Jonathan Hockey’s Reviews > The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy > Status Update

My speculative proposal is that the correlate of qualia are those events without precedence. It is commonplace to observe that habitual actions are unconscious in people. Maybe the same thing is true in nature. Maybe brains are systems where a lot of novel events take place. " This is also similar to an idea of mine, regarding that emergence of consciousness is one and same as emergence of a unique being/perspective

In this chapter he is arguing for the reality of qualia, experienced by conscious individuals here and now, and Galen Strawsons related view of panpsychism is evoked as consistent with the temporal naturalism perspective, but not consistent with the timeless naturalism and platonic, mathematical realist perspectives.

"We have direct experience of the world in the present moment. Just as the fact that we experience is an undeniable feature of the natural world, it is also an undeniable feature of the natural world that qualia are experienced in moments which are experienced one at a time. This gives a privileged status to each moment of time, associated with each experience: this is the moment that is being experienced now."..

"In Chapter 1, I introduced the metaphysical folly as the tendency for unreflective naturalists to believe in an imagined nature constructed in their imaginations as being more real than the world we perceive with our senses. " (pp 480) This is akin to my notion of this tendency for hypostatisation of our models of reality, and the problems this creates in confounding and blocking our true appreciation of reality.

The last couple of chapters develop the understanding of mathematics required alongside the temporal naturalism, which will be one of providing static models based on past regularities, rather than being the ideal form to which reality aspires. Three cosmological options are pluralist, linear cyclic models and branching cyclic models. The first is inflation, multiverse and least likely for Smolin. ..

As he says in the text: "To give up the relativity of simultaneity is a major step, but we have very good reason to consider it, if we are to escape the cosmological dilemma and fallacy and move toward a cosmological theory that could give sufficient reason for choices of laws and initial conditions." (pp 420)

This section makes quite a claim that relativity of simultaneity may be only a locally correct phenomena, rather than universal, in order to be made consistent with shape space and his notion of a global, and real time of here and now, i.e. his temporal naturalism.

Smolin's alternate suggestion is that we avoid multiverse ideas and anthropic reasoning principles to stay true to a temporal naturalistic understanding of the universe as unique, meaning that there is a preceding universe or state to our current universe, from which we can form a sufficient reason account for its emergence, perhaps through his concept of cosmological natural selection.