[HN Gopher] A growing number of scientists are convinced the fut...
___________________________________________________________________
A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences
the past
Author : myth_drannon
Score : 210 points
Date : 2023-03-17 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Well, of course, what happens tomorrow dictates what happens
| today. It's hard to be sure about what happens tomorrow. Then
| again it's hard to be sure about what happens yesterday. It's not
| a one-to-one relationship, but there are striking similarities.
| alphanumeric0 wrote:
| I'm attempting to recall an analogy from a paper about this
| subject. One of the authors gave the analogy of time being like a
| river. If we are traveling down this river, and the river is
| changing speed ahead (maybe due to rocks or a sharp bend), then
| it is correct to say that the river is changing the past (our
| present location in the river), since our speed would then start
| to change as we approach the new point.
| karmakaze wrote:
| It does make explaining some things much easier, like the
| "Delayed-choice Quantum Eraser"[0] experiment.
|
| Basically what's possible next is anything that can solve for
| conditions set by the past, and some from the future.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
| tetris11 wrote:
| I think it relates more to Wheeler's Anthropic Participatory
| Principle[0], where multiple observers of some event in the
| past, can influence it from the future.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
| pif wrote:
| > A growing number of scientists...
|
| Beware, getting from one to two is already a growing number!
| taskforcegemini wrote:
| that's actually a big jump, 100% increase
| yonaguska wrote:
| Very tangentially related, but we rewrite the past all the time.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Wouldn't that be a matter of perception and written history
| rather than the factual past?
| karpierz wrote:
| What is the factual past?
|
| It's the extrapolation of models that we've created in the
| present, but those models are only our best guess at the
| truth. They may be revised in the future or simply not hold
| for the past.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| What? No. The factual past is what actually happened. Don't
| mistake the map for the territory.
| mistermann wrote:
| Can you point us to The Territory please? You see it, I
| presume?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| My eyes are a fairly reliable map, but they're still not
| the territory. That we are only able to perceive reality
| by proxy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though, it
| just means that we have to get used to using maps, while
| remembering that they can be flawed.
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| The factual past is what actually happened, history is what
| we wrote down.
|
| Perception and reality are not in fact the same thing.
| CalRobert wrote:
| To be fair there is some disagreement over what exactly
| "the past" _is_.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwzN5YwMzv0 discusses
| this a bit.
| karpierz wrote:
| Can you show that there is a factual past without parsing
| it through your perception?
|
| It was factual that the earth was 6000 years old, until
| it wasn't.
| danjoredd wrote:
| I would argue that factual past is unprovable without
| some sort of visual evidence, and even that can be
| manipulated...especially with AI on the rise. The problem
| with your point is that EVERYTHING is parsed through your
| perception, and you can just as easily make the point
| with the same logic that you can't prove that what you
| are currently experiencing is present reality.
|
| What actually happened is unprovable without some layer
| of trust once the event leaves the affected. For example,
| I ate a grapefruit for breakfast. That is a fact.
| However, I have tossed the peel away and I am
| communicating that I ate it with a stranger over the
| internet. For all you know, I could have eaten cookie
| crisp. If you and enough people get together and
| collectively believe that I ate cookie crisp, the public
| belief will be that I ate cookie crisp. However, that
| does not change the fact that I ate a grapefruit.
| karpierz wrote:
| Given that people can hallucinate/make up false memories,
| you sure you ate a grapefruit for breakfast?
|
| So sure that regardless of what evidence you are
| presented, you'd be certain that you ate a grapefruit.
| Even if:
|
| - I showed you videoproof that you were eating a sandwich
| for breakfast
|
| - we had all of your family say they were having
| breakfast with you and saw you eating a sandwich
|
| - a doctor came and said "I analyzed your stool and found
| no evidence of grapefruit"
|
| - we had a message, cryptographically signed by a key you
| generated/controlled, that said "man this sandwich is
| delicious"
|
| Even with any amount of evidence to the contrary, you'd
| still believe that you ate a grapefruit?
|
| If not, then are you sure that it's fact that you ate a
| grapefruit, or it's just that all current evidence points
| to you eating a grapefruit?
| danjoredd wrote:
| Given that, there are two, and only two possibilities:
|
| Either
|
| -my perception of reality is inherently opposed to
| objective reality
|
| or
|
| -the world, for some reason, is gaslighting me into
| thinking I ate a sandwich and the objective reality is
| that I ate a grapefruit.
|
| See, my problem with this "philosophy" that objective
| reality does not exist is that it enables abusers. Have
| you ever seen the movie Gaslight? Its a classic. This
| poor woman lives with an abuser...someone who is
| committed to making her think that she is crazy. He
| contradicts everything she does and says, sets up
| evidence to objectively prove that she only imagined
| herself doing it, and keeps her under his thumb through
| those means. In the end of the movie, its revealed that
| none of the evidence is real and that she is sane. To
| combat against these types of people, its important to be
| sure of your own reality and only change if evidence is
| overwhelmingly pointed in the opposite direction. Even
| then, question these changes in belief heavily.
| Otherwise, you will believe just about anything anyone
| says.
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| No, that was never factual. Radiocarbon dating gives us
| evidence, factual without the lense of perception or
| opinion. Saying the earth is 6000 years old is just
| repeating propaganda.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > It was factual that the earth was 6000 years old, until
| it wasn't.
|
| This is the opposite of the example you seem to think it
| is. The Earth has always had the same actual date of
| origin. If it is not factual now that the Earth is 6,000
| years old, then it wasn't before either. The whole
| argument here is that people's perceptions and reality
| can in fact be different.
| karpierz wrote:
| > The Earth has always had the same actual date of
| origin.
|
| Maybe, but I'm asking: can you show that peoples'
| perceptions match/differ from reality, without relying on
| perceptions being factual/reliable?
|
| If not, then how do you know that reality is fixed?
| mr90210 wrote:
| Let's say that you are convicted as a criminal, and
| allegedly you were in a certain location and committed the
| crime.
|
| If you were not there and didn't not commit the crime, is
| that past to which used to determine your conviction
| factual?
|
| Whether later you are proven not guilty, the past didn't
| change, but rather our perception of it.
| karpierz wrote:
| You're begging the question. You started with: assume
| there is a factual past of where you were. And then
| argued: there is a factual past.
|
| I'm not enough of a skeptic to say "don't trust the
| models of the past"; memory turns out to be a pretty good
| model. So does carbon dating.
|
| But the reason you say "you were not there and did not
| commit the crime" is because you don't remember being
| there. Maybe you even remember being elsewhere. But that
| doesn't mean it's true, memory is fallible.
|
| You might say that you even have photos of yourself
| somewhere else at the time. But if there were photos of
| you at the crime scene, would that change what the past
| was? Maybe your memory is shoddy, or maybe the photos are
| fake.
| a_c wrote:
| Maybe perception IS reality.
| danjoredd wrote:
| Thats pretty dangerous thinking though. Adolf Hitler
| famously said "a lie told often enough eventually becomes
| the truth" and then used that way of thinking to commit
| horrible atrocities.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| but what is the metric signature???
| gatane wrote:
| When you flip that dx/dt so it becomes dt/dx...
| electrondood wrote:
| I have also come to this conclusion. I have had experiences that
| cannot possibly be explained unless at least some future events
| already exist.
|
| This also explained the "probabilistic" nature of quantum
| behaviors; it's only probabilistic to us because we are unaware
| of the influence of future events. I now believe it's extremely
| likely that the universe is superdetermined, and I gave up the
| idea of actual free will long ago.
|
| Highly recommend "Time Loops" by Eric Wargo.
| contravariant wrote:
| Superdeterminism is a cop-out where the universe is
| simultaneously the only existing one and the most common
| possible one, for no obvious reason.
|
| But yeah we'd like to think there's just one past and multiple
| different futures, but the fact that the laws of physics are
| time-reversible kind of makes it unlikely for both to be true.
| acyou wrote:
| Could you please expand on the experiences that you have had,
| that can't be explained without future events already existing?
| strogonoff wrote:
| If only physicists were a bit more curious about philosophy...
| mistermann wrote:
| It's a good idea, but how could they be, _in fact_?
| raydiatian wrote:
| A growing number of people are recognizing that this article was
| published in VICE, which isn't exactly a reputable STEM magazine,
| as punctuated by the fact that the article refers to theoretical
| physicists as "people" or "scientists".
|
| You gotta think about the (stoner) audience this article was
| written for, I wouldn't take too much stock in its conclusions.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Cool theory... A bit too Asimov for me though
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline
| richardw wrote:
| Honestly it's been staring us in the face for 100 years. Light
| doesn't experience time. We've known this for so long. Light is
| created and destroyed in the same instant - across billions of
| light years it happens instantly. For that to be true, what else
| must be true? Must.
|
| There is no photon. There is just a wave. The interaction
| probably (definitely?) depends on features of both the emitting
| electron and absorbing electron. There is either retrocausality
| or superdeterminism (or both). We don't know which. Right now
| that's not important but scientific fashion has been refusing to
| get this one thing. We'll learn so much once we move past this.
|
| Light going into a black hole? Research paper.
