News You Can Bruise for 2006 March 19

Permalink [Comments] (5) Sun Mar 19 2006 13:33 Why Do You Exist Here?:

I read a philosophy paper (probably online) that hypothesized that our perception of consciousness was an artifact of the fact that time only goes in one direction. I want to reference this paper in the Ruby Cookbook, but I can't find it. All the words I can think of to describe the paper are also keywords used by the wormhole aliens who fill the web with crackpot stuff like "The Illusion of Linear Time and Solar Dynasties". In fact, I did find a paper that seems to say the same thing as the paper I'm trying to find, but it too was written by a wormhole alien and is unintelligible.

Does anyone else remember this paper? Maybe I should have developed an intense emotional hangup when I first discovered it, so that I'd always be revisiting that moment and I could remember the URL.

Comments:

Posted by Pyrop at Sun Mar 19 2006 14:14

Borges?

Posted by Rachel at Sun Mar 19 2006 14:20

It sounds very familiar but I took a whole class on stuff like that.

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Wed Mar 22 2006 20:56

Er, nothing to see here. Just playing games with javurscript cookies in my own thingummy. Move along folks.

Posted by FA-22 at Tue Mar 28 2006 05:59

If you're looking for a legitimate source to quote in the book, a good search term for weeding out quacks, is "the arrow of time" -- type that in with "consciousness" and you'll get some signal with all the noise.

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