I meant that I can no longer see reasons to believe in this immutable, reified essence of being (or let's just say the word - soul) behind the scenes to make us the same in essence from day to day. I certainly didn't mean to reject the lifelong personal identity.
— HuggetZukker

But that is all that a soul is. Aristotle define a soul as the actuality of a potentially living body, and Aquinas seconded him. To have a soul is simply to be alive. It is neither some kind of "stuff" nor a "thing" living within us.

This definition leaves open, as definitions should, the question of whether any aspect of life, such as awareness, survives physical death. If something does, it is not a holistic person, but the remanent of a person. — Dfpolis

Thanks for the perspective on philosophical use of the word "soul." Now, I think that, when we deal with Aristotle or Acquinas, we should strive to understand their words in accord with their intents, and that so should we when we deal with other communicators, unless we don't want to understand them. I think you knew in which way I meant the word, so let's move on.

If we can be aware of some intelligibility that does not require neural encoding to make itself present, then there is no reason why awareness cannot continue after the brain ceases to function. After reading W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, I am convinced that we can be aware of such intelligibility. — Dfpolis

Can you clarify what you believe about such knowledge, which does not require "neural encoding?" Do you believe that it might require "encoding" in a way, which cannot be described as "neural"? Does such knowledge continue to relate to something else, in some way, after cessation of brain function, and if so, can you offer an example, even a hypothetical one, of a relation between such knowledge after the cessation of brain function, and something else?

One can imagine virtually anything. — Dfpolis

That's the great thing about imagination.

Imagine that you can make two carbon copies of me, but only by destroying the original in the process. Now you can ask whether or not I will survive, and if I will, which one of the copies will I become?
— HuggetZukker

One can imagine virtually anything. Imagining a "world" does not mean that it is actually self-consistent, for many "worlds" we may think possible have covert contradictions, For example, one may imagine a world in which life evolved, but in which the physical constants are slightly different than in ours. This seems very possible, but the calculations underlying the fine-tuning argument shows it is physically impossible. So, I give no credence to experiments that cannot be performed, or to experiments in which the result is assumed, not observed. The whole point of experimenting is to allow nature to shock us out of our misconceptions.

Devoting attention to imagined issues diverts attention from what we actually know and experience -- which alone should be the basis of our theorizing. — Dfpolis

Let's stick to the context. bert1 was talking about ways of analyzing personal indexicals. I tried to illustrate mine by putting the principles of my position through a Gedankenexperiment, in order to explore its consequences of relevance to the subject. You're confusing a Gedankenexperiment with a "basis of theorizing." Not everything we say over the course of a discussion is intended to make people's heads explode. I'm not asking anyone to give credence to the thought experiment.

I am not saying you did. I am saying that the physicalist approach is inadequate. — Dfpolis

But you have not convinced me that the physicalist approach is inadequate. You may say that awareness transforms information from being latent in the physical world into being active in logical order, but "logical order" needs not be founded in a non-physical realm. "Logical order" may well be abstract, but so is the world wide web, yet has no operational existence independantly of running servers. What do you know about "logical order" which suggests that it probably doesn't have a physical foundation?

I can't find much in your comment which I think we really disagree upon.

I am only made of my physical self, which is undergoing constant change, meaning I'm basically a new me every day.
— HuggetZukker

Materialists are inclined to base identity and being made of the same "stuff." Of course, that is not the basis of personal identity. Identity is more about the continuation of the same, identifiable process. even if every atom in my body were replaced over the course of my life, I am still the same person I was when I was born, because a single life process links the present me to my infant, even zygote, self. So, while I am evolving and maturing, I am not "new" everyday. I am the continuation of my same self. — Dfpolis

I did say this: "I'm basically a new me everyday," but I didn't mean it so literally. I meant that I can no longer see reasons to believe in this immutable, reified essence of being (or let's just say the word - soul) behind the scenes to make us the same in essence from day to day. I certainly didn't mean to reject the lifelong personal identity.

That there is no "eternal" you is as much a faith position as your previous construct. Your account offers no rationale for this belief. — Dfpolis

With "eternal self" I was referring to that (let's say the word again) soul, which I had previously conceived of as potentially "eternal" in the sense of it not being clearly dependent upon the life process. You're right, I cannot therefore claim, now, in a broader context, that there cannot be an "eternal" self in one sense or another.

