:

1. I can differentiate between the sensation of blue I am seeing, and my awareness of that sensation of blue I am currently seeing. I can differentiate myself as the seer from the sensation of blue itself.

2. I don't think it can differentiate between the faculties of sensation and intellection. There's more to consciousness and cognition than just qualia. I can entertain universals, abstractions, conceptualizations, mathematics, symbols, possibilities etc. If the self is qualia, how come the higher order faculties of intellection? Does this not raise issues about how to differentiate between humans and animals, if selfhood is identical to qualia?


I'm sympathetic to the line of thinking that does attempt to unravel the hard problem, however, rather than simply solve it. I think something has gone wrong in the way the question has been posed, and I think a view of consciousness not based on qualia would be better.

There are a few things I do not understand about the discussions on consciousness. The consciousness we know ourselves to be, that is the first person experience. That consciousness is the container of everything in our personal world. There is our conceptual reality, and our non-conceptual perceptions. Part of that world is both the knowledge and the perception of our body, our sense perceptions, other people etc. Those people, we call them conscious, but that is of a completely different kind than that container of concepts and perception we are aware of as being ourselves. We see their eyes are open and they act in a sensible way, that is what we call 'he/she is conscious'.

So I agree that "....the hard problem of consciousness is impossible to solve", but I don't see the logical proof because it seems we are talking about two different things both referred to as consciousness.

Let's first assume that the hard problem of consciousness is not the lack of scientific knowledge in that domain but the paradox it creates when thinking of consciousness as an object in the world. — Skalidris

What or where could anything be but in the world?

If you assume, for example, that the feeling of hunger is non-physical, then it's paradoxical to think of the feeling as an object in the physical world. But why would you? I don't know of a good reason to split the feeling of hunger from the hunger.

The feeling does not merely accompany the physiology, it has a hierarchical structure in the sense that it emerges from its constitutive lower-level functions in the brain, which in turn are causally constrained by hormones, the level of glucose in the blood, and an empty stomach. The feeling of hunger is not detached from an empty stomach, they're parts of the same structure.

Well, I'm also talking about the " first person experience", and people who explore the hard problem of consciousness are also talking about this, aren't they? — Skalidris

1 yes and 2 no. I believe the two of us are talking about the same thing. But most people, and especially everybody I've seen here so far, seems to talk about consciousness as an object. To me that implies they are talking about something different than I am. Wayfarer yesterday jumped from intelligence to consciousness as if it is the same thing. If two people are not talking about the same thing, no logical argument makes sense.

I wonder if most people ever have tried to simply be aware of their own consciousness (yes, that IS circular). Most people, and especially here on the forum, are so caught up in thinking that they only can have a conceptual understanding of consciousness. No wonder you never can say anything sensible about the topic.

The hard problem of consciousness.
It might not really be that fundamental to philosophy.

Try starting with a more fundamental idea
Do physical and non-physical things exist.
I think if we assume physical things exist the next question is how non-physical things can exist.
They can't by definition.
Non-physical, to me, means non existent.
So a good approach is to identify non-physicals as physically contained non-physicals.
Brains holding mental content.

That gets closer to what consciousness is.
Not just any type of physical matter, but the special case of brains holding non-physical content.
And examining the context we see full input and output capabilities, connections with the biological organism, location in space and time, that is fully consistent with what consciousness is.

So what consciousness is, and other things like information, can be understood by using the idea of physically contained non-physical objects.
Not sure that's news, but maybe to some. In anything Chalmers related, consciousness refers to brains in a physical state.

the question is in what form do non-physical things exist? If physical matter isn't involved there is no physical form. — Mark Nyquist

Forms are not just the shapes of physical things; they are the essential principles that particular things must conform to in order to exist. For instance, the concept of 'wings'—a structure for flight—has emerged independently across insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals. The form of a wing is determined by the function of flight. This form, understood as an abstract principle, pre-exists physical wings. It represents the necessary conditions that must be realized for flight, rather than being derived from physical matter.

