Article ‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams is taking Pascal’s bet

[Syne]

I doubt just saying the words would be enough. Otherwise everyone would secure their afterlife with such a "wait and see" approach.
But I wish him the best, wherever he ended up.

[Secular Sanity]

Roger Penrose: I remember thinking in this kind of way when my mother died. In some sense, she was still there because her existence is still out there in spacetime, although in our time she is not alive. A colleague of mine had a son who died in tragic circumstances and I presented this idea to him, and it helped his understanding also. This was before I heard that Einstein had a colleague died, and he wrote to the man's wife that Bessa was still out there, and that somehow this was reassuring. I certainly think this way often, that spacetime is laid out and that things in the past and things in the future are out there still. [four-dimensionalism]

Relativity’s math treats time like space, but the irreversible flow of events and entropy proves past, present, and future are not equally real.

Syne and MR need to get room. Jesus!

Oops! No offense just in case there is one.

[C C]

And the celebrated, esteemed writer/artist is now...

(1) Basking peacefully in the "absence of everything" (including himself missing).

(2)  Receiving admittance to the Good Place, or (goodness forbid) the opposite stratum, but unable to report back.

(3): Incrementally rising from the "absence of everything" to the commencement of another phenomenal continuum (different life experience in this world). 

(4) "I've rejoined the cosmopsychism god identity that fundamentally pervades the universe!"

(5): "Release me from this sleep chamber! The video game to brain simulation has ended, but some idiot locked the mechanism for getting out!"

(6) Scott Adams is still alive, just not here in the present and beyond this point.

Roger Penrose: I remember thinking in this kind of way when my mother died. In some sense, she was still there because her existence is still out there in spacetime, although in our time she is not alive. A colleague of mine had a son who died in tragic circumstances and I presented this idea to him, and it helped his understanding also. This was before I heard that Einstein had a colleague died, and he wrote to the man's wife that Bessa was still out there, and that somehow this was reassuring. I certainly think this way often, that spacetime is laid out and that things in the past and things in the future are out there still. [four-dimensionalism]

Relativity’s math treats time like space, but the irreversible flow of events and entropy proves past, present, and future are not equally real.

Syne and MR need to get room. Jesus!

Oops! No offense just in case there is one.

Well, "now" is certainly special or privileged to an interval of consciousness, because that particular state or content of perception is the only one that belongs to it, that it can be ABOUT. It can't be about what was a "now" one year ago or what will be a "now" next year, because each of those likewise belong to their own distinct interval of consciousness.

In other words -- past, present, future are indeed inescapable native classifications inherent to psychological identification and understanding.

Information processing affairs (or at least the ordinary skull meat variety -- not the cosmopsychism kind that supposedly groks the entire universe) can only deal in discrete packages. And that's what our milliseconds in duration intervals of perceived "changes" drop out of -- ours supposed "clock" of consciousness that divides existence into a sequence of changes (that would otherwise really be different co-existing states of the universe). 

So from the eternalism standpoint, we're just abstracting concepts from the character of own cognition and then reifying, objectifying, or projecting those concepts on the external world (or the metaphysical or ultimate external world, anyway -- not the one of everyday representation falling out of neural states). 

The worldline of the brain would be divided into distinct neural configurations, lacking one that could yield an apprehension one's entire life as a whole. Each chunk sequence of brain states corresponding to an increment of processed sensory information is thereby solely about itself and (to some extent) the memory of the previous one that it is being is compared to (in order to vet that change or rather "difference" is indeed the case). The conscious experiences corresponding to those brain states are inherently solipsistic -- each is an island that only regards itself as real because only it is manifesting (not the content of awareness five minutes before or the one five minutes later).

So (in eternalism context) we're [again] merely abstracting and objectifying an attribute of cognition (the specious "flow"), just as uncritical or direct realist scholars did with the other secondary qualities before Galileo came along.

Even indirect realists (and materialists) still can't fully appreciate what the brain does. Despite accepting the idea of a non-mental world, they really can't handle the consequence of the latter exhibiting no manifestations at all (both static and changing), of everything becoming absent after death. Explicitly, of course, they will claim that they are against panpsychism, but implicitly, one can infer -- from their inconsistencies betrayed by language or other items they believe -- that they are partially dabbling in panpsychism just like everyday humans in general.

As for reversal, we wouldn't be capable of knowing that a sequence of changes did switch in direction, just as characters in a movie do not comment about such after the film is played in reverse and then returned to normal (i.e., nothing was physically modified in the frames by the flip, which obviously includes what the characters do). But all irrelevant anyway, since we would be smuggling the idea of a "flow" (from some different conception of time) into one that doesn't entail such to begin with.

That mysterious flow
http://www.physicsland.com/Physics101_fi...Davies.pdf

Nothing in known physics corresponds to the passage of time. Indeed, physicists insist that time doesn’t flow at all; it merely is. Some philosophers argue that the very notion of the passage of time is nonsensical and that talk of the river or flux of time is founded on a misconception. How can something so basic to our experience of the physical world turn out to be a case of mistaken identity? Or is there a key quality of time that science has not yet identified?

Yes, it's how the brain is organized along its worldline (into segregated configurations producing distinct or individual perceptions of outer and private content) that they're neglecting to take into consideration. More with respect to the conditions necessary for "flow" to even apply:

A number of philosophers over the years have arrived at the same conclusion by examining what we normally mean by the passage of time. They argue that the notion is internally inconsistent. The concept of flux, after all, refers to motion. It makes sense to talk about the movement of a physical object, such as an arrow through space, by gauging how its location varies with time. But what meaning can be attached to the movement of time itself? Relative to what does it move? Whereas other types of motion relate one physical process to another, the putative flow of time relates time to itself. Posing the simple question “How fast does time pass?” exposes the absurdity of the very idea. The trivial answer “One second per second” tells us nothing at all.

Although we find it convenient to refer to time’s passage in everyday affairs, the notion imparts no new information that cannot be conveyed without it. Consider the following scenario: Alice was hoping for a white Christmas, but when the day came she was disappointed that it only rained; however, she was happy that it snowed the following day. Although this description is replete with tenses and references to time’s passage, exactly the same information is conveyed by simply correlating Alice’s mental states with dates, in a manner that omits all reference to time passing or the world changing.

Thus, the following cumbersome and rather dry catalogue of facts suffices:

December 24: Alice hopes for a white Christmas.
December 25: There is rain. Alice is disappointed.
December 26: There is snow. Alice is happy.

In this description, nothing happens or changes. There are simply states of the world at different dates and associated mental states for Alice.

It doesn't matter whether the view of time one believes in is presentism or eternalism or the growing block universe (GBU). Our distinct cognitive states are still isolated islands in which each only deems itself as existing, not the others. Each is only present to itself, there is no neural configuration corresponding to experiencing one's entire life all at once. Only those divisions dealing with specific increments of external data and one's internal thoughts.

[Secular Sanity]

If tenseless descriptions are complete and nothing ever comes into existence, then in what sense is the future not yet real rather than merely unknown to us?

[Syne]

Eternalism is ultimately nihilistic.