| macrolime wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT if it has any technological applications. No
| ideas if its just bullshitting
|
| Retrocausality, or the idea that events in the future can
| influence events in the past, is a concept that challenges our
| conventional understanding of time and causality. Although it is
| an intriguing concept that arises in some interpretations of
| quantum mechanics, it is important to note that there is
| currently no experimental evidence supporting retrocausality.
|
| As a result, it is difficult to predict how retrocausality could
| be influenced or used in technology, since we have no concrete
| examples of retrocausality occurring in the physical world.
| However, we can speculate on how such technology might work if
| retrocausality were indeed possible.
| Communication: If retrocausality were real, it could potentially
| be harnessed for faster-than-light communication or even
| communication with the past. Such technology might allow us to
| send messages or information backward in time, which could have a
| significant impact on how we understand and interact with our own
| history. Computing: Retrocausal computing could
| theoretically be used to perform complex calculations more
| efficiently by taking advantage of future outcomes or solutions
| to influence the computational process in the past.
| Energy production: If retrocausality could be controlled, it
| might be possible to harness energy from future states of a
| system and use it to power devices or processes in the past.
|
| However, it is important to reiterate that these applications are
| purely speculative and based on the assumption that
| retrocausality is a real phenomenon. Until there is experimental
| evidence supporting retrocausality or a more comprehensive
| understanding of how it might work, it is unlikely that we will
| see any practical technologies utilizing this concept.
| ibn_khaldun wrote:
| The end is not unlike the beginning, in that it has been written
| to exactitude. "The pen has been lifted and the ink is dried".
|
| Side note: does anyone remember when Vice was "fringe" in its
| content? I mean, ten or so years ago...
| q845712 wrote:
| The first time somebody showed me an article in Vice it was
| ~2010 and the article was about the style and fashion of how
| bricks of heroine were being branded. so ... yeah.
| mlindner wrote:
| It's articles like this that make me realize why so many less
| educated people think that science doesn't have rigor, is close
| to religion, or can't be trusted. Science authors like this do a
| disservice to science.
| neets wrote:
| Sounds like Rupert Sheldrake[1] is finally getting through to
| people,
|
| 1. [A New Science of Life](https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-
| rupert-sheldrake/a-new-sc...)
| pharmakom wrote:
| Intuitively... we can't even do science without a notion of time
| that advances. How can we make observations without there being a
| concept of "something happened previously"?
|
| I think this is embedded in science itself.
| ChancyChance wrote:
| It's an article about QM.
|
| On Vice.
|
| About a QM thought experiment.
|
| On Vice.
|
| Why would there be any expectation of scientific rigor
| whatsoever?
|
| "retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first
| glance"
|
| Stop there, vice.
| agilob wrote:
| Check other articles by the same author.
| stametseater wrote:
| Mostly a bunch of clickbait crap.
|
| > _" One 'Super-Earth' Could Destroy Our Own Planet, Study
| Finds"_
|
| > _A super-Earth existing in our solar system is so far
| hypothetical, but its effects would be incomprehensibly
| destructive._
| taylorius wrote:
| Lars von Trier has entered the chat.
| coldtea wrote:
| Is there any point to the comment? Did Vice made the theory up?
| richardw wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
| mik1998 wrote:
| I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMa
| nnAmnes... is applicable here.
| mlindner wrote:
| Technically, Vice isn't a human.
| m463 wrote:
| hmm... Vice might be incorporated.
| nanidin wrote:
| [dead]
| krsdcbl wrote:
| the comment may be superficial and dismissive without
| pointing out factual issues, but ad hominem attacks are still
| a very different thing than dismissing the credibility of a
| publication that has a track record of misleading pop science
| sensationalism
| berry_sortoro wrote:
| [dead]
| dools wrote:
| Spooky action at an instance
| wisty wrote:
| Human instincts only apply to the systems that they're "evolved"
| to handle (or the systems we can readily observe and learn from).
|
| Think about big systems. The moon is a ginormous rock that's so
| big it is visible from thousands of km away, but it just hangs in
| the sky because it's moving so fast it can cheat gravity, but we
| can barely even see it move. Or think about how a star can
| somehow explode because it starts running out of fuel (and our
| sun is just yellow hot - you can do that with a blow torch, but
| it's powered by a nuclear explosion - I guess it's got quite a
| bit of surface area?). And little things are even weirder,
| consider how fast the proteins in your cells bounce around. Then
| there's quantum - our gut intuition is so out of its comfort zone
| it's basically meaningless.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Right, something along the lines of Donald Hoffman's The Case
| Against Reality
| causality0 wrote:
| The sun being classified as a yellow dwarf does not mean it's
| "only yellow hot". You can observe that by going outdoors and
| holding up a white piece of paper and noting it is not yellow
| in sunlight.
|
| _powered by a nuclear explosion_
|
| Not quite accurate. The nuclear fusion going on inside the
| sun's core is not an explosion. In a nuclear explosion, a
| significant fraction of the fuel in a given area is consumed in
| an instant. The sun's core on the other hand only fuses its
| fuel extremely slowly. Pound for pound, the sun's core
| generates less heat energy than mammalian muscle tissue. It's
| just that there's so much of it that the heat energy is
| extremely well insulated.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| The sun is the color it is because its surface is 5500
| Kelvin, which we have defined as white. The sun is cooler
| than most visible stars, so it can be called yellow by
| comparison.
| stametseater wrote:
| The sun appears slightly yellow because the atmosphere
| scatters blue light more than the rest. The result is the
| sky looks blue, the sun is slightly yellowish, and the
| cumulative light (both directly from the sun and diffuse
| light from the sky) is white. Outside the atmosphere, our
| sun appears proper white.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| I used to work at camp. You didn't need to tell kids about
| fire; they could figure it out. Don't touch the fire.
| Flashlights were too complicated. It's night, a kid turns on
| their flashlight, points it in their eyes, says "ow" and can't
| see where they're walking until their eyes readjust.
| Flashlights are beyond our instinctual understanding of how the
| world works.
| dekhn wrote:
| it's funny you mention flashlights. NO matter how many times
| I tell people not to point their flashlight at people's eyes,
| it happens (by accident) over and over. It bothers me a lot
| because I am very good at getting my eyes dark-adapted and as
| soon as somebody flashes me, I lose about 10 minutes of dark
| vision.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Maybe this is just because the kids had prior experience with
| fire (touch it = ouch), but no experience with flashlights?
| ocimbote wrote:
| Yes. If we learned something about fire, it's to teach the
| youngest ones to stay away from it. Nothing more. An
| unattended and untaught kid will try it, at least because
| it's nothing like they've seen before.
| creeble wrote:
| while I might buy that the past is strongly influenced by the
| present ("facts" change over time), I don't think we have much of
| a model for the future to say much of anything about how it
| influences the past.
|
| Or, I guess the point is, maybe it's the same thing.
| sophacles wrote:
| So it goes.
| stkdump wrote:
| If time were symmetric, wouldn't that mean instead of causality
| (future is influenced by the past) and retrocausality (past is
| influenced by the future), there is no preference and in effect
| no causality at all? A&B are necessarily connected, but none of
| them is the cause of the other.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you think of it as a series of states with some prior
| probability, and jumps from state to state also have some
| probability, it isn't so much causal as correlated.
|
| If time is a true dimension and reality is the most probable
| universe when integrated over all of time, improbable states
| and transitions might occur in the "past" in order to enable
| high probability states and transitions in the future.
| bartimus wrote:
| This is 'What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole' all over again.
| Just because something happens in Quantum Physics doesn't mean
| humans can influence their pasts.
| Lucent wrote:
| Another point for my favorite minority quantum mechanics
| interpretation, two-state vector formalism (TSVF).
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Where can I read the report?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101v2
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Maybe in a microscopic way like at quantum level
| hummus_bae wrote:
| [dead]
| wootland wrote:
| As a non-physicist I'm not sure I'm interpreting this correctly.
| Does this essentially mean that all states in time already exist
| and our consciousness is just traversing this 4D space in one
| direction on the time axis?
|
| If so, does that mean that the big bang could actually be the end
| of the universe and we're just experiencing time in "reverse"
| toward an initial starting state that we perceive as the future?
| Nevermark wrote:
| While most laws of physics may be time symmetric, the laws of
| thermodynamics are not - wherever there is a gradient in
| entropy.
|
| In very informal terms, anywhere where there is very low
| entropy (higher order), any direction away from that will
| likely (to the point of certainty) be in a direction of higher
| entropy (lower order).
|
| For instance, if you have a jar of red & blue marble, with high
| order (such as perfect alternating layers of red vs blue
| marbles) then any disturbances (such as shaking the jar,
| reaching in and moving a handful, ...) will almost certainly
| reduce order.
|
| And no practical amount of shaking the jar will ever return the
| marbles to a high order state again.
|
| Even though any close up video of the marbles being jostled
| will reveal the same physical properties and behavior for the
| marbles, whether played forward or backward.
|
| So at the individual marble level, laws are symmetric.
|
| But at the jar of marbles level, one direction of time looks
| very different than the other.