And, there is a very sharp line between being conscious and not. It was drawn by Aristotle inDe Anima iii. What awareness does, that noting else does is make what was merely intelligible, what was only knowable, actually known. There is a huge difference between having and processing information and knowing information, and that difference is bridge when we become aware of (conscious of) intelligibility.

Now you may say that consciousness is "emergent," or that it is "breathed into us by God." There is no operational difference between these views — Dfpolis

I understand the concept that awareness makes the merely intelligible actually known, but I may have presented my stance too coarsely, and I apologize for that. Please see my recent replies to bert1 for an update.

What is clear is that awareness, by making the merely intelligible actually known, transforms information from being latent in the physical world to being active in the logical order -- and that transformation is not within the competence of physics to explain, because physics has nothing to say about logical entities, — Dfpolis

I can't find where I may have suggested that physics should have the competencies to explain such transformations. I do, however, hold the belief that those instances of consciousness which we are most knowingly familiar with, may as well owe their degrees of freedom and operational capacities to some more fundamental levels of reality, like how a piece of software owes its degrees of freedom and operational capacities to the hardware it runs on.

Anyone else could be HuggetZukker
— bert1

What does this mean? I used to find the notion meaningful, because I (more or less automatically) thought of a being as having some non-physical essence of being. It led me to ask myself, "why am I me instead of someone else," but hidden in this question was the actual meaning of "by what means and criteria or logic did this spectator (I) enter this particular life?" So there was the assumption of a discrete essence of being built in.

My current thinking is that to be is to experience, such that one is identical to one's whole experience. Within this framework, X could not experience exactly what it's like to be Y without actually being Y as a consequence. The brain interprets sensory information, steers the body appropriately, and everything it does, including the very important storage of, and access to memory; a prerequisite for the sense of continuous being.

Then one could still ask "why am I me instead of someone else," but within this framework, and presuming that dead objects also do not have discrete essences of being (another topic), the question drops to the same level of meaning as that of "why is the pencil on my desk not a carrot?" (Or why is A=A?) That is a completely different type of question than "by what means and criteria or logic did this essence (I) enter this particular life?"
— HuggetZukker

Sure, I see that the questions we ask (Such as 'Why am I bert1, and not HuggetZukker?) seem to be theory-laden, and perhaps they are.

Consider, though, how "Bert1 is bert1" is a very different proposition from "I am bert1". I am bert1 tells me who I am in a way that bert1 is bert1 does not.

Some analyse this in terms purely of language use and see no metaphysical significance in it. I do see metaphysical significance in it. — bert1

Imagine that you can make two carbon copies of me, but only by destroying the original in the process. Now you can ask whether or not I will survive, and if I will, which one of the copies will I become?

Prior to meeting each other, each copy will confidently claim to be the original person, since they have identical initial content of memory. I think they are both neither clearly right nor clearly wrong. The copies do not have a shared consciousness, since they have separate brains. They will go on to live separate lives, and are therefore two different persons just sharing an initial composition and an initial strand of personhood.

Then, did the original me die? It depends on what one means by die, I think, but I'd rather say that I "branched out." As you can maybe tell, in this scenario, I think of each copy's continuous sense of self as arising from the conscious integration of information about selfhood over experiental time. They both feel like they have lived the same initial strand of life, and I think of it that way too.

The question remains of which one of the copies I became. In which copy did my internal experience continue? I think this has no clear answer, and I think this concept is difficult to wrap one's head around without some suspension of the self concept. Even the best abstractions can lose coherence.

Obviously, this scenario provokes ethical concerns, but that's another topic. It is very similar to scenarios of consciousness uploading and quatum teleportation. I think it would open a huge ethical can of worms for society if any one of these hypothetical technologies was invented, and I might never feel at ease with them.

Another way of approaching this is to ask "By examining all non-indexical information in the world, can I figure out which one I am?" Again, even if the answer is 'no' there is further argument to be had over the metaphysical significance of that. — bert1

I think indexicals, in this context, have no reality outside minds, societies, and cultures. The sense of self involves the faculties of several brain regions. It involves embodiment, autobiographical memories, and morality.

In nature, it was not a single creature learning the self concept at a single point in time, but one or more species, over time, "learned" it. Since the individual specimens were presumably all non-omniscient, non-omnipotent creatures with finite spatio-temporal existences, they could only examine information via interaction in a local reference frame, so the concept of indexicals was an obvious evolutionary move. I would therefore describe indexicals as emergent facts about finite conscious existence.

