BadgerJelly » Mon Jan 09, 2017 9:56 am wrote:I am not saying our brains states are running backwards! I would have no comprehension of such a thing. That makes no sense. Our brians would be literally spewing out information from our senses. "Comprehension" would be impossible and meaningless ... I cannot imagine such a thing at all in the slightest only fool myself that I maybe could by an obtuse use of language. That is far from what I am doing here.
Maybe think of a cruel experiment where you only expose children to something in reverse. Maybe we train people to act out their lives in reverse. A sudden switch to viewing the world as it is would be very disorientating. I am asking you to place yourself in such a disorientating position and see how you would naturalistically view the world and come to understand it.
The best example to express this I can think of is the "ball on the hill" stated in last post. In reverse the ball will "magically" start to roll up the hill and hit some object. The way we see it there is no mystery. Something pushes the ball and it rolls down the hill. We see the cause and the effect. In reverse we are blind to the "cause".
I also understand perfectly well that we can onky partially fulfill this idea. We cannot simply forget that the ball rolls down the hill because some pushed it. What I am saying is that if we viewed many objects rolling up a hill we would conclude that the object will "hit" something even if we would not know when the object would start rolling up the hill.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. A certain amount of coherence of thinking is necessary for awareness of consciousness (if we accept that there could be consciousness that is unaware of itself). The evidence is strong that our conscious awareness derives from the activity taking place in an animal body. An animal body that appears to have evolved in form and function to produce neural activity of a certain sort and appears to be the foundation of the nature of our aware consciousnesses.
I think a significant part of what makes our thinking coherent is the notion of cause and effect. We model ourselves as actors where we can do an action that will cause the effect that we want; e.g. I caused a cup to interrupt a stream of water and fill with that water so that I could drink it. Much of the coherence of our thinking comes from modeling the world temporally and in those temporal sequences of events we see causes causing effects. I think it is likely that we are biologically predisposed to think that way.
So if someone with a perfect memory took a hallucinogen that caused them to experience their memories backwards with perfect fidelity I think there would be no way they could make sense of the experience because it would deeply, deeply contradict the cause and effect way we essentially are programmed to see the world. One of the fundamental factors that makes our thinking coherent would have to be somehow ignored. IDK, maybe if a person had a disciplined enough mind and was prepared for it, they might be able to maintain some coherence to their thinking while denying that the temporal sequence was unfolding completely contrary to their almost hardwired sense of cause and effect.
What would a mind have to cohere around to be able to have a mentally coherent view of the backwards temporal sequence? Well, it seems like a deeper essential part of our thinking that helps it be coherent is pattern recognition. The backwards sequence of events would likely be recognized as patterns of events. If the person could keep themselves from trying to impose cause and effect relationships on the patterns, I suppose the patterns could be interesting to experience.
Another problem, though, would be that unless some significant part of the hallucinator maintained awareness that what he was experiencing was an artifact of running his memories backwards, the hallucinator would probably try to think of acting in this backwards experience. He could be hallucinating and get really thirsty and need to get a drink and therefore try to act through his memory backwards experience. That could make for a bad trip.
If we could detach ourselves enough from the experiences that shaped our awareness, then I think watching a movie of a flower blossoming played backwards would be a pretty good approximation of what it would be like to experience a reversal of temporal events. It would be like passively watching a movie run backwards. What does a movie of a flower blossoming mean when it is run backwards?