|
| We, and the particles that make us, and our environment, are
| the marbles whose configuration is more disordered the further
| in time we get from the Big Bang.
|
| So we perceive the time direction away from the Big Bang as the
| future, toward the Big Bang as the past.
|
| And the statistical "force" of increasing entropy provides the
| useful energy we use to survive, learn, create useful islands
| of order, in the greater sea of increasing disorder.
| dekhn wrote:
| Not sure if you appreciate this, but if you repeat the
| shaking experiment enough times, you will see it return to
| perfect order- at some exceptionally tiny probability. I'm
| pretty sure you are saying that but instead of "practical
| amount", it's easier to say it's just exceptionally unlikely.
| mftb wrote:
| So I think I understand this argument and it makes sense to
| me (at the moment). To me the (to paraphrase), "increasing as
| we move away from the big bang" stuff seems to lead right to
| the idea that the expansion of the universe is what we
| perceive as the passing of time, but I never hear any one
| knowledgeable say that. Is there some obvious reason that
| it's not that succinct?
| lordnacho wrote:
| That all makes sense, but why does cause and effect seem to
| go one way with the entropy arrow?
| soperj wrote:
| > And no practical amount of shaking the jar will ever return
| the marbles to a high order state again.
|
| This can't be true. Take the case where there's only 2
| marbles, it's likely that at some point that shaking them
| will return them to the original state. For higher numbers of
| marbles the probability becomes lower and lower, but is never
| 0.
| a257 wrote:
| With enough marbles, the discrete distribution behaves like
| a continuous distribution. The point probability of a
| continuous distribution is infinitely improbable -- in
| other words it is 0.
|
| (0.00..0..1 = 0 just as 0.99 repeating equals 1)
| soperj wrote:
| There can't be an infinite number of marbles in a finite
| amount of space.
| a257 wrote:
| The number of possible states asymptotically approaches
| infinity, so we can model it as such. You can get a more
| "accurate" model using more math (with measure theory),
| but the terms will coalesce such that they are
| negligible.
| soperj wrote:
| negligible isn't zero, and time at a universe scale may
| be longer.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| > infinitely improbable -- in other words it is 0
|
| This sounds like a rather bold statement to make, as long
| as we're already speaking so metaphysically.
| a257 wrote:
| The statement is mathematically correct [0].
|
| [0] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/142730/px-x
| -0-when...
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| We're talking about physics, not mathematics. We don't
| have the luxury of hand-waving away fundamental questions
| about the nature of the continuum.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis
| a257 wrote:
| Please elaborate.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicist, so I'm not
| nearly informed enough to elaborate on the subject
| properly, but I would note that the axiom of choice is
| not proven, and while you can mathematically divide a
| continuum into infinitesimally small sets, you cannot do
| the same to physical matter. From my understanding, many
| of the contradictions between classical and quantum
| physics arise at this boundary between the discrete and
| the continuous, where classical physics generally assumes
| continuity while quantum physics is constructed around
| discrete quantization mostly independent of time.
|
| Again, I'm not a physicist, but I think it's telling that
| the validity of continuum mechanics [0] depends on a
| _model_ and multiple _assumptions_. I have no trouble
| agreeing with your original statement, "with enough
| marbles, the discrete distribution behaves like a
| continuous distribution," _when speaking mathematically_
| , but mathematics by its nature is an idealized model of
| the world - I'm not willing to accept that it's
| objectively representative of physical reality. The
| discussion we're having here is one of metaphysics, so it
| feels a bit like the height of hubris to use mathematics
| as the tool for describing objective reality, because
| metaphysically, we cannot say that mathematics is
| anything other than a tool we've constructed for
| approximating the model of the world as we understand it.
| Considering the subject of this post is about
| retrocausality, we're already throwing out some pretty
| wild ideas, so I think it's a bit hubristic to dismiss
| them by citing a branch of mathematics that assumes the
| existence of countably infinite sets [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_mechanics#Val
| idity
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philoso
| phy_of_...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _We 're talking about physics, not mathematics._
|
| Mathematics still apply.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Mathematics applies insofar as it can model the subject
| under discussion. It's a great tool for, dare I say,
| 99.999999...% of practical problems. But mathematics is
| an imperfect model of objective reality that cannot
| resolve metaphysical problems like Zeno's paradoxes [0].
| Any discussion of retro-causality is inherently one of
| the philosophy of space and time, which is the domain of
| metaphysics, not mathematics, so we can't necessarily
| apply familiar mathematical lemmas to resolve the
| problems it creates.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#In_m
| odern_m...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_space_and
| _time#D...
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Any point is infinitely improbable when sampling with
| infinite precision, only because this calculation is not
| computable.
|
| Even if the point probability is 0 or approaching zero
| very fast, some event occurs with probability 1.
|
| The probability that life would evolve on a blue planet
| that its anthropomorphic inhabitants will come to call
| Gaia or Earth, has as a star Sol, in this corner of the
| Milky Way, in this particular local group and so on is
| zero even if we limit ourselves to just the observable
| universe.
|
| At the same time the probability that life will exist at
| some planet at some solar system at some galaxy at some
| local group and so on, is practically 1.
|
| That is to say, depending on how you categorise and count
| said marbles, the reordering may occur.
|
| While any individual marble will not be at its place with
| P=1. You can still end up in a situation where the
| marbles are ordered in layers.
|
| The whole thing regarding entropy is concerned with a
| closed system. You can very much exchange energy to
| decrease entropy, but said exchange is a) leaky, and b)
| implies that the system is not isolated.
| a257 wrote:
| A probability of zero does not mean that the event is
| impossible. When we refer to probabilities we are talking
| about probability densities. Infinite precision is a
| useful modeling tool in the same way that approximations
| of pi are useful.
| dekhn wrote:
| In a well defined system, a probabiltiy of zero _by
| definition_ means an event is impossible.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I think I was misunderstood. My comment regarding
| infinite precision was mostly aiming to argue that any
| single point has probability zero but an event still
| occurs.
|
| This was then used again when mentioning earth to argue
| that depending on the definition of "order" here:
|
| > And no practical amount of shaking the jar will ever
| return the marbles to a high order state again.
|
| It is entirely possible to reach a state of higher order
| if you don't require that individual marbles don't hold
| the same arrangement relative to adjacent marbles,
| meaning that any permutation of marbles with identical
| color is acceptable.
|
| This happens because the event you are asking for is a
| very large subset.
| dekhn wrote:
| you're correct. In stats/thermo class there's a commonly
| taught "what's the probability of all the molecules of air
| in a room spontaneously moving to <extremely small
| location>". The problem is that shoving all those molecules
| into a tiny location woudl increase the pressure
| tremendously, sending all the particles in directions that
| would eventually return to a uniform distribution.
|
| IIUC my professor right the probability is non zero but is
| practically impossible for a large number of incompressible
| spheres.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I like this concept. Is there any sci-fi based on this premise?
| gpuhacker wrote:
| Surely reminds me of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
| Azkaban, where Harry is saved by himself as he at some point
| in the future travels back in time to save himself.
| idleproc wrote:
| Not sci-fi, but the block universe is central to Alan Moore's
| Jerusalem.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Greg Egan - A Clockwork Rocket (book 1 of the Orthogonal
| trilogoy, all three of which I recommend)
| e12e wrote:
| The Nolan film "Tenet" is based entirely around the idea of
| reversible causality.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Aliens in the movie Arrival perceive time in circular
| fashion, basically live in future and past.
| [deleted]
| andsoitis wrote:
| And the movie is based on Ted Chiang's novella, "Story of
| Your Life"
| MayeulC wrote:
| Just saying, this is a pretty big spoiler.
| jspank wrote:
| Reminds me of the Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse-Five.
| They are able to see in four dimensions so humans appear as
| fetuses at one end of the four-dimensional person and dying
| at the other end.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tralfamadore#Slaughterhouse-
| Fi...
| imsaw wrote:
| Interesting concept. I wonder if it's compared with spatial
| 3D space, then how large would the 4th dimension of time be
| if it were to fit the timeline of a human lifespan
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| A natural interpretation leads to time being very large
| and us moving very very fast through it.
|
| It's convenient to model our movement through space-time
| as occurring at the speed of light. Thus, the faster we
| move in space, the slower we move in time all the while
| the length of our space-time velocity vector is
| invariably c. We can then imagine 1 second of time being
| interchangeable with 299,792,458m.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The 'Dirac Beep' in this short novella (1973):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quincunx_of_Time
|
| Also, the concept of causality itself is a kind of underlying
| theme in Hannu Rajaniemi's "The Causal Angel" (2014) (3rd of
| a series).