Now, this veers into neurobiology, and I'm operating from a layman's point of view here, so definitely don't take my word on any of it.

In a scenario of examining all non-indexical information, and no indexical information at all, all at once in parallel, I do not think the self concept is even intelligible, or if it is, I figure it could at best take the form of conceiving of everything as part of oneself.

Your thoughts? Let me hear about arguments to be had over the metaphysical significance.

Sorry about the slow reply. I think I may have been a little condensed and misleading in the OP, so I've taken some time to work on a clarification.

My own view is that consciousness could not be an emergent phenemenon, because it does not admit of degrees. All emergent things emerge gradually (to a greater or lesser extent) because or the complexity of the interactions that they emerge from. Consciousness is one of those few concepts that does not seem to admit of degree. Consider your suggested examples, both of them involve experience, and so fall clearly withing the definition of 'consciousness'. There is 'something it is like' to be in those states, to use one formulation.

That is why I asked for examples of intermediate stages between conscious experience and no experience at all. What people usually offer is examples of very vague and diffuse experience, and contrast that with sharp wakeful experience. But both these are still examples of experience. What I'm after is some intermediate stage between experience (no matter how vague and diffuse) and no experience at all. It seems to me that the concept of experience does not allow for this, and that makes any theory of conscious emergence fatally problematic. — bert1

You may not have sufficient experience with things which do not admit to degrees to make this assertion. H2O does not admit to degrees, yet is made of H and O atoms, neither of which in separation give rise to water-like substances.

At any rate, I didn't think about it this way. My stance is a type of weak emergentism, and I wouldn't argue that mininally integrated experience (protoconsciousness) could not occur at the fundamental level of the world, but rather that any significantly integrated experience may well be a case of "much arising from little."

I see it like this. This is a world in which it's like something to be, and in which there's at least one observable reality, not that these two phenomena must necessarily be of distinct foundations. I propose that the fundamental stuff of the world may have the intrinsic potential to give rise to consciousness through certain mechanisms involving no specific conscious endpoint, without the fundamental stuff having significant consciousness itself, if any at all. This stance avoids asserting that consciousness is exclusively intrinsic to some yet unknown substance(s) (dualism.) It also avoids asserting that consciousness is both fundamental and universal (panpsychism.)

I am not averse to some forms of panpsychism. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) shows how consciousness higher than protoconsciousness might emerge. IIT is a panpsychist (or maybe panprotopsychist?) theory, and I'm not averse to it. It could well have the answer, but I'm not decided on the matter.

Here's what the Inter Mind website says about the two way connection:

With any Conscious experience there seems to be an implied Conscious Self (CSf) that experiences the experience. One approach is to say that the Conscious experience and the CSf are all part of a single Conscious Mind thing. I think the best thing to say is that we really don't know how to understand this yet, which is ironic because this is what we are.

The CSf can have Good experiences, Neutral experiences, or Bad experiences. The CSf will try to seek out Good experiences and try to avoid Bad experiences. The CSf must have a Conscious Volition (CV) capability in order to satisfy it's desires. This means that the Inter Mind must not only connect forward from the Physical Mind to the Conscious Mind but must also connect backward from the Conscious Mind to the Physical Mind. With the forward connection the Inter Mind is monitoring the Physical Mind and converting Neural Activity into Conscious experience. With the backward connection the Inter Mind is monitoring the Conscious Mind and converting CV into Neural Activity to move the Physical Body. — SteveKlinko

This is considerably more complete than the mode of thinking I came from originally. Though, I don't quite understand why the conscious mind needs to be something, I guess, non-physical? Why might it not all be neural?

Science just denies Consciousness and Conscious Volition even though it is the 800 pound Gorilla in the Scientific room. — SteveKlinko

I don't think this is quite true anymore. Consciousness Studies have existed since the 1980's, and, I believe, came forth along with the availability of functional MRI scanning. Notably neural correlates are studied to find correlations between conscious experience and patterns of neural activity. There is no doubt plenty more research to do, and new, more sophisticated techniques would be great, but to say that consciousness is being denied seems to me like an unfair assessment.

I don't like the sound of your friend, sorry. — bert1

That's okay :sweat:

I practically asked for this comment by oversharing. My bad.

Could you give an example of a creature, or a state of being, or structure or function or whatever, which is neither clearly conscious nor clearly not-conscious? — bert1

I don't have a really good example, sorry. I don't know whether one can currently know anything about this sort of thing. I'm reminded of hypnagogia, which I have by the way experienced myself accompanied by exploding head syndrome and sleep paralysis.