a concept a non-physical always is mental content so is physically contained. — Mark Nyquist

While concepts such as wings or circles are grasped by the mind, they are not merely products of the mind. They exist as forms independently of their physical manifestations. The mind may indeed correlate with brain activity, but the claim that the mind 'is the product of' the brain is precisely what the hard problem of consciousness calls into question. The relationship between brain and mind remains a mystery, and it is worth considering that the brain might enable conscious acts might actually drive evolutionary processes. Greater intelligence provides greater possibilities for the organism, suggesting that the brain is a product of the mind’s ability to conceptualize and act within the world, as much as a cause.

This does not posit 'non-material' things or forces, but constraints, which are top-down rather than simply bottom-up. Living things, generally, are shaped by both of those factors, not simply by physical (bottom up) causation. Most of what you and @Philosophim are saying, is a consequence of the 'Cartesian duality', with it's artificial model of matter and 'non-material substance', as explained in this earlier post. It seems natural to you, because it is deeply embedded in our way of seeing things.

...whether we do harm to things or not should be more than feelings. Just because I feel disgust at something doesn't mean I should kill it. Just because something makes me happy doesn't mean I should embrace it. For me, it is a respect for its agency, the fact that despite all the odds that get thrown at every life, it has survived until now. Why should I harm or end it over something as trivial as just an emotion? — Philosophim

From the above I understand the theme of your response to my first of two main conjectures to be "difference." My counter-narrative to your theme is "continuity."

So, your narrative propounds the discontinuity of extra-categorical modal difference whereas my counter-narrative propounds the continuity of intra-categorical intra-modal connectedness.

Let me attempt to translate the above sentence into plain-spoken English: with your theme, a collection of things are grouped into separate categories, with the assumption there is no connectedness between the categories. As an example, consider a group of apples in one category and a group of oranges in another category.

What you have done, I think, is equate feelings with apples for one of your categories and equate thoughts with oranges for another one of your categories.

In my counter-narrative, I claim that feelings and thoughts belong to one category: cognition. The difference between these members of one category is by degree, and therefore not by category.

To elaborate, to have a feeling about something means having thought about something with a relatively small amount of detail, or low resolution. On the other hand, to have a profound understanding about something means having reflected on something towards amassing a large amount of detail, or high resolution.

When we compare low-resolution feelings with high-resolution thoughts, it’s like comparing a low-resolution digital image of something with a high-resolution version of the same image. That they are the same image establishes their mutual membership within one category: a specific image. The difference between them is not extra-categorical and modal, but rather intra-categorical and extensional.

The fancy logical term for your theme of difference by category is “intentional:” the properties that something needs to have in order to be counted as a member of a specified category.

Your theme argues that feelings and thoughts are intentionally disconnected; my theme argues that feelings and thought are intentionally connected.

That your theme overstates the difference of feelings and thoughts by degree with respect to difference-as-disconnection is evidenced by:

There are plenty of people in life I don't understand. And I'm sure there are plenty of people in life who don't understand me. Bonding often comes from like goals. Survival, or accomplishing a task together require a closeness and understanding of another person up to a point to get this done. It does not require me to understand exactly what another person is experiencing in life. — Philosophim

I assert this is an overstatement of the degree of difference_disconnection separating feelings from thoughts in terms of people understanding each other and moreover, it is therefore an overstatement of the degree of sameness_connection necessary for a human to know what it’s like to be a bat.

As you say, you can bond with another human without knowing exactly what it’s like to be the other person. Nonetheless, to a degree, you do know what it’s like to be another person. And likewise, to a degree, you do know what it’s like to be a bat.

Highly technical, very abstract thoughts about moral principles are directly connected to intuitive feelings about how we should treat other innocent beings. Without this direct connection, moral principles become empty and therefore meaningless.

I assert there is no impenetrable membrane called what-it’s-like-to-be-an-individualized-self. It’s this mistaken belief that creates the hard problem. It's this mistaken belief that falsely divides subjective from objective. Clearly, the selfhood of the self is the object of that selfsame self's consciousness.