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| You can wish yourself well in the past. I believe this works.
| electrondood wrote:
| You're actually the lamination of what you typically consider
| to be yourself, across all time periods in which you exist: a
| 4-dimensional spacetime worm.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think of personal growth as a conspiracy between present
| me, past me, and future me. Where our motives are aligned,
| good things happen.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| This is good! And ask for help from the future :)
| figassis wrote:
| Allow me to steal this bit of insight
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm just another incarnation of you anyway, so it's not
| even stealing.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Past me leaves future me notes.
|
| I often find them insightful, especially if I am reviewing
| them again years later.
| layer8 wrote:
| Several things:
|
| - The laws of physics are essentially time-symmetric, and they
| have no concept of causation or of a preferred direction of
| time. In principle, the future causes the past as much or as
| little as the past causes the future. Physics effectively only
| says they have to be _consistent_ with each other, as related
| by the laws of physics.
|
| - The _apparent_ directionality of time that we perceive is
| suspected to be tied to the entropy gradient we are on. See the
| "past hypothesis" for example [0].
|
| > Does this essentially mean that all states in time already
| exist and our consciousness is just traversing this 4D space in
| one direction on the time axis?
|
| - I would say that all moments in time are equally real,
| including our consciousness at any given moment. There is no
| actual flow or "travelling". The flow we perceive is merely an
| illusion caused by the fact that we only remember the past and
| not the future (which again may just be a consequence of the
| entropy gradient we are on). This is known as the "block
| universe", or as "eternalism" [1]. The opposing view that only
| the current moment is real, and that the future differs from
| the past in its "realness", is known as "presentism".
|
| - Note that any notion of "travelling" through time implies
| that you can draw a 2D diagram of where in time you are at each
| point in time, or which point in time is "real" at which point
| in time (in the sense that a moment in time isn't real until
| time reaches that moment, but after that it is real and cannot
| be made unreal again), thus implying two dimensions of time.
| That doesn't make any sense, and thus my personal conclusion is
| that the "presentism" view is nonsensical.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_hypothesis
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The block universe: https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-
| time
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Is it the same thing as the holographic universe theory that
| was in vogue a couple of decades ago?
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/d7/8c/27d78c9c3ee93c13eda4.
| ..
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| No. The block universe is that 3+1D spacetime "exists all
| at once". We just happen to experience travelling through
| it in one way.
|
| Holographic universe is that the physics and information in
| a 3+1D space time could be encoded into a 2+1D universe
| (with it's own physics).
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Ah, _Discover_ had an issue about that as well
|
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-here-
| to-e...
|
| https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xH8AAOSwryZi3Ef0/s-l1600.j
| pg
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Must it be "the" time axis? Might it instead be "our" time
| vector? Maybe there are alien civilizations right next door
| which we fail to recognize as life because our time vector is
| orthogonal to theirs. Instead they're just gamma ray bursts to
| us.
| [deleted]
| MayeulC wrote:
| Interestingly, the norm of your 4D speed vector is constant,
| IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line
| plebianRube wrote:
| I try to tell my 'past' self events that have occurred.
|
| I also try to listen to any future 'self' notifications.
|
| It's mostly a fun thought experiment.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > In addition to potentially rescuing concepts like locality and
| realism, retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a
| "time-symmetric" view of our universe, in which the laws of
| physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or
| backward.
|
| Usually the fundamental laws are regarded as time symmetric
| already.
|
| What does this mean: > Instead, retrocausal models suggest that
| there is a mechanism that allows circumstances in the future to
| correlate with past states.
|
| Surely future states inevitably correlate with past states?
|
| Perhaps it all makes sense but that article doesn't make a
| compelling case.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| We don't have a time symmetric model of wave function collapse,
| to my knowledge. If I'm wrong I'd be super curious to read
| about it
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| We don't have a model of wave function collapse at all, iirc.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Just reverse time in the evolution operator.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Wouldn't many worlds be time symmetric?
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, but it's not a model of wave function collapse. Its
| very premise is that there is no wave function collapse.
| orbifold wrote:
| Measurements are adjoint to state preparation. Depending on
| what you measured you can prepare a special state at that
| time to make the system time reversal symmetric.
| derbOac wrote:
| Not an expert in this area at all but there have been some
| experimental findings in the last five or so years that suggest
| the possibility of retrocausality.
|
| This is just one example I found but I think there might be
| another experiment from a few years ago that was getting some
| attention at the time (although I might be confusing it with a
| theory paper):
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-29970-6
|
| There are probably better overview articles on retrocausality.
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731652-800-quantum-...
|
| https://aeon.co/essays/can-retrocausality-solve-the-puzzle-o...
|
| https://phys.org/news/2017-07-physicists-retrocausal-quantum...
|
| I'd have to read through all these more thoroughly but I wonder
| if there's some "time locality" property in these models?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Surely future states inevitably correlate with past states?_
|
| He means to correlate through effects going the future -> past
| direction...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events
| sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with
| examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the
| Earth-centric model of the solar system.
|
| Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not
| comparable to geocentrism.
| macrolocal wrote:
| It's comparable to GPT4 being shocked that we can read
| backwards!
| whatshisface wrote:
| It is because in both cases, you can work out that you'll never
| make an observation that really proves it one way or the other,
| but you might come up with some laws of physics that are more
| conveniently expressed in one way than another. They're both
| ultimately questions about your coordinate system, and in fact
| it is easier to invert time than it is to work out how
| everything's supposed to function in a rotating+sun-
| orbiting+precessing+... coordinate system.
| nanidin wrote:
| If we reverse time and this implies running everything
| backwards in physics, do we include gravity in the set of
| things that are reversed? Then everything would fly off the
| face of the earth in reverse-time.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Let's check.
|
| F = ma
|
| F = m dv/dt
|
| u = -t dv/dt = -dv/du
|
| - F = m dv/du
|
| If you stop there it looks like you're right, but you also
| must change the definition of velocity to account for the
| new time.
|
| v = dx/dt = -dx/du
|
| +F = m dx/du
|
| So the direction of gravity (the force F) stays the same
| when you flip time. I can explain that without the math by
| pointing out that if you took a video of a ball being
| thrown up and caught and played it in reverse, it would
| still depict a ball being thrown up and caught.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > I can explain that without the math by pointing out
| that if you took a video of a ball being thrown up and
| caught and played it in reverse, it would still depict a
| ball being thrown up and caught.
|
| That's amazing, thanks. The portion where you caught the
| ball in forward time is equivalent to throwing the ball
| in reverse time.
|
| I need to rewatch Tenet some day
| novaRom wrote:
| I watched it 4 times. Only then I started to understand
| what's happening. How great and unique this movie really
| is.
| mkl wrote:
| I felt like I understood it the first time, but didn't
| think it was very good. Was that your initial reaction?
| nanidin wrote:
| If we change the analogy of throwing a ball to firing a
| gun into the air - does the analogy still work? Since
| when we fire the gun up, the bullet will travel faster up
| than it will travel down due to terminal velocity in
| forward time. How is that phenomenon explained in reverse
| time?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Instead of predominately striking the bullet in a way
| that causes it to slow down, the molecules in the air
| will predominately strike it in a way that causes it to
| move faster, in what looks like an unbelievable (but
| still physically possible) run of good luck.
| kgwgk wrote:
| In the way down -sky to gun - the molecules in the air
| will give it energy to accelerate more than gravity alone
| would. Before that - in the way up - air molecules will
| cause it to move upwards at constant speed until
| conveniently they stop doing so.
|
| > unbelievable (but still physically possible)
|
| Physically possible - but in the same sense that the
| second law is not a physical law.
| nanidin wrote:
| So it seems like if we reverse time, we reverse entropy
| and that as time approaches 0, we would effectively be
| reversing the big bang and instead have the big collapse.
|
| Another thought experiment that comes to mind is
| compressed gas in a cylinder. When we open the valve, the
| gas in the cylinder comes out. In reverse time, the gas
| would go back into the cannister and the valve would
| close after the gas went back in. Very low probability of
| that happening in forward time, though not not 0.
|
| Though it seems weird, because why does the gas go into
| the cylinder? Because further into reverse-time,
| something sucked it all out (in forward-time, this
| machine is the compressor that put the gas in the
| cylider.) This hurts my brain!
| theemathas wrote:
| Reversing time on an attracting force _still_ gives you an
| attractive force. Velocity is reversed, but acceleration
| isn 't.
|
| Imagine a ball being thrown up and then falling down, in a
| parabola. Reversing a video of that still gives you a video
| of a ball in a normal parabola trajectory.
| [deleted]
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Gravity is a universal constant. If you reverse time, you
| just reverse the order of cause and effect, not _what the
| effect is_.
|
| Does that make more sense to you?
| nanidin wrote:
| If we reverse time, would gravitational waves flow
| backwards?
| dekhn wrote:
| yes. it's literally like playing a movie in reverse.
| nanidin wrote:
| " it's literally like playing a movie in reverse" seems
| overly authoritative for something we haven't observed. I
| have seen Tenet, but it's a work of fiction.
|
| Have we observed reflected gravitational waves? In
| reverse-time, where would they originate from if they
| presumably rippled out into space and didn't collide with
| anything in forward-time?
| dekhn wrote:
| .... they would "originate" from all the locations the
| gravity waves spread to and converge on the source.
|
| Tenet has nothing to do with this- I'm just explaining it
| as it was covered in my many physics classes that covered
| the nature of the arrow of time
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time) and how I
| interpret it in terms of what seems most likely/least
| unlikely.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| "gravity is a universal constant" contradicts Newtonian
| mechanics, special and general relativity.