There is an evolutuionary continuum for abilities such as flight, olfactory sense, social behavior, problem solving, etc. Could the same not (perhaps) be the case for consciousness? Maybe some simple animals have, or hypothetical advanced future artificial intelligences, will have, quasi-consciousness. I'm just speculating!

Anyone else could be HuggetZukker — bert1

What does this mean? I used to find the notion meaningful, because I (more or less automatically) thought of a being as having some non-physical essence of being. It led me to ask myself, "why am I me instead of someone else," but hidden in this question was the actual meaning of "by what means and criteria or logic did this spectator (I) enter this particular life?" So there was the assumption of a discrete essence of being built in.

My current thinking is that to be is to experience, such that one is identical to one's whole experience. Within this framework, X could not experience exactly what it's like to be Y without actually being Y as a consequence. The brain interprets sensory information, steers the body appropriately, and everything it does, including the very important storage of, and access to memory; a prerequisite for the sense of continuous being.

Then one could still ask "why am I me instead of someone else," but within this framework, and presuming that dead objects also do not have discrete essences of being (another topic), the question drops to the same level of meaning as that of "why is the pencil on my desk not a carrot?" (Or why is A=A?) That is a completely different type of question than "by what means and criteria or logic did this essence (I) enter this particular life?"

I simply recognize two Categories of things that happen. First Category is all the Neural Activity that can happen. Second Category is all the Qualia that can happen. It appears that Neural Activity leads to or produces Qualia. You cant just say that the Neural Activity is the Qualia. The Neural Activity is one Category of Phenomenon and the Qualia is a different whole Category of Phenomenon. If they are the same thing then the burden is on you to show how these two disparate Categories can be one and the same thing. Nobody knows how the Neural Activity produces the Qualia. I don't have any theories of how this can happen. There's nothing to falsify. The Hard Problem remains. — SteveKlinko

If you sufficiently deconstruct anything that is actual and thoroughly deconstructible, you will end up with a model of how it works. Such a model makes anything look functional and quantitative in nature (physical, even if you call it by another name), which may be contrary to one's everyday intuition about qualia. If such a functional clockwork* is an unsatisfactory picture, it may well mean that one has no justifiable choice but to adapt one's intuition to that which is superficially unintuitive.

Of course, I cannot therefore prove that the cause of the conscious experience of qualia is not something other than a clockwork* in nature, unlike everything else which is actual that we know of, since you can't prove a negative.

*The word "clockwork" carries the outmoded connotation of perfect determinism, which is at odds with quantum mechanics. Therefore, I'd really like to find a similar word, which does not connote determinism at the fundamental level of reality. I hope you can catch my meaning despite this.

That's quite clever. I laughed out loud! Thanks. — creativesoul

No problem. I'm glad you took it well :yum:

Well-received humor lightens a disagreement.

The outline is all about applying common sense to known temporal order(s) and arriving at knowledge of existential dependency(and vice-versa). — creativesoul

Is Dennis 1967-2018 a known temporal order? I already gave you the bullet points of his life.

Conflating different time periods loses the distinction between Dennis prior to the heart transplant and Dennis after. — creativesoul

I'm not asking for conflation of time periods or existences. The shorter time periods remain implicit under the existence of Dennis 1967-2018. I'm simply asking to consider an existence which isn't selectively chosen for its compatibility with the very propositions it is supposed to negate.

Dennis 1967-2018 is not just an arbitrary scramble, but the life of a person. What besides bias for the premises necessitates the sweeping of Dennis 1967-2018 under the rug in favor of smaller bites fitting conveniently in the mouth of the argument?

The question itself is conflating distinctly different time periods, according to your own example. — creativesoul

According to your own interpretation of the example. The example presents a mundane notion of an existence, and illustrates that the outline doesn't parse it. Is the existence of Dennis 1967-2018 a valid notion? Is the outline meant to deal with any and all valid notions of existence? If yes to both, Dennis 1967-2018 is a counterexample.

In your opinion, what thing(s) did Dennis 1967-2018 existentially depend on? You don't have to mention Adam and Eve and all that, just the most immediate non-trivial necessity or necessities.

