Say, let’s admit consciousness is the result of a physical process.
Then say this process only goes “forward” when our time coordinate increases. Just like an egg gets cooked when it’s temperature coordinate increases, but it doesn’t get more or less cooked when it’s temperature coordinate decreases.
This would mean that going back in time doesn’t result in any perceptible change, since your consciousness hasn’t evolved from it’s “former” state.
Thus making it possible for us to be travelling through plenty of dimensions in varied directions, only ever experiencing the brief times when you happen to be moving in increasing time. Or whatever combination of movement along varied dimensions makes it possible for you to be conscious.
TLDR: i need to take shorter showers
That depends how you define your terms, but under most definitions I don’t think that this is always going to be the case
I’m not taking about life, I’m talking about consciousness which is a separate topic
Why?
We can measure it indirectly (eg by people telling us about their conscious experiences) which is good enough for empirical study
People explaining their own consciousness is really not good enough. Simple llm ai systems can do that. I’m pretty sure that dogs are conscience, but we can never get their perspective. You cannot know anyone other than yourself is conscious.
There is a lot of data that is out of reach (such as the experience of a dog) but we can generalize from the data we do have access to and see if we can pick up any meaningful patterns and then generalize from there. That’s how all science is done