By independent I don’t mean bearing no relationship with each other whatsoever, but simply that pairs of instants that are closer to each other are not more correlated than those that are more distant. “But what does closer mean?”
For you to entertain the hypothesis that life is an iid stream of sense data, you have to take the basic sense that “things are perceived by you one after another” at face value. “But a fundamental part of our experience of time is the higher correlation of closer instants. If this turned out to be an illusion, then shouldn’t we dismiss the notion of real or objective time in its entirety?” Yes. For the version of us that is inside this thought experiment, we would have no way of accessing this thing called time (the real sequence of iid perception events) since even the memory of the past would be just a meaningless perception. However as a brute fact of the thought experiment it turns out that these meaningless perceptions do “come” in a sequence
If instants are fully independent, why would there even be a definable “last”?
By independent I don’t mean bearing no relationship with each other whatsoever, but simply that pairs of instants that are closer to each other are not more correlated than those that are more distant. “But what does closer mean?” For you to entertain the hypothesis that life is an iid stream of sense data, you have to take the basic sense that “things are perceived by you one after another” at face value. “But a fundamental part of our experience of time is the higher correlation of closer instants. If this turned out to be an illusion, then shouldn’t we dismiss the notion of real or objective time in its entirety?” Yes. For the version of us that is inside this thought experiment, we would have no way of accessing this thing called time (the real sequence of iid perception events) since even the memory of the past would be just a meaningless perception. However as a brute fact of the thought experiment it turns out that these meaningless perceptions do “come” in a sequence