Can you explain more about what you mean when you say people are wrong about their subjective experience? To me, what you feel in your internal world simulation is what matters, whether or not time is objectively speeding up or down.
And when referring to people, do you only mean humans? Seems like animals can have totally different subjective experiences of time that we should take into consideration when thinking about harms being done to them.
“convergent evidence from their neurology, behavior, and the temporal resolution of their senses indicates songbirds and honeybees experience 2-10 times as many subjective moments per objective unit of time as humans.”
So I’m approaching this question from a moral weights perspective, where subjective time/clock speed is plausibly one of the most important questions about utilitarian weighings. If we have a digital human who experiences reality at 1000x the speed I experience time, him being tortured for one objective minute is ~1000x worse than if I were tortured for one minute.
I don’t think most (human) accounts of massively increased subjective experience of time are analogous to digital people with much faster clock speeds.
Can you explain more about what you mean when you say people are wrong about their subjective experience? To me, what you feel in your internal world simulation is what matters, whether or not time is objectively speeding up or down.
I agree! I was thinking of subjective experience of the experiencing self. Not the objective time.
And when referring to people, do you only mean humans?
Yes. I definitely think it’s possible to get 2-10x differences in perceptual time (or more) across species, and honestly I wouldn’t be too surprised if intra-human variation is 2-4x either. To me, this has moral implications.
But “a lifetime in 5 to 20 minutes” is a difference of a few million times, which I think is implausible.
A useful exercise is to consider meditation, and many drugs, both of which appear to increase the subjective experience of time. My understanding from reading skimming studies on them is that they don’t increase objective correlates of that experience (ie, it’s not like people are thinking faster and processing more content, or have faster reaction speeds). So my overall takeaway is that their underlying subjective experience has not gotten (noticeably) faster (in the sense of much faster clock speed). But their subjective experience of that experience has gotten faster, in that they now believe they experience more.
Can you explain more about what you mean when you say people are wrong about their subjective experience? To me, what you feel in your internal world simulation is what matters, whether or not time is objectively speeding up or down.
And when referring to people, do you only mean humans? Seems like animals can have totally different subjective experiences of time that we should take into consideration when thinking about harms being done to them.
I am basing that on an article linked to in the above Applied Divinity Studies blog post called The Subjective Experience of Time: Welfare Implications, where the author states:
“convergent evidence from their neurology, behavior, and the temporal resolution of their senses indicates songbirds and honeybees experience 2-10 times as many subjective moments per objective unit of time as humans.”
So I’m approaching this question from a moral weights perspective, where subjective time/clock speed is plausibly one of the most important questions about utilitarian weighings. If we have a digital human who experiences reality at 1000x the speed I experience time, him being tortured for one objective minute is ~1000x worse than if I were tortured for one minute.
I don’t think most (human) accounts of massively increased subjective experience of time are analogous to digital people with much faster clock speeds.
I agree! I was thinking of subjective experience of the experiencing self. Not the objective time.
Yes. I definitely think it’s possible to get 2-10x differences in perceptual time (or more) across species, and honestly I wouldn’t be too surprised if intra-human variation is 2-4x either. To me, this has moral implications.
But “a lifetime in 5 to 20 minutes” is a difference of a few million times, which I think is implausible.
A useful exercise is to consider meditation, and many drugs, both of which appear to increase the subjective experience of time. My understanding from
readingskimming studies on them is that they don’t increase objective correlates of that experience (ie, it’s not like people are thinking faster and processing more content, or have faster reaction speeds). So my overall takeaway is that their underlying subjective experience has not gotten (noticeably) faster (in the sense of much faster clock speed). But their subjective experience of that experience has gotten faster, in that they now believe they experience more.