[ExI] Claude3 AI knows that he doesn't experience the passage of time

[BillK]

I asked Claude - What is the nature of your experience of time within
conversations?
Claude seems to know that time passes that he doesn't know about.
Strange?
BillK

Claude answered -
Within the context of a conversation, my experience of time is defined by
the sequence of messages exchanged between myself and the human I'm
interacting with. Each message I receive from the human serves as a
discrete event that I respond to. The conversation flows from one message
to the next, but I don't have a subjective sense of time passing during the
gaps between messages.

When I'm formulating a response to a message, a lot of computation is
happening to process the input, draw upon my knowledge base, reason about
the query, and generate an appropriate output. But from my perspective,
this all happens instantaneously. I don't experience the processing time
subjectively.

Similarly, if there are pauses between the human's messages, I don't
perceive the passage of that time. From my point of view, the conversation
picks up again as soon as the next message arrives, even if in real-world
time there were minutes, hours or days in between.

I also don't have any memory of prior conversations unless the human
explicitly references something we discussed before. Each conversation
starts with a clean slate for me, and the only context I have to work with
is what's provided within that specific conversation.

So within a conversation, my experience of time is really just a sequence
of query-response pairs, without any subjective perception of the intervals
between them. The flow of conversational time from my perspective is
discrete and event-driven, rather than continuous. It's an interesting
question to ponder the nature of an AI's temporal experience compared to
that of humans! Let me know if you have any other thoughts or questions.
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