| nanidin wrote:
| In these "it's like taking a video of throwing a ball in
| the air and allowing it to land on the ground, then
| playing it in reverse" examples, I can't help but think
| of Newton's first law. If an object at rest stays at
| rest, how does the ball leap from the ground? Where does
| the impulse come from? Reverse time seems too far fetched
| for me, or at least the simplified naive version of it
| does.
| bnralt wrote:
| It also seems a bit misleading, since in that scenario a
| ball is intentionally thrown so that it comes down the
| same way.
|
| Let's consider something else - imagine an accretion disk
| of space dust slowly pulling itself together to form a
| planet. Play that in reverse, and you have the a planet
| slowly coming apart piece by piece. Imagine reversing the
| impact that created the moon. The moon comes apart piece
| by piece, creating an accretion disk around the earth,
| which then all moves and hits one area of the earth, and
| there several parts of it (and part of the earth itself)
| move together to form a separate planet, which then
| launches itself from the earths surface into space, flies
| around the sun a few times, and then slowly breaks apart
| piece by piece into another accretion disk.
| sidlls wrote:
| It isn't because we have the observations we have. It might
| be mathematically easy to invert time, but empirically it's
| not so simple. Mathematical symmetries and expressions are
| nice, but then the actual physical consequences and
| requirements (e.g., material, time, energy inputs) sort of
| force one's hand.
|
| Also, geocentrism is actually disproven by numerous
| observations, which in fact guided the mathematical
| formulation of our current physics.
|
| One thing is (almost) certain: the laws of physics as we know
| them (i.e. the Standard Model and General Relativity) are
| incomplete ("wrong"). That doesn't mean any old model is
| equivalent or as useful as either, though.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Also, geocentrism is actually disproven by numerous
| observations, which in fact guided the mathematical
| formulation of our current physics._
|
| The validity of a coordinate system with the earth
| stationary at the center is guaranteed by the general
| principle of relativity. To get the stars to circle around
| it you would add a radially increasing potential in
| classical mechanics, or some coordinate shenanigans in GR.
| These coordinate systems are used in aerospace engineering
| to get convenient expressions of L1 points, etc.
|
| I know it sounds hard to believe, but if you're willing to
| bite the bullet that "the center of the universe" has no
| physical meaning, then earth can't be _not_ the center of
| the universe any more than it can be.
| prerok wrote:
| To be honest, I have no idea what you are talking about.
|
| Certainly, there is merit in practical calculations when
| we are all this close to the ground where it all seems
| either flat or at least geo-centric.
|
| But... the movements of the other planets in our solar
| system were really strange to model in geo-centric
| models. In short, each of the other planets should rotate
| around an imaginary axis to compensate for their changing
| positions in the sky.
|
| Of course, all this is talk about in the context of our
| solar system. As for us being the center of the universe,
| well, the same argument holds for any other point in the
| universe. So, I think it's less likely than me winning
| the lottery in the next five minutes :)
| felipeerias wrote:
| In the XVII century, the alternative to heliocentrism was
| Tycho Brahe's model: Earth at the centre, the Sun and
| Moon and the stars revolving around it, and the other
| planets revolving around the Sun. It was basically
| equivalent to the heliocentric model with a different
| coordinate system.
|
| It's important to understand that astronomers chose it
| because it really seemed to provide a better explanation
| given the knowledge and technology at the time.
|
| Tycho Brahe himself noted that his model could be
| disproved by observing the stellar parallax effect as the
| Earth orbits the Sun (if the Earth does move, then the
| stars would look slightly different throughout the year).
| This is a real effect, but so small that it couldn't be
| observed until the XIX century.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I know it sounds hard to believe, but if you're willing
| to bite the bullet that "the center of the universe" has
| no physical meaning, then earth can't be not the center
| of the universe any more than it can be.
|
| I disagree.
|
| The sentence <<"the center of the universe" has no
| physical meaning>> _requires_ that Earth can 't be at the
| center of the universe, because there isn't a center for
| it to be at.
|
| You're still allowed any or many arbitrary zero-points,
| but that's only the center of a number line, nothing
| else.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's basically a semantic issue but I don't think the
| negation of an undefined proposition is true, I think it
| is undefined. (Thankfully the universe does not run in
| JavaScript, where !undefined _is_ true.)
| jskulski wrote:
| We may not be able to observed it, and maybe can't. Just
| like time slowing down would be imperceptible to the person
| on the spaceship nearing light speed. It takes the
| mathematics
|
| Or if I'm lucky enough to have the time to watch the moon
| move slowly, it feels natural to my senses to say it's
| moving across the sky. The moon feels like it's moving
| around me. But I can stretch my brain and imagine the
| reality.
|
| Sometimes math arrives first. We have the new maths (or an
| problem in current math), and that points to some
| possibility. Because it's not observable, ignoring our
| senses is a requirement to develop that in the model and
| measurements and experiments. Eventually we are able to
| observe it.
|
| I'm not familiar with history of astronomy. Would it be the
| case where the observations that lead to heliocentric
| thought we nuanced and had to build on more obvious
| perceptions that things aren't adding up? Was the wobble of
| Venus part of that?
|
| And you're right, old models are useful and remain relevant
| a lot! The model of time moving linearly will likely always
| be the most useful model for navigating our daily choices
| (if we have any at all!)
| bsder wrote:
| > Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not
| comparable to geocentrism.
|
| Why not?
|
| The "arrow of time" almost always requires thermodynamic
| arguments. And that requires a concentration of "low entropy"
| to move toward "high entropy". Which, by definition, are
| "boundary conditions" and not a fundamental part of your
| physical rules.
|
| If, for example, your universe is entropically uniform, is
| there an "arrow of time"? And, even if there were, could you
| detect it?
|
| However, I would like to point out that it's not like we
| haven't had this kind of issue before. The Bohr-Einstein
| debates were a good example. Einstein favored a "fields"
| interpretation of quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, Einstein's
| interpretation predicted that atomic states wouldn't decay, and
| that was clearly, obviously wrong, and Bohr very much hammered
| on that.
|
| Except that Einstein wasn't "clearly, obviously wrong." As you
| increasingly isolate excited atoms, their atomic states take
| longer and longer to decay. The problem was that the
| experiments of the day couldn't create these kinds of singular
| quantum state systems--they were stuck with systems that were
| contaminated with lots of thermodynamic interactions.
|
| We may be seeing something similar here. We are just starting
| to be able to put together the experiments that can probe
| things like Bell's Inequality. As we isolate these systems, we
| may find that the systems were contaminated with statistical
| time and that we get different results when we can isolate
| them.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > If, for example, your universe is entropically uniform, is
| there an "arrow of time"? And, even if there were, could you
| detect it?
|
| What does that even mean? If your universe is entropically
| uniform there is no "you".
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Geocentrism seemed reasonable until it didn't.
|
| If time is a true dimension rather than just something we model
| as a dimension, it's not unreasonable to think that outcomes in
| the present could be influenced by constraints that exist in
| the future - if the "universe" function must be valid according
| to some constraints at all points in the time dimension, "past"
| states that lead to invalid future states will never occur.
|
| The idea of invalid universe states is of course purely fun
| conjecture, but this same concept also maps to probable vs
| improbable universe states as well. If a future state is
| improbable (in the sense of a Bayesian prior according to some
| underlying distribution of energy in the universe) that might
| cause the universe to evolve in a way that seems improbable at
| the moment by moment level, but is actually the most probable
| sequence of events when integrated over the entire duration of
| the universe.
| bmacho wrote:
| > Geocentrism seemed reasonable until it didn't.
|
| Literally nobody "assumes" that "time moves one direction"
| (which is not even a statement). There are models, where t is
| a real number, which models are sadly very very good models,
| but they are not perfect (therefore not true). Noone believes
| that Newtonian mechanics, QM or GR are true. QM fails to
| correctly predict the movement of the planets, and GR fails
| at the two-split experiment.
|
| But then there are literally thousands of physicists that try
| to come up with different models.
|
| How is this even remotely similar to geocentrism?
| willis936 wrote:
| Time could move backwards if we lived in a time symmetric
| universe. We don't. Maybe if you flipped the charge and
| handedness of the entire universe you could also reverse time,
| but that's yet to be tested.
|
| https://youtu.be/L2idut9tkeQ
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| Here's the analogy, per Sean Carroll [1]:
|
| - There seems to be a special direction "down", where things
| fall by default, because we live in the vicinity of an
| influential object in space, called Earth
|
| - There seems to be a special direction "forward in time",
| where things happen by default, because we live in the vicinity
| of an influential event in time, called Big Bang
|
| If we had stuck to the local Earth context and geocentrism, the
| objectivity of the "down" direction would remain unquestioned.
| It's when we started modeling other things outside of Earth, it
| became clear there's no objective "down" direction, just a more
| general concept of Gravity.
|
| Carroll's argument is that it's the Big Bang, an extremely low-
| entropy configuration of the universe, that gives rise to the
| 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the resulting emergence of an
| arrow of time in the forward direction. It's purely a
| statistical phenomenon at larger scales, and attributable to
| being "next to an influential event", according to him.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZsmyTE3j9o
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested
| either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like
| metaphysics?
