Existence without space or time

[hailstan]

This is how I try to imagine existence/causality without space or time.

First, existence without time. This can be modeled as something like a block universe, where time is represented spatially as a series of snapshots that follow in sequence. In the block universe, time does exist as a dimension, but I think it's intuitively useful for understanding how causality can be preserved without needing to appeal to change or the passage of time.

Next, existence without space. The contents of your own mind have no spatial relation to one another, yet do still have causal relations. Thoughts and emotions evoke and influence one another without needing spatial extension.

Now we can combine the two. The resulting model is a mental space whose thoughts are connected to one another through associative links. These links are causal in a sense, while still existing outside of time.

This is, of course, similar to what Kastrup proposes as the end of More Than Allegory. I just find it to be a helpful way of framing it.

[Cleric K]

It's a well laid model but to become a practical model we still need to account for the experience of time. This means that we should find the place of memory. If we only experienced transitions from one snapshot to the next we would have eternal change that would be something like anterograde amnesia - we would experience the snapshots but without any sense of continuity and how we arrived to our current state. This points attention to the fact that every next state not only is a snapshot of experience linked with other snapshots but much importantly this snapshot must be in very special relations with the previous states. In a way the previous states must 'interfere constructively' within the present, so that their echos can be experienced as the feeling of continuity of consciousness. Viewed in this way we should speak not simply of a sequence of snapshots but something more akin to growth and integration of snapshots.

You may be interested in something that I posted some time ago in the same lines (you may cut short directly to the light bulbs in the post).

[Starbuck]

Wonderful way of picturing it thank you.

My chosen metaphor is Nucleic Acid.

All of the information of the complete being is stored in potential in the DNA, but can only be sequenced and expressed one chain at a time by an 'external' device which we call RNA. It turns out that RNA is 'made' by DNA in a process called transcription. The process by which RNA expresses DNA is translation. The translator is itself the transcribed. The one that represents the will is itself simply the will.