I assert there is a reasonably accurate one-size-fits-all-what-it’s-like-to-be-selfhood, accessible to many if not all sentients, that supports the sympathy and morals essential to the peaceable animal kingdom and civilization.

There are plenty of people in life I don't understand. And I'm sure there are plenty of people in life who don't understand me. Bonding often comes from like goals. Survival, or accomplishing a task together require a closeness and understanding of another person up to a point to get this done. It does not require me to understand exactly what another person is experiencing in life.
— Philosophim

I assert this is an overstatement of the degree of difference_disconnection separating feelings from thoughts in terms of people understanding each other and moreover, it is therefore an overstatement of the degree of sameness_connection necessary for a human to know what it’s like to be a bat. — ucarr

That is because we are different people. Ucarr, I feel very little similarity in myself to other people. I know objectively that I am. But my feelings are worthless. I do not feel what some call "connections" with other people. If I listened to my feelings I would be a lone hermit, and perfectly content to do so. Fortunately, I understand that actions and consequences are far more important than feelings in life.

I am not trying to discount the fact that some aspects of consciousness can be similar. I'm just noting that similarity is not necessary for morality.

I assert there is no impenetrable membrane called what-it’s-like-to-be-an-individualized-self. It’s this mistaken belief that creates the hard problem. It's this mistaken belief that falsely divides subjective from objective. Clearly, the selfhood of the self is the object of that selfsame self's consciousness.

I assert there is a reasonably accurate one-size-fits-all-what-it’s-like-to-be-selfhood, accessible to many if not all sentients, that supports the sympathy and morals essential to the peaceable animal kingdom and civilization. — ucarr

This is a nice thought, but can we demonstrate this to be something known, or will it only remain a belief?

I assert there is no impenetrable membrane called what-it’s-like-to-be-an-individualized-self. It’s this mistaken belief that creates the hard problem. It's this mistaken belief that falsely divides subjective from objective. Clearly, the selfhood of the self is the object of that selfsame self's consciousness.

I assert there is a reasonably accurate one-size-fits-all-what-it’s-like-to-be-selfhood, accessible to many if not all sentients, that supports the sympathy and morals essential to the peaceable animal kingdom and civilization.
— ucarr

This is a nice thought, but can we demonstrate this to be something known, or will it only remain a belief? — Philosophim

I would agree with ucarr that the basic sense of self is plausibly thought to be the same across species. Obviously this is not an empirically checkable assertion. It seems that almost nothing in philosophy is.

you examine a human organism and find that there are sensors — Wolfgang

But to know that they were "sensors," you'd have to already be importing some idea of what it means to sense, i.e., be conscious. Otherwise, aren't the nerves just collections of stimulus-response machines, and isn't that function enough? I don't think this succeeds in avoiding the hard problem.

Suppose you know nothing about consciousness, but you examine a human organism and find that there are sensors and nerves. Do you then ask yourself what this is good for? The answer will be that it must have a function. Perhaps you then think that it is there so that these beings can sense what they are doing. So that they are not eaten in the next moment. Sensing is nothing other than consciousness. In our case, this has now become more differentiated, so that we experience entire dramas. This does not change the principle. — Wolfgang

At heart, is how it is that "sensing" comes from physiological processes. The homunculus fallacy rears its head when you assume the process and sensing without making the connection (the hard problem!).

Yes, and if you "define down" sensing so that it becomes something a thermostat can do, then you're still minus a theory of consciousness, which now has to be defined as something else. — J

Yes. Also may I add, "sensing" is doing the work of two meanings that shouldn't be confused here.

1) Sensing- akin to "responding in a behavioral kind of way"
2) Sensing- akin to "feeling something".

Clearly we want to know how 1 and 2 are the same, or how 1 leads to 2, etc. That is the hard problem, more-or-less simplified.