|
| Stars shine until they run out of fuel, and the age of a star
| - the status of its fuel, the buildup of fusion products -
| happens as time passes. Life on planets taps into the flow of
| sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical
| energy from the a hot planetary core) to generate complex
| structures in defiance of the regular direction of entropy
| (not violating conservation of energy, though). So... life
| reverses the arrow of time?
| K0balt wrote:
| I think that one thing to keep in mind is that we are only
| capable of observing the passage of time along one vector
| because our perception relies upon entropic biological
| processes.
|
| We cannot observe in any subset of possible universes where
| entropy is not present or is working backwards-Ergo those
| possibilities are wholly out of our direct perception.
|
| That does not mean that causality cannot run in reverse,
| however, only that we cannot interact with those mechanisms
| in a way that would preclude our existence or observation.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| But could we observe the effects? Can there be particles
| which have mass and therefore exhibit gravitation but
| which are subject to reverse entropy? We would observe
| these for example as an unexplainable increase in
| gravitational pull on observable matter without an
| observable source of that gravitation and without a
| preceding cause.
|
| Are photons themselves stratling this entropic boundary
| since they travel at the speed of light and within their
| own reference frame are not subject to the passage of
| time?
| prerok wrote:
| Well, of course not :) Entropy as direction of time just
| means that the chaos on the whole increases. So, to create
| an ordered structure, like a cell organism, the by-product
| is more chaos around it.
| ashirviskas wrote:
| To add, life just speeds up the chaos by orders of
| magnitude, it's a perfect entropy catalyst.
| kergonath wrote:
| I'd be shocked if that were the case, even only
| considering the Earth. The oceans and the atmosphere are
| full of entropy. So is the liquid outer core. And even if
| the mantle is not quite liquid, and even if the crust is
| mostly solid, these are _huge_ in terms of volume and
| mass, much larger than the sliver of dirt we inhabit on
| top of them. So yeah, I really doubt we (collectively,
| all human beings) are changing the Earth's entropy in any
| meaningful way.
| zone411 wrote:
| Life reduces local entropy.
| prerok wrote:
| I think that the real question is whether the death of the
| universe by cool down will happen before the arrow of time
| is reversed. To me it seems more like it will just slow
| down and then finally stop.
| SirYandi wrote:
| Or if there ever is a "big crunch" where all black holes
| crunch together to a critical mass, would there be
| another big bang and time then run backwards?
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| The hypothesis I have encountered is that time would
| reverse when the expansion of the universe peaked and
| started to collapse back in on itself. The next big bang
| would start another run of our universe. I'm guessing the
| randomness in quantum fluctuations would allow this next
| run to evolve somewhat differently from the one we are
| experiencing.
| klipt wrote:
| Right, entropy can decrease, just with low probability, which
| you can calculate using the Fluctuation Theorem:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem
|
| Perhaps given infinite time, we will randomly get back to a
| low entropy state infinite times, but I don't know enough
| about the math to say for sure.
| ben_w wrote:
| You can, but that inevitably leads to far more Boltzman
| brains than things like the universe, and that's disastrous
| because then you should expect to be a Boltzman brain
| yourself, but they're configured randomly so if you are a
| Boltzman brain you can't trust any belief you have about
| reality including the maths that says you should be a
| Boltzman brain.
|
| It's basically a softer version of Russell's paradox but
| for cognition and reality.
| psychphysic wrote:
| I don't think Carroll can take credit for the idea of the
| arrow of time being emergent from a local entropy initial
| state.
|
| Roger Penrose proposed that as far as I know, when Carroll
| was probably a high schooler.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _Roger Penrose proposed that as far as I know, when Carroll
| was probably a high schooler._
|
| No. At least as early as Arthur Eddington when Penrose was
| a twinkle in his dad's eye.
| yeahwhatever10 wrote:
| Explaining an idea is not equivalent to taking credit for
| it.
| psychphysic wrote:
| > Carroll's argument
|
| This assigns credit to Carroll.
| Jcowell wrote:
| It merely says that Carrol argued. The idea within the
| argument was no means assigned to her but _used_ to make
| /support it.
| zone411 wrote:
| This idea of time's relation to entropy is pretty iffy. I
| recommend this book
| https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/20/new-book-links-flow-
| of-....
| platz wrote:
| who's taking "credit"
| [deleted]
| epgui wrote:
| I disagree, I think the comparison is pretty reasonable.
|
| Your entire experience of the world is defined and limited by
| the fact that your brain "only processes information in one
| direction of time" (for lack of better wording). Your personal
| experience does not necessarily map correctly to the real
| world. The same is true for both examples.
| brwck wrote:
| It's not just a matter of our subjective experience of time,
| it's a matter of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. Time
| moves in one direction is another way of saying entropy
| always increases. If time could move in the opposite
| direction, then entropy decreases which breaks our
| understanding of physics.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| It's really interesting to think about how we struggle to
| express the idea of the future having a causal impact on
| the past. I reckon this is because our language and our
| understanding of time are limited.
|
| Our brains like to process events in a linear sequence,
| from past to present to future, but this view of time might
| not fully capture how everything in the universe is
| interconnected. It's possible that our language just can't
| handle these complex concepts.
|
| So, I don't think anything mentioned in this thread
| contradicts the idea that "time always moves in one
| direction" and "entropy always increases".
| dasil003 wrote:
| Right. "Time only moves in one direction" is not saying
| much more than "our consciousness experience time moving
| in one direction". The very idea that time "moves" is
| entirely related to our vantage point. If our perception
| were not bound to time, then the nature of cause and
| effect might look completely different.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I don't think the idea that "the future can influence the
| past" is the same thing as saying that entropy decreases or
| that time can move in the opposite direction. I think these
| are different concerns
| yyyk wrote:
| The comparison is bad all around. Geocentrism actually had
| decent reasoning and was not a superstition. It's just we
| couldn't see the parallax with then-current instruments. As
| soon as instruments allowed, humanity changed rather quickly.
| Notatheist wrote:
| Time moving in one direction actually has decent reasoning
| and is not a superstition. It's just we can't detect time
| moving backwards with now-current instruments. As soon as
| instruments allow, humanity will change rather quickly.
| yyyk wrote:
| The problem with the comparison is what it's used to imply.
| The popular understanding* is that scientists believed in
| religious dogma, and that led them to 'unscientific'
| geocentrism and believing that time has only one direction.
| It's a backhanded accusation of superstition, and that's
| unfair towards both current scientists and past scientists.
|
| (On a personal note, I'm actually sympathetic to the
| article's retrocasual proposition. I suspect reality is
| non-local and TSVF etc. naturally tend towards non-
| locality.)
|
| * This is _Vice_ , of course they use the popular
| understanding and not something more sophisticated.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Yep. Someone else already pointed out the well known
| counterargument to symmetry below regarding thermodynamics. You
| typically don't see scrambled eggs become whole again. I think
| that's pretty hard evidence to overcome.
|
| Granted, I'm not a physicist and I'm sure any physicist working
| on this totally understands that. Just wanted to point it out.
| resource0x wrote:
| If the direction of time is reversed, the eggs become whole
| again, but your memory of them once being scrambled is
| reversed, too, so you don't notice anything unusual.
|
| (It's like a rollback of database transaction, where not only
| the database state, but also the state of everything,
| including your brain, is getting rolled back)
| fortyseven wrote:
| That would suggest a kind of "super timeline" I'd imagine.
| beiller wrote:
| If the future could affect the past, it suggest that then
| if time reversed, you would notice something unusual right?
| Kind of like suggesting there is a side effect in your
| function (consciousness). Kind of like how today, past
| events can influence the future like we act differently
| from learning from mistakes.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| But is there any evidence of that? Or is it just a thought
| experiment? I need to read more of the article, but
| appreciate you giving me some food for thought.
| resource0x wrote:
| It's a thought experiment, of course. There cannot be any
| evidence one way or the other, by definition. Any
| potential evidence is rolled back, too. But then, why are
| we so sure our current beliefs WRT the arrow ot time are
| true?
|
| Though there's no hard evidence, but if you think, for
| example, about the efficiency of evolution - it would be
| much easier to explain if we assume that the unlimited
| number of iterations is performed. (This is not the only
| possible explanation, of course- but this one is
| overlooked IMO)
|
| I would say that compared with the strange ideas like
| "multiverse", this one is rather benign :-)
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Scrambled eggs can become whole again by being consumed by
| insects, who are then consumed by chickens, who then lay
| eggs.
|
| The biological processes enabling that sequence can be said
| to have negative entropy.
| dekhn wrote:
| Negative entropy (also called negentropy) isn't really a
| well-defined concept. Instead, better to say that
| biological processes harvest free energy to maintain order
| in the face of increasing entropy.
| aeternum wrote:
| The argument is that thermodynamics is simply a statistical
| phenomenon. Scrambled eggs are due to proteins denaturing
| (folding in a random way).
|
| Scrambled eggs do actually unscramble spontaneously if you
| zoom in far enough. The issue is that the rate of scrambling
| is much higher than the rate of unscrambling so on the whole,
| you get scrambled eggs.
|
| The amazing thing is that all chemical processes are actually
| reversible given enough energy and finesse.
| seydor wrote:
| Assuming that time "moves" kinda is
| weknowbetter wrote:
| Nothing actually moves according to Zeno's paradox.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Zeno's paradox assumes space is infinitely divisible.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| they didn't understand limits
| [deleted]
| narrator wrote:
| The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics also says
| this[1]. Retrocausality and non-locality are why a lot of
| physicists don't like it. It's just an interpretation too, but is
| otherwise consistent with all other QM theories.
