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Paul C.W. Davies Books

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“To conclude: time doesn’t pass. (I hope the reader is now convinced!) Well, what does pass, then? I shall argue that it is the conscious awareness of the fleeting self that changes from moment to moment. The misconception that time flows or passes can be traced back to the tacit assumption of a conserved self. It is natural for people to think that ‘they’ endure from moment to moment while the world changes because ‘time flows’. But as Alice remarked in Lewis Carroll’s story, ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’ Alice was right: ‘you’ are not the same today as you were yesterday. To be sure, there is a very strong correlation – a lot of mutual information, to get technical about it – between today’s you and yesterday’s you – a thread of information made up of memories and beliefs and desires and attitudes and other things that usually change only slowly, creating an impression of continuity. But continuity is not conservation. There are future yous correlated with (that is, observing) future states of the world, and past yous correlated with (observing) past states of the world. At each moment, the you appropriate to that world-state interprets the correlation with that state as ‘now’. It is indeed ‘now’ for ‘that you’ at ‘that time’. That’s all! The flow-of-time phenomenon reveals ‘the self’ as a slowly evolving complex pattern of stored information that can be accessed at later times and provide an informational template against which fresh perceptions can be matched. The illusion of temporal flow stems from the inevitable slight mismatches.”

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Book:The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life
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“Belief in a divine being who starts the universe off and then “sits back” to watch events unfold, taking no direct part in subsequent affairs, is known as “deism.” Here God’s nature is captured by the image of the perfect watchmaker, a sort of cosmic engineer, who designs and constructs a vast and elaborate mechanism and then sets it going.”

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Book:The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World
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