The actual science is much simpler than that comedic explanation: recent experiments suggest time emerges from quantum entanglement between particles/systems. When quantum systems interact and become correlated, observers inside those systems experience what we call "time." External observers see the whole system as static and timeless.
But that's about measurement and observation in physics experiments - not about consciousness being special or rocks having "experiences" or the universe being some kind of cosmic computer.
It seems like it was just deliberately designed that way, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with our time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.
And what would be a non-religious opposite point? The human brain seems to be pretty physical, unless each has some magic attached to it that enables consciousness?
For instance the Big Bang Hypothesis largely came from observing that everything is moving away from everything else. So it's a very intuitive, even simple, hypothesis when you consider well what would happen if you just kept playing everything in reverse? The problem it turns out as we learned more is that a big bang, as we understood it, would not actually create what we see. For instance one problem, among many, is the Horizon Problem. [1]
Areas of the universe that should not be causally connected (light/causality itself, traveling obviously at the speed of light, would not have had time to go from one region to the other if it started at the birth of the universe) seem to be causally connected, in that they're effectively homogeneous. The currently standard explanation for this is cosmic inflation. [2]
Cosmic inflation suggests that for a brief moment in time, the universe's acceleration went into ultra over-drive expanding outward at many times the speed of light, only to suddenly slow down, and then resume accelerating again. This theory is 100% ad hoc. There is no rationale, logic, or remotely supported physical explanation - it's as good as magic for now. The only reason it became the standard is because it plugged a bunch of holes in the Big Bang Theory.
So too with consciousness, it's only in insisting in an answer that somebody is left waxing between the extremes of a basic emergent physical property with completely hamstrung ad hoc hypotheses to support it, or a God ordained proof to each person of their inner spirit. Its natural to seek answers to everything, but the reality is that we don't have those answers, and in some cases those answers may ultimately never be available. And while this may vary between people, I would much prefer to simply accept my own ignorance than believe in answers that have no more grounding than that opposite extreme which they seek to challenge.
Property Dualism is probably the most palatable to materialists, especially non-reductive physicalism. Basically, the idea that mental properties are irreducible to physical ones 1:1, but may still map to physical reality. Or that all mental states may map to physical states, without mental states themselves being physical (the things itself not really "existing" outside of the qualitative experience of the conscious entity).
I know that to many materialists that just means that the physical state (of the brain or GPU vram) is the consciousness, but dualism is imo sort of like saying one thing can't be two things at the same time, at least when it comes to consciousness - the vram state is real and correlates to a conscious state, but the conscious state still exists non-physically.
I also understand that many of us don't want to think that consciousness is "something special" or have aversions to anthropocentric theories, but I believe we shouldn't completely write off the possibility that something really is special about consciousness until we solve it, or at least get anywhere close to solving it, which we evidently haven't done at all because we're not even theoretically sure of a good path to make an artificial version of consciousness. It's not like we lack the compute and are waiting for technology improvements, we just don't know how to do it.
> we just don't know how to do it
As far as I know, there is no proof that consciousness exists, aside from the fact that everyone personally perceives it. In other words, one has no proof that another is conscious.
Claude effectively claims to be conscious, why should we not believe him?
Sort of, minus the word "is" in "consciousness is..." since nobody, as you point out, can say what consciousness "is." Without some qualifier. "I hypothesize that..."
> But that would also mean that consciousness cannot invoke any quantum mechanics
Well, consciousness isn't known to be physical, yet does influence the physical world (probably), which is a major criticism of dualism from a materialist perspective - clearly, if it's influencing the material world, it's material! But, we don't know, so, no, it doesn't necessarily mean that consciousness can't invoke quantum mechanics if it's not physical.
> Claude effectively claims to be conscious, why should we not believe him?
I agree generally that we don't know enough about consciousness to "prove" it exists, but I disagree insomuch as I don't like to engage in cleanroom absolute theoretics about it - e.g., yeah I can't prove what consciousness is, but I accept that you're probably conscious, and that my friends I know in real life absolutely are, and Claude isn't because it's basically a Chinese Room. I don't have rigid theorics around this but I don't really believe anyone does, so I guess I'm just vibing about it for now.
sure, but in exactly the same way rocks are embedded in reality's information-processing systems are creating temporal experiences (erosion, melting, etc)