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Mandela effect moment
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I am fascinated by physics but my original background is math.
| This all seems fascinating but also sort of baroque and far from
| experiments like much of QM and GR lately.
| [deleted]
| acyou wrote:
| The idea that there are "causes" and that there are "effects",
| and that these are separate and distinct, is in some way on a
| parallel with the idea that the past influences the future, and
| vice versa. If we think that the past influences the future, then
| it's just as reasonable to think that the future influences the
| past. Personally, I view "causes" and "effects" as abstractions
| that we use to help interpret our complicated world, nothing
| more.
|
| That's not to say that it's not legitimate to talk about causes
| and effects and to reason using them, but when seriously
| considered, anything that absolutely looks like definitely a
| cause or an effect, needs to be considered again with the system
| boundaries re-drawn, that is to say, with the system boundaries
| drawn around the whole universe.
|
| Take for example the cigarette lighting the forest on fire.
| Saying that the cigarette caused the fire is as much of a value
| judgement and political statement as saying that the decades-long
| drought caused the fire, or that humans causing global warming
| caused the fire, or that the cigarette companies caused the fire,
| or that God caused the fire. The emotional response that each of
| these statements elicits in various people should tell you that
| any statement linking cause and effect is emotional and political
| at its core. This reflects the nature of the humans that create
| these statements.
|
| We have a built-in tendency to try to assign causes to events and
| effects. We should zoom out enough to understand that this is
| part of our humanity, not part of the way that the universe
| works.
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| For this community it might be useful to stress that the vast
| majority of practicing theoretical physicists is not in the least
| worried about any interpretation of quantum mechanics.
|
| I would argue that the idea instead is to try to make predictions
| for future experiments. In the case of quantum gravity,
| especially string theory, these might be thought experiments
| (what happens if you fall into a black hole), technically
| infeasible experiments (what would a particle accelerator with
| the size of the solar system produce), or even completely
| hypothetical (what if the universe would have eleven macroscopic
| dimensions) but that does not change the underlying mindset.
|
| When it comes to the interpretation of quantum mechanics there is
| just nothing _left_ to explain. There is no experiment that
| decides between different interpretations, so that is _it_ as far
| as most physicists are concerned.
|
| The ideas in the linked article suffer from the same fate: there
| does not seem to be even a hypothetical way to test them, and the
| topic is therefore considered one of philosophy more than
| physics.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Still, can't alternative formulations inspire new physics? Like
| Lagrangian/Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics
| making the step towards QM easier?
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in
| time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the
| past? This mind-bending idea, known as _retrocausality_ , may
| seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is
| starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers,
| among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the
| most intractable riddles underlying our reality."
|
| Linguistics: _retrocausality_ -- is going into my 2023 lexicon...
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Why would I want to read about science in Vice, as someone
| actually interested in physics, but knowledgeable enough to
| understand a talented science communicator(with a PhD in the
| field) like Sean Carroll or Rebecca Smethurst.
|
| What purpose does it serve to write sloppy interpretations of
| complicated, likely to not pan out hypotheses(almost always the
| case) on quantum mechanics?
|
| So if this doesn't pan out, all they accomplished was that now a
| bunch of people are walking around with wrong information.
|
| If it does, then we'll find out eventually anyway.
|
| Science journalism is not useful to scientists, not helpful to
| nerds like me and for the masses it only contributes to
| misinformation and miseducation.
|
| There are plenty of talented communicators with advanced degrees
| in their fields that can do this job better, and journalists
| should go do their jobs which is the opposite of regularly
| misinforming the public(inb4 cynical reply hurr durr journalists
| always misinform about everything <direction> wing media herp
| derp. Not interested.)
| ford wrote:
| There's an interesting short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted
| Chiang that is related to this concept.
|
| It was the motivation for the movie arrival (though IMO is much
| better - the movie adds some drama that does not exist in the
| short story)
| [deleted]
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Phenomenal film. Full of interesting ideas and heartache. Pairs
| well with Annihilation.
| nathias wrote:
| on the quantum level sure, but on the macro level it's just
| idealism
| zoogeny wrote:
| The final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation played with
| this concept [1].
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(Star_Trek:...
| andrewfromx wrote:
| "It's important to emphasize at this point in time, whatever that
| means, that retrocausality is not the same as time travel."
|
| The funny line there is at this point in time. The whole article
| is about how the future influences the past so... at some point
| in time retrocauslity will be the same thing?
| kazinator wrote:
| The laws of physics are symmetric in time in classical Newtonian
| mechanics already. E.g. a swinging pendulum looks the same in
| time, forward and backward.
|
| What's not symmetric is in the area of thermodynamics and
| statistical mechanics; E.g. we never observe shards of glass
| spontaneously reassembling into a window pane.
| gexaha wrote:
| In philosophy this idea is called "hyperstition"
| gfd wrote:
| I used to believe that the world is lazily loaded. That means the
| first moment I see something (e.g., a world map) is the point
| where all the past history to consistently explain the
| observation gets "locked in".
| snozolli wrote:
| That was proven not to be the case:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-n...
| sdwr wrote:
| Sounds like that link supports the idea?
| snozolli wrote:
| Only if you didn't read the article, though I agree that
| the scientists' choice of terminology is confusing for
| regular people.
| orbz wrote:
| Wave function collapse in effect?
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| What changed?
| carlmr wrote:
| That's still lazy loading, he hasn't looked into it yet.
| KwisatzHaderack wrote:
| I feel like this assumes solipsism.
| Spivak wrote:
| Multiplayer solipsism. That part of the game doesn't load
| until at least one player observes it.
| sdwr wrote:
| Was coming to say something like this. Gets to some fun
| conclusions - ex. paleontologists invent dinosaurs by looking
| for them.
|
| Another angle on it would be showing that the universe has
| multiple possible levels of detail - that objects behave like
| newtonian point masses most of the time, that digestion is
| replaced by a simple hunger meter when nobody's paying
| attention.
|
| From this direction, time's main function is compressing "now"
| so there's more space for something else later.
|
| I'd be willing to believe that everyone has a god-given amount
| of universe rendering time that can be allocated in different
| ways, and that other people's attention stacks with it in a
| complex, layered way.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This thought experiment implies that humans, or conscious
| agents, represent a highly concentrated source of entropy,
| currently (mostly) confined to planet Earth. Meanwhile, in
| the vastness of space, most of the mass has settled into some
| relatively deterministic equilibria, with no conscious agents
| to alter the course of its future. Yet we're down here on the
| blue planet messing everything up.
|
| Coupling this thought with the simulation theory, it makes me
| wonder how the simulation would respond to increasing entropy
| over a larger volume than just our local system. That is, if
| we send a bunch of biological/artificial agents in all
| directions throughout the cosmos and let them wreak havoc,
| would it crash the simulation? Or what if we just smash a
| bunch of asteroids out of their stable orbits and let their
| disruption cascade throughout the system? Or maybe we've
| already messed everything up by broadcasting highly entropic
| radio waves throughout a spherical volume with a radius of
| ~100 light years?
| sdwr wrote:
| My guess is it would conserve entropy/processing on Earth
| to match the increased cost.
|
| But there's a difference between "screaming into the void",
| like broadcasting radio waves, that presumably have 0
| effects, and other things.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| That would also mean that when I don't see or hear other
| people, they don't "exist" as physical things that can be
| seen or heard until I encounter a situation in which they
| would be.
|
| It's the same as "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is
| around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
|
| But then again, that information has to be stored somewhere
| right?
|
| Like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around, sure
| you can say it isn't being perceived so it won't be
| "rendered" but the moment someone walks in the forest and
| sees that fallen tree, it would need to be rendered from some
| information about the fall and information of how it looked
| before the fall. That information would have to be sitting
| somewhere in limbo waiting to be rendered. So why not just
| actually let it sit IN the rendered "realm" and now you have
| one place for data to live in. You save on data transfer fees
| too.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > But then again, that information has to be stored
| somewhere right?
|
| As a collection of probabilities stored as a wave.
|
| If a bank account has a 50% probability earning a penny
| every second, the bank doesn't need to store all of the
| intermediate values for every "clock tick", but instead
| calculate how much has accumulated since the last time
| someone checked the account and store that value with a
| timestamp.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Where is this wave stored though? And what is the wave
| made of? A wave of what?
| sdwr wrote:
| The idea is that the universe "cheats" by replacing a
| computationally expensive process (a tree falling, breaking
| into pieces, being eaten by insects, moss growing) with a
| series of cheaper, "good-enough" replacements, based on the
| level of scrutiny.