So the logic is given memories of the past are know to be not physical then consciousness is known to have non-physical components supported by brain biology. To me that's where the logic leads.
Chalmers didn't do anyone any favors in setting up the hard problem.
I just disregard him.

In this sense, consciousness is the presence of colors, sounds, smells, and feelings and the thoughts that categorize these sensations into logical ideas the same way a soccer game is the presence of 22 people on a field following rules. — Harry Hindu

Not so sure about "logical ideas" (maybe just "ideas"?) but otherwise I agree.

How do we get from that to consciousness being the interaction of neurons? Is it two separate phenomenon, or the same phenomenon being described from two different perspectives? — Harry Hindu

At this point we need to make sure it's not just a dispute over terms. What do we want "phenomenon" to designate? I vote for something like "appearance to a mind," so that the 22 people and the soccer game are two different phenomena. On that understanding, I want to say that neurons and consciousness are also two different phenomena, appearing from two different perspectives. But notice that it doesn't really matter how we understand "phenomenon" here. We could go the other way and stipulate that "phenomenon" designates a single event in time, in which case the soccer game and consciousness are now redescriptions of "the same phenomenon." Either way, we're left with the hard problem. I know many people want to do some arm-waving here and say, "Well, it's two different descriptions, what more do you need to know?" but surely the answer is, "A lot. Why are these descriptions as they are? What allows the passage from one description to another? Are we right in believing that the mental-level description is grounded in, but not caused by, the physical-level description? Does the physical-level description have a "translation" into Mentalese? When we encounter something as extraordinary as subjective experience, what else do we need to say about it to fill out the experience? Yes, consciousness is, in a sense, "only" a description of how things look to a subject, but don't we feel it's a lot more than that too -- somehow constitutive of identity?" etc. etc.

But to me that requires the existence of the kind of agency that only begins to appear with organic life (by no means only conscious agency.) That is the reason I'm open to biosemiosis but not to pansemiosis. — Wayfarer

I think whether and how living and non-living processes can be integrated within a single overarching framework is secondary to the kind of model we adopt to integrate mind , body and world within a framework that overcomes the dualism implied by the hard problem. Agential realism doesn’t eliminate all distinctions between the living and the non-living, or between human cognition and living self-organization in general. Some phenomenologists , unlike agential realists, reduce the physical and the material to the living consciousness (Henry, Husserl), whereas Heidegger famously said that humans have world, but animals are poor in world and rocks have no world.

In Thompson’s Mind in Life book, he writes approvingly of Pattee’s approach, so my question is to what extent your thinking , or Donald Hoffman’s thinking, is on the same page as Pattee and Thompson with regard to the relation between mind, body and world, and to Thompson’s biological panpsychism. I think Hoffman learns the wrong lessons from evolutionary theory. He says that the fitness payoff function of evolution contains no information about reality ‘as it is’, so the cognizing subject remains on the appearance ( or ‘illusion ‘ as he call it) side of the appearance-reality distinction, thanks to the gimmick of evolution. I don’t know about Pattee, but Thompson would never describe sense-making in these dualistic terms. Sense-making isnt the result of an arbitrarily produced evolutionary mechanism that just happens to be adaptive for survival, but instead is based on the the fundamental living principle of self-organization To be a living system is to maintain a normative pattern of interacting with an environment in the midst of changing conditions. Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself.

In research on gravity, there's talk of backwards causation and that time is not a fundamental property of the universe. — jkop

You can always find ridiculous talk, but it's always irrelevant.

I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a hard problem to explain how the past creates the future. — jkop

If you ever gave that a serious try, you'd find out that the exact opposite is the case. It's very simple to demonstrate logically that the past does not create the future.

This is because we need to deal with the reality of choice, and the fact that the future is full of possibilities, while the past is fixed, or determined. Those are fundamental self-evident truths, derived directly from experience. And, possibilities cannot be created from a determined past, yet a fixed past can be created from possibilities. Therefore, that the past does not create the future is a very sound conclusion.