[SEQ RERUN] Timeless Control
post by MinibearRex · 2012-05-30T02:31:35.817Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 2 commentsToday's post, Timeless Control was originally published on 07 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
We throw away "time" but retain causality, and with it, the concepts "control" and "decide". To talk of something as having been "always determined" is mixing up a timeless and a timeful conclusion, with paradoxical results. 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.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Thou Art Physics, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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comment by [deleted] · 2012-05-30T03:34:02.963Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This seems compatible with R. Buckminster Fuller's claim (section 301.00 in 'Synergetics' from 1975 / 1979):
Universe is the comprehensive, historically synchronous, integral-aggregate system embracing all the separate integral-aggregate systems of all men’s consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, but always complementary and only partially overlapping, macro-micro, always-and- everywhere, omnitransforming, physical and metaphysical, weighable and unweighable event sequences. Universe is a dynamically synchronous scenario that is unitarily nonconceptual as of any one moment, yet as an aggregate of finites is sum-totally finite.
I suggest the key words here are nonsimultaneous and partially overlapping. Universe is big enough that local now (I see a star) is not everywhere now (that star burned out a billion years ago in local time). Block Universe may be the universe considered from outside Time, and Fuller's partially overlapping universe may be the universe considered from within while understanding there are plenty of nows to go around.
Replies from: David_Gerard↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2012-05-30T08:20:13.707Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If ever things needed rewriting, it was Fuller's later works. That he said useful things in them was at odds with the frankly cranklike writing style. Whole books written in that style.