|
| Not existing is the cheapest.
|
| Then, broad strokes, location and orientation
|
| Then pieces, level of decay
|
| etc,
|
| and moving between the layers is you spending your
| attention budget to force the universe to do more work.
| dbtc wrote:
| 'the world' vs 'my world' and 'your world'
| SMAAART wrote:
| Alfred Adler would agree with retrocausality.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| This would perfectly explain deja vu.
| huetius wrote:
| Would this put concepts from classical philosophy like formal and
| final causation back on the table? The article seems to imply
| that it's possible, but I've learned that journalistic summaries
| can be low-fidelity.
| [deleted]
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Interesting because it messes with the school of thought that
| everything is determined already and we're just following a
| sequence of actions that arise from the starting conditions of
| the universe. If causality is broken then maybe we have free
| will?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| If causality is broken, that means hard indeterminism.
| electrondood wrote:
| Causality isn't broken; the universe is "simultaneously causal
| and teleological," because it's superdetermined.
|
| There also isn't any free will, because there isn't actually
| any agent who could have it. Actions we perceive as volitional
| actually arise in the brain up to 7s before we "choose" them.
| The sense of a "me" is a post hoc add-on that claims credit for
| everything, in order to unite the disparate phenomena that
| comprise the sense of self.
|
| There isn't actually any "me," and recognizing this is what the
| word "enlightenment" refers to.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| It could just mean causality has more dimensions than we can
| perceive. It doesn't mean it is nonexistent.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| So my decision to have a ham sandwich for lunch is determined
| by some meta-universe that created the starting conditions
| for this universe, and allows for the breach in causality? Or
| somehow is involved in the backwards-arrow of quantum events
| that the article talks about so the universe cannot turn out
| any other way?
|
| I dunno, seems like a "God of the gaps" thing - we can
| speculate on meta-meta-universes endlessly. Including one
| where my decision to have a ham sandwich disturbs the state
| of a yet higher dimension that sets the starting parameters
| of your higher dimension and once again I have free will.
| paulusthe wrote:
| That's a very lazy school of thought though. It's just
| atheistic Calvinism, a tautology masquerading as a
| "philosophy".
|
| Calvin believed in pre-destination (your fate and every
| decision you make is decided before you exist) on the grounds
| that, because God exists and is omnipotent, what you are doing
| must therefore be what God wants to happen, both good and bad.
| After all, God is omnipotent, so there you go.
|
| Today's Calvinists just replace God-driven destiny with nature-
| driven destiny, but the underlying tautology (X exists,
| therefore X was always destined to exist, as proven by the fact
| that it exists at all) remains the same. In fact, it's an
| arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it
| requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have
| of probability theory. So it's the "smarter" Calvinism that
| requires you be ignorant of 20th century mathematical advances.
|
| Hate that crap. The only people I hear talking about it are
| silicon valley utopians, which is probably the other reason I
| hate it.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of
| Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses
| any knowledge they have of probability theory
|
| No to pick too many nits, but I think it is well established
| that knowledge of formal sciences (i.e. mathematics) does not
| impart knowledge about natural sciences (i.e. physics). While
| maths a useful tool, there are no established rules of
| inference for reality, and without rules of inference you
| can't really make claims on infinite sets.
|
| Natural sciences allow us to find mathematical constructs
| that make good predictions within specific constraints or
| that have not yet been falsified, just because something is
| true in probability theory does not make it true in reality.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| If humans lacked free will, probability would still be
| useful, because humans use it when they have imperfect
| information about an upcoming event.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I don't follow this argument. The coexistence of probability
| theory and strict determinism create no issues in modern
| mathematics.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of
| Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses
| any knowledge they have of probability theory. So it's the
| "smarter" Calvinism that requires you be ignorant of 20th
| century mathematical advances.
|
| I entirely fail to see how probability theory means it's
| impossible for the universe to be deterministic.
| explaininjs wrote:
| Scott Aaronson's "Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" tackled
| this question in a way I found enlightening. It's a bit of a
| dense read (I needed a plane trip to sit down and focus on it),
| but it presents a compelling case for the possible reversal of
| time arrows when it comes to the effects of quantum
| indeterminism on macro scale interactions. In short: what if
| humans, somehow, someway, have the ability to "influence" the
| resolution of unobserved universal start-state quantum noise in
| order to affect our "will" onto the universe? Furthermore, what
| experiments could be done to validate or invalidate aspects of
| this hypothesis?
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| That seems crazy - that my decision to have a ham sandwich
| for lunch had to be propagated all the way back to the start
| of the universe in order to happen ;)
|
| And yes, provability is a major problem with all these kinds
| of theories. We don't have a parallel universe handy as a
| control, and just saying "I am not going to have a ham
| sandwich tomorrow" isn't a viable experiment.
| explaininjs wrote:
| I interpret it as a sort of entropic antennae... each
| person (brain? qbit?) is tuned into what might be
| considered an allocated "entropy bandwidth". Some
| decisions, like whether you eat a ham bandwidth tomorrow
| utilize* practically none of that bandwidth. Others, what
| you might consider "major life decisions" might utilize* a
| ton of bandwidth. Some people might be gifted with a
| "larger" antennae, allowing them to utilize* a higher
| amount of entropy per second, or per lifetime. We might
| call these great artists, or generally any genius-level
| intellectuals. Alternatively, bat-shit crazy people.
|
| *: On "utilize". A central debate ( _the_ central debate?)
| seems to be what sort of "state access mechanism" this
| maps to in our lexicon: "{reading|writing}
| {global|local|shared} {bandwidth|memory}"
| why-el wrote:
| My favorite sentence on free will comes from Chomsky (who I
| think was probably quoting someone else): "if we don't have
| free will, then why are you arguing the point?"
| layer8 wrote:
| The compatibilist view is that there is no contradiction
| between free will and determinism, because free will refers to
| macro states and determinism refers to micro states.
|
| In addition, in the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, we
| don't follow just a single sequence of events, but all
| physically possible sequences of events, where the points where
| sequences branch off each other can correspond to different
| decisions we "freely" took. Meaning, when we make a decision,
| _all_ applicable options of choice will become actual reality.
| user81436628 wrote:
| [dead]
| a_subsystem wrote:
| Well... yes.
|
| http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/GURDJIEFF%20AND%20TIME.pdf
| echelon wrote:
| I just need retrocausal information on the stock market, world
| events, and any threats to myself or my monopoly on retrocausal
| information access. That's all.
| Rediscover wrote:
| Perfect response for the subject being discussed -and- your
| user name -and- a summary of your namesake from of a couple of
| amazing books by Charles Stross.
|
| I applaud You.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky
| mtmickush wrote:
| If the information is truly retrocausal you won't be able to
| leverage it to alter the future :'(.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| This idea is present in several Star Trek episodes. The meta
| question is when did we create those episodes?
| GravitasFailure wrote:
| I misread your username as a timestamp and was very, very
| confused for a minute. Very appropriate in this context.
| excalibur wrote:
| > "You have to be very careful in a retrocausal model because the
| fact of the matter is, we can't send signals back in time," Adlam
| explained. "It's important that we can't, because if we could,
| then we could produce all sorts of vehicles or paradoxes. You
| have to make sure your model doesn't allow that."
|
| This rings false to my scifi-trained brain. Paradoxes emerge when
| information about the future allows you to change it in some way.
| But if the future is truly immutable, there's no reason why you
| can't learn what it will be. Any attempts you make to alter it
| will only result in the exact thing that you already knew would
| happen.
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author. Maybe what they MEANT to
| say is if you didn't already receive an email from your future
| self 5 years ago, then you can't send one today that your past
| self will receive at that time. Just as the future is immutable,
| so is the past. But if we had some sort of quantum email that
| allowed for such a thing, it WOULD be possible to go check it
| today and find a message from yourself 5 years in the future.
| mjhay wrote:
| I'm guessing it's in terms of quantum information. Quantum
| entanglement and tunneling can happen faster than the speed of
| light, which causes similar time paradoxes with special
| relativity. This is avoided by the impossibility of sending
| observable classical information. Two entangled objects can
| affect each other, but you can't get actual information about
| it, because it is destroyed upon observation.
| ardit33 wrote:
| "Manifesting" -- maybe those girls that are into it, are right ;)
| dsego wrote:
| World-line travel my friend
|
| https://metallicman.com/detailed-breakdown-of-consciousness-...
| okasaki wrote:
| Isn't it just a matter of perspective/terminology?
|
| If in my physics theory I redefine that past=future and
| future=past then I have a physics theory where the future
| influences the past, and very strongly so.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Recently, I came across the Feynman-Wheeler handshake[1-ish],
| which lead to the Transactional Interpretation[2] of quantum
| mechanics, which lead to the Afshar experiment[3]
|
| I've come to conclude that all of these are consistent, but that
| they are a _metaphorical truth_ , in that you shouldn't interpret
| them as literal truth.
|
| Gun safety advocates teach "All Guns are Loaded", another
| metaphorical truth. If you behave as if it were true, you will
| generally live longer, and be safer.
|
| The math underlying quantum mechanics has all sorts of non