[announcerman]

How do you decide that your new view is valid and is not based on your need to lessen the fear of death. I have problems with this with every new thing I try to use to make death more palatable, be it religion, philosophy or anything else. I just cannot believe in anything because I feel its just a convenient way to make the fear smaller. How can any view be valid if its based on self interest?

[simonh]

What's wrong with self interest? That's a serious question.

I don't mean that in a nihilistic, nothing is true, everything is permissible way. Nor do I mean it's ok to arbitrarily pick fantasies to believe, especially if that leads us to imposing the consequences of those beliefs on other people. There are few beneficial delusions. The question is, what do you care about in life and what are your goals.

How you choose to think about things is a tool you can use to help you on a productive path. If a certain way of thinking helps you maintain an even keel mentally, then that can be useful. It doesn't take blind faith, you don't have to exclude the possibility of alternate explanations, keeping an open mind is fine, but if this is a plausible possibility then why not take some comfort from that? It doesn't necessarily mean you're compromising any of your principles to do so.

[ClintEhrlich]

I find this to be an eminently reasonable perspective, which did not deserve to be downvoted.

Existential anxiety can be extremely debilitating. If one plausible interpretation of time brings you comfort, there's no harm in focusing on it.

[omalleyt]

Well, "appeal to consequences of belief" is a logical fallacy. But yes, of course it's possible that inaccurate views of the world can actually bring about better outcomes than accurate ones

[Nursie]

I find it weirdly comforting to know that nothing in this universe is really eternal. If you could live literally forever, you'd witness the end of all life on earth in about a billion years, and eventually the slow heat death of the universe.

I'd love a lot more life than I have in front of me - a few millenia at least - but even with a traditional, linear view of time there's no point, need or possibility of eternity.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Even if the universe were eternal, the way I see it eternity is just another kind of ending. I think the important thing to realize is that a thing does not cease to have value simply because it is impermanent.

[goatlover]

It will cease to have value when there's nobody left to value it.

[CuriouslyC]

It can value itself. After all, that's what it's doing now via us. It doesn't necessarily have to configure itself into something like a human to perceive and appreciate itself.

[gowld]

What is "it" when "it" is purely random noise? By definition and known physics, heat-death of the universe means there is absolutely no configuration.

[CuriouslyC]

Is the noise truly random, or is it just unpredictable? Does the maximization of entropy indicate no deviations from equilibrium will spontaneously occur? Does the lack of memory indicate a lack of consciousness?

[icebraining]

Why? Can't we value things that will exist in a future where we no longer belong?

[goatlover]

We can value whatever, but eventually there won't be anyone left to do the valuing. Impermanence doesn't stop us from valuing, but impermanence does guarantee that value won't last. Which may or may not bother us now, depending on how existentially grumpy we feel in the moment. But luckily, those feelings are impermanent as well.

[simonh]

All true, but of course the point of the idea we're discussing here is that there may not be any reason to assign special weight to the value of things in the present or the future, over the value of things in the past.

[Schiphol]

In this case the view in question (the B-theory of time) is supposed to be backed up by science: e.g., the Gödelian models in the OP, but, much more than that, the relativity of simultaneity. The RoS is really non-negotiable, and still entails that the actual world does not have a Newtonian absolute present.

[CuriouslyC]

While the RoS indicates that observers won't agree on the order of distant events, I don't think that it eliminates the possibility of an absolute present moment. You could simulate a system with relativistic physics just fine with a single global clock, just by adjusting the local simulation refresh rate to account for time dilation. Players might disagree on the order of events and the amount of time that had passed, but they would still update based on the progress of the global simulation clock, modulo the local refresh rate.

[Schiphol]

Right, that's interesting. Thanks. This is analogous to saying that we live in an Einsteinian simulation run from a Newtonian world, right?

[CuriouslyC]

I prefer to imagine we exist in a roughly newtonian program, but the computer executing it is a distributed system with finite local resources, so it doesn't all run in sync.

[Schiphol]

Do you know of anywhere where a model representing this is construed explicitly? It seems like the kind of thing that is harder than it seems, if you know what I mean :)

[mcguire]

What is the benefit of the global clock, in that case?

[CuriouslyC]

It gives you a single "correct" order of events, and a single present state.

[gowld]

It gives to whom a single correct order of events and present state? Not to me. Only to "God", an entity external to the system.

Which is fine if you are a God (or programmer) building a simulation, but has no objective meaning to anyone inside.