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I’ve been thinking about a simple thought experiment.
Imagine you could completely suspend consciousness in a human brain. Not sleep or anesthesia, but really suspend it — for the sake of the experiment, consciousness is fully paused: no perception, no memory, nothing being updated at all.
Someone starts drawing a line on a piece of paper. When it reaches a certain point — say 1 meter — someone else presses a button to suspend the brain. While the brain is suspended, another person continues drawing the line for another meter. Then the button is pressed again and the brain resumes.
From the brain’s point of view, when was the second meter of line drawn? In the future? In the past?
It seems like the answer is that there isn’t really a “when”. The brain just jumps from before to after. The drawing clearly happened in the world, but there’s no sense in which any time passed for the brain itself.
That makes me wonder whether the feeling of time passing depends on something happening inside the system, not just on things changing outside it.