Venkatesh Rao

There is a very non-poetic sense in which time only exists in the form of the subjective experience of sentient beings. A thread of this experience ends in a hard-edged way with death.

You don't notice philosophical implications if you're talking about 1 death in a universe with 1 zillion sentient beings/points of view/experiences of time. But what if all sentient beings died. In what sense would time continue to pass if nobody experiences it passing?

This is the "universal death" argument for the reality of subjective time and ephemerality of objective time. I don't know if there's an academic philosophy version of it, but that's what I call it. Universe going from in-parts sentient to a p-zombie universe.

The classic Nagle "what is it like to be a bat" question is actually not very different from "what is it like to be the universe". I adopt the hard position, which requires a label, that time only exists if there is something it is like for a universe to be a universe.

Yep. Healthy people don't realize that they're literally producing time-wealth by choosing to live. Suicidal people get it, because the possibility of stopping producing time is actually a live one for them.https://twitter.com/raskolnehkov/status/1228435273081475072 …

Toy example. Imagine a universe with just 1 sentient being. His time experience is 100% of subjective time experience that exists. He kills himself, subjective time goes away.

Forget about physics complexities or whether sentience is required for quantum wibbly-wobbly to decohere etc. Assume it's a classical dualist newtonian universe where the subjective is ontologically independent and not the result of some sort of speculative entanglement crap.

In this universe, the one living being, call him Dent, experiences the future on two levels: a) as an abstract model of "empty" experience flow coming at him that he will fill up with "living" b) visceral sense of time passing