Sara Walker: belief

Transcript context

…The difference between life and consciousness, which comes first. Yeah. I think if you’re thinking about this thinking about living things as these giant causal structures or these objects that are deep in time or whatever language we end up using to describe it seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects. Consciousness and the abstraction that we have in our minds is actually a manifestation of all the time that’s rolled up in us. It’s just because we’re so huge that we have this very large inner space that we’re experiencing that’s not, and it’s also separated off from the rest of the world because we’re the separate thread in time. Our consciousness is not exactly shared with anything else because nothing else occupies the same part of time that we occupy. But I can understand something about you maybe being conscious because you and I didn’t separate that far in the past in terms of our causal histories. In some sense, we can even share experiences with each other through language because of that overlap in our structure. Well, then if consciousness is merely temporal separateness, then that comes before life.…

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