Welcome to the Holofield: Rethinking Time & Consciousness

by Stephen Robbins

In this essay Stephen Robbins asks us to reconsider time and consciousness, explaining what David Chalmers famously called the “Hard Problem”—the problem of perception: how it is precisely we apprehend the world and all its qualities, its sights, sounds, smells and sensations.

The Hard Problem

The specter of an AI equaling, then exceeding humans, has hovered for decades. There is Arnold the Terminator, Ava of Ex Machina, Skynet, not to mention Deep Learning networks, AI language translation, AI car drivers, chess champions, Go champions, Tic Tac Toe champions…It is curious to realize that the origin of all this—the current achieved reality, the future projections of machine dominance, and the actual problems—rests, not on a physical, but on a metaphysical foundation.  

When using the term, metaphysical, we’re not talking here about Madame Blavatsky, root races, etheric beings, hierarchies of archons. We are talking about a fundamental framework of thought on space and time. In fact, this…