Sean Carroll

So the entropy increases in both directions away from the big bounce.

And so what you and I would call the crunch has a reversed arrow of time to what you and I call the big bang.

Of course, the people living on the other side of the bounce would call the phase they're in the big bang and the phase we're in the big crunch.

So I hope that I covered all the bases there for these three questions.

Sorry to go on about it.

I thought that the paper didn't quite deserve its own solo episode, but it did deserve some explication here in the AMA.

All right, let's change gears a little bit.

C. Gerlando says, You suggested that one reason current AI systems probably aren't conscious is that they don't get bored or tired.

Giacomo Leopardi, the 19th century Italian poet-philosopher, has a striking theory of boredom because desire is inseparable from human existence.

Consciousness suffers when it has no object—occupation, fear, pain, or illusion—to absorb it.

On this account, boredom is not just a lack of stimulation, but consciousness experiencing the burden of its own empty duration.

Do you think boredom or tiredness are merely useful behavioral markers of consciousness, or do they point to something deeper, that consciousness requires an ongoing self-relation across time with needs or desires that can fail to be satisfied?

Well, on the one hand, I'm going to repeat my usual disclaimer.

I am not an expert on consciousness, and I don't have any deep theories about consciousness.

I have vague feelings, and I have strong convictions that consciousness does not require us to change the laws of physics.

That's my only firm belief about consciousness.

But everything you say, I'm not at all familiar with Leopardi's work, but it sounds good to me.

I mean, all these words sound more or less like what I'm familiar with from thinking about entropy and cognition and things like that, you know.

The reason why we feel like time is passing, this is another question we're going to get to later in the AMA, but we feel like time is passing because entropy is increasing.

Because we are constantly changing, right?