The sculpture with the box did not exist prior to the box. The sculpture with the box is existentially dependent upon the box. The sculpture prior to the box is not. They are not the same sculpture. — creativesoul

In my opinion, the old sculpture and the new sculpture are sub-existences of a whole time sculpture. To say that the whole time sculpture ceases to exist due to one change seems absurd.

With your approach, it seems impossible to conceive of the existence of Dennis 1967 - 2018.

In year 1967, Dennis was born.

In year 2010, Dennis' heart failed, but luckily he survived thanks to receiving a heart transplant. Thus concluded the existence of Dennis born in 1967 as began the existence of Dennis who got a heart transplant in 2010.

In year 2018, Dennis who got a heart transplant in 2010 swallowed nine lithium batteries on purpose to die and succeeded. On his tombstone it said,

Here lies Dennis who got a heart transplant
2010 - 2018
RIP

Come now, let's not lose all sensibility. — creativesoul

I agree.

The sculpture existed prior to the metal box. That which exists prior to something else cannot be existentially dependent upon it. The sculpture is not existentially dependent upon the metal box. — creativesoul

And yet from this quote...

Are there examples that clearly negate any of the five 'rules'? — creativesoul

...it would appear that you were interested in having it explored whether or not P1 could be right.

But we do know what we are looking for. We just are unable to find it, so we give up and say things like the Neural Representation is the Conscious Experience. This is worse Superstition than that which you started with. There is zero explanatory power in such a statement. The Hard Problem remains. — SteveKlinko

You have a hypothesis that, to my understanding, claims it is possible to find something in the brain that transforms physical information or physical processing into qualia.

How can the hypothesis be falsified? What predictions does the hypothesis make? This is what I mean by knowing what you're looking for.

I don't think neuroscience should quit studying any aspects of consciousness, including perception and qualia. Any kind of studying of consciousness is a good thing.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — from Chalmers's formulation

When it is asked how it can be that "physical processing" (something physical) gives rise to "a rich inner life" (something not defined in physical terms), it creates the problem: What kind of physical signs might "rich inner life" leave behind? At some point we must identify something (not just anything, but something which correlates well with "having qualia") as the physical sign we were looking for, since if the thing we are looking for isn't physical, how can it possibly be found by natural sciences?

Also, "it seems objectively unreasonable that it should" is being asserted without an actual attempt at justification.

I don't follow how this resolves the problem of what is consciousness or how is it that you are conscious. This seems to only answer the question of where consciousness come from. My understanding of emergent theories is that they explain how consciousness can arise in a purely physical environment — Hanover

In my case the problem specifically concerned qualia, so it was the "hard problem". My change boils down to the realization that the hard problem is not a problem, because if you don't know what you're looking for, you're not actually looking for anything, so you won't find "it."

Suppose there is found a neural effect that correlates with someone's account of experiencing "red". Then the hard problem proposes to ask how the neural representation of red causes a conscious experience of red. What does not seem to be considered is the possibility that the neural representation of red is the conscious experience of red.

I can sympathize with wanting there to be some kind of "conscious endpoint" besides the machinery itself, but if there is no physical role hypothesized for it, how will you know what signs to look for? How will you know when you have found it?

Take the example of a modern art sculpture made out of trash. The sculpture is a tower, and near its base is a supportive rotten box of wood that is threatening to collapse.

The sculpture collapses if the box collapses. However, with the help of hydraulic equipment, the tower can be saved by being temporarily suspended as its rotten box gets replaced by a metal box that was fabricated later than the tower was built. Wouldn't you say that the metal box did not exist until it had been fabricated, so it did not exist before the sculpture?

Would the sculpture have seized to exist if the rotten box had collapsed? Someone might think of it still existing but in a collapsed form, but the artist might reject it and say that it stopped existing. If we say it would have seized to exist, after its fix up, is it the same sculpture? What if the artist insists that it is?

However, if any person, such as the artist, is taken to be the arbiter of the sculpture's existence then the person's opinion of its existence is its only direct existential dependency, and any other factors are just a temporary indirect dependencies.

The thing is, did the artist's opinion that the sculpture exists exist prior to the sculpture? It could not have. The sculpture seems to be one with the artist's opinion that the sculpture exists (when the artist is the arbiter.)

Hi! I've already posted without introducing myself, but that's because I'm a barbarian. I think I'm not as academical as most members I've encountered here, but I can spell my name. I'm also non-religious and without a favorite color. Are there any other achromatists here?

I don't think you can know what it's like to be a member of a gender in the sense of possessing completely precise knowledge, because people are so incredibly diverse, and the issue so complex, that it's not so far-fetched to think that there might not be any universal facts about gender.

That said, you can possess less precise knowledge learnt from sociology and other humanities, and you can possess insight and intuition - fuzzy "knowledge" gained from the interactions in your life. Social behavior contains subtle clues from which we can develop a lot of implicit, imprecise "knowledge." Call it street smarts if you will.

It's not definsible? What kind of defense do you require for the free pursuit of well-being and existential fulfillment? Personally, I only expect ethical defense for that, and I can't find ethical problems with transgenderism.

If every effect has a preceding cause...
— HuggetZukker

How could you know that this is true?

How could you show it to be false?

So where does it stand?
— Banno

If you can argue that it is true, or that it is false, I encourage you to go ahead and make your case.

My argumentation hinges on it having unknown truth value, and therefore I have no incentive to argue that it is true, or that it is false.

An infinite past seems impossible, because that would entail a completed infinity; it would mean TODAY is the conclusion of an infinite series of actualized past days.

From the phrase "actualized past days," I infer that you probably approach time as a force that actively flows by the present moment. This is compatible with Presentism and Growing Block Universe. It's a very intuitive approach, but it may be helpful to try to see it from a different perspective. In the context of possibility B and C, I approach time as still with all moments eternal as consciousness flows through. This falls under an approach called Eternalism.

In mathematics, there are both positive infinity and negative infinity. Think of the present as t=0 where t is time. Starting at t=0, line P for past extends infinitely towards t=negative infinity, and also starting at t=0, another line F for future extends infinitely towards t=positive infinity.

None of these lines' lengths are completed infinities.

Chronologically speaking, the past timeline "ends" in the present, but it doesn't begin at any time, and therefore it's incomplete.

Geometrically speaking, P begins at t=0, but it doesn't end at any t, and therefore it's incomplete.

By "emergent" - do you mean the mind is not reducible to the physical and operates (at least partly) independently of the laws of nature?

Not operating independently of the laws of nature, and technically reducible, but it's very hard to predict the emergent behavior by studying the individual constituents.

Emergence means that the properties and behaviors of a whole arise from the properties and behaviors of its constituents, but the constituents do not individually possess the emergent properties and behaviors. In other words, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

A popular demonstrative example of emergence is the phenomenon of starling murmurations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOGCSBh3kmM

The definition describes almost anything physical, and in the context of emergent consciousness, I think physicality is typically implied. In my case, physicality is the intended implication.

I guess you could conceive of metaphysical emergence as well. For example, the Trinity could perhaps in some people's views, be thought of as emergent without physicality.

What if the first cause is causation?

Can you hypothesize a process whereby causation causes an effect?

That said, there are known uncaused events like photon emission or radioactive decay. There are metaphysical interpretations that say there are hidden variables that make such events actually caused, if not predictable, but that is just one possible interpretation, sort of matching your option B below.

A good angle. At the opening of the argumentation, I wrote:

If every effect has a preceding cause, as classical inquiry implies

I chose the wording, "classical inquiry", in avoidance of the word, "science", because I wanted to keep the arguments simple, but the angle you give is something I had strongly considered bringing up.

Hidden variables may not help improve current theories, but they remain a wide open possibility.

A) If there was uncaused cause then
...
4. Something has come from nothing.
This doesn't follow. It assumes that 'nothing' is the first uncaused cause.

I didn't mean it that literally, but rather like this: "Something which didn't come from anything has existed." I can't imagine what "coming from nothing" means if taken more literally, but I'd like to be helped by a description.

Infinite things having happened doesn't imply infinite time. There are infinite events (no end to space), so only finite time is necessary for infinite things to happen. I'm suggesting that C be worded as just infinite (non-cyclic) past time.

You're completely right that if there is infinite space, infinite events have happened in finite time. My bad.

Any model of this needs to account for entropy. It defines the arrow of time, and something needs to reset it, or it doesn't describe the reality we see.

Hmm. I could at best give reference to some hypotheses (for example, the eternal inflationary model might give leeway to infinite past), but I have nothing solid to counter your argument. I really like the idea of infinite past, but it doesn't seem likely, so therefore I give up.

I don't understand what you're objecting to. I haven't spoken of a cause of time. Frankly, I consider time and causality as two sides of the same coin, like wavelength and frequency. I can't conceptualize one without the other. I don't think time is external to the world; it's integral to it.