Sean Carroll

And I think that's, we sort of understand the basic reasons that need to be articulated into a more complete understanding.

But people like Janan Ismail and others have worked on this.

The fact is that you, at every moment of time, the version of you at 12 o'clock and the version of you at 1 p.m.

and the version of you at 2 p.m.,

have in your mind both a picture of your present configuration.

You think you know who you are, where you are, how you were arranged.

You might not be 100% accurate in that, but you have it.

You also have an impression of what you were like in the recent past, okay, where you were, what you were doing.

And you also have a projection into the future of where you might go, where you hope you're going to go, where you expect to go, where you want to go, etc.,

And you are constantly updating all of these different pictures.

And they're different pictures, right?

Your projection into the future is different than your memory of the immediate past.

And it's that difference, that imbalance, which is ultimately traceable to the thermodynamic arrow of time, that we conceptualize as an experience of the passage of time.

It's not that, quote unquote, time is really passing.

Time just is a label on the four-dimensional block universe.

But at every moment of time, every instantiation of you contains an unbalanced set of impressions about the past and the future.

And it's that unbalanced set of impressions that we attribute to or that we interpret as a sense of time passing, is what I would say.

David Sotolungo says, if one believes that in the vast majority of worlds, artificial superintelligence kills off mankind and also believes it's practically impossible to stop ASI from coming into being, do you think it makes sense to ignore the worlds where ASI kills off mankind and instead just focus on making sure that whatever ASI gets created ends up being beneficial to mankind rather than creating a dystopia?

So I'm going to have to deny the premises of the question here.

I don't believe that the vast majority of worlds ASI kills off mankind, and I also don't believe that it's practically impossible to stop ASI from coming into being.