On the topic of the experience of stopping time, a friend asked

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oh yeah - and of course, the obvious question is that 1) how could we EVER
encapsulate this kind of stuff in a man-made thinking machine
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what I said is...

to me, it's no more mysterious how experience could come out of a computer, than how it could come out of a 3-pound hunk of fibrous cells (the brain), ...

my views on consciousness and experience are pretty eccentric for the AI community ... maybe there will be some good discussions on this at the machine consciousness workshop in hong kong in june ... I don't exactly view consciousness as produced by the artifact that it's associated with (the brain, the computer). I think of it more like: consciousness is always there, and different sorts of physical structures can amplify or present it in different ways.... The brain leads to one kind of manifestation of universal consciousness, a computer leads to another ... but if you look for the consciousness in the nerve cells or the semiconductors, that's vaguely like looking for the musicians in the radio antenna while you're listening to music ;-) ... yeah, the specific thoughts and structures are in the brain (or the computer), but what makes them really be *experience* is not created by these physical media ... it's an underlying part of the universe that is just amplified by these physical media...

but, this strange view of things is too weird for AI people to handle so I generally keep my mouth shut about it!