Ok, fascinating. Another way to formulate similar question, familiar to physicists, is how unidirectional time experience emerges from palindromic geometric time of QM. I agree with those physicists who say that thermodynamics in current form is poorly formulated woo, and hence by implication, also thermodynamic arrow of time.Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 5:29 pm What I was asking was to be pointed at some current/past philosophical developments that take time in the sense of the metaphor. My thinking was that we don't experience the time flow in certain direction because of some external law (like increasing entropy, etc.) but because this is the only way stream of consciousness can be experienced. For example, in physics we have phase space of all possible states of the universe. Then we have a law that describes the transition from state to state. We as humans, experience the transitions and ask what that law governing the transitions is. We ask this question because we implicitly assume that the universe will make these transitions even if there's no one to observe them - thus there should be a law for the direction and our consciousness only observes the workings of that law. My point was that there's no need for such a law. If we imagine a phase space of states of being, then the only way we can ever experience a stream of existence is if the states progress in integrative way, such that every next state embeds the echo of the previous ones as memory. Even if we hypothesize that the transition to all other states is possible, if they don't correspond to a gradual increment over the former state and don't containing the echo of the chain that led to them, we'll simply have no conscious experience that we can talk about. So it's something like the anthropic principle applied to time/consciousness. It allows us to think of all possible states of being existing simultaneously and experienced in an integrative flow.
My attempt at a more full answer starts from foundational principle of Divinely Integrated Differentiation, which is an ethical axiom that can be stated also this way: All unique has inherent value, and only unique has inherent value. Creating more of the same is not creation, it's mechanical repetition.
Only differences are experienced. And qualities of differences can and do differentiate without end. Smooth and gradual changes, more abrupt polarities, etc. The différance of difference, as Derrida said, of eron erå, as we swedify the the Finnish translation of Derrida's post-structuralist word play exemplification of the qualitative evolutionary principle. Divinely Integrated, because there is the palindromic polarity-symmetry at the bottom of the process. The simplest, most economic way to write the palindromic symmetry is "<>2, both more and less (cf. the notion of interval), and I call that form 'Self'. Self-referentiality is not formalizable in terms of classical logic, as Gödel showed, because it contains relations <, > and =. Notion of equivalence is derived from modal negation neither more nor less, which can be formally written ><, and consequently >=< and >[]<, as we develop static elements of the foundationally dynamic theory. In natural language: If A is neither more nor less than B, then A and B are equivalent (in a given context).
A very natural interpretation of <> is Bergson duration, an open ended process that is neither unity nor multiplicity, but sharing same indefinite quality as undecidability of Halting problem. That is why I call further development of this approach also Mereology of durations and/or Bergson lattice.
There's a critical issue to "mathematics are everywhere we look". If we limit mathematics foundationally or otherwise to quantification, the claim is pure myopia of "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail". If we start and expand math from the more-less relation, we do see that in it's various qualitative differentiation pretty much everywhere, it's wholly natural. Same can't be said of quantification, which is purely metaphysical if postulated as foundational axiom.Other than that, as others already pointed out, I'm also on the opinion that strict mathematical theory of consciousness can never be. Donald said that "mathematics are everywhere we look". I see two aspects of this. The first is the more trivial - we see mathematics everywhere because we look at everything through mathematical glasses. A shoemaker might view the whole reality as different metamorphoses of the Archetypal Shoe. A painter can see everything as canvases and paint strokes. We see in reality whatever concepts and ideas we project over the perceptions. This is the more superficial aspect.
The deeper aspect is that mathematics is the closest we can get to clean experience of the spiritual realm through intellectual thinking. In pure thinking (mathematics included) we are already living in the spiritual world. In mathematics we find thinking that supports itself, it's the object of itself, independent of sensory and other perceptions. The mathematical thoughts are determined through their inner relations. This is a prelude to what the ego secretly yearns for but has not yet the courage to approach - the wider spiritual world, of which mathematical thinking is only a rigidified instance. In our ordinary consciousness perceptions and concepts are somewhat orthogonal - we connect them together but we can't say that they are organically connected (except for the perceptions of our own thinking). That's the intuitive reason to assume our concepts are only representations of reality (the 'real' thing causing the perceptions). And this is natural, the concepts seem like inert mineral-like entities. It is only through our own thinking that they are set in motion and connected to perceptions. We have no reason to assume concepts/ideas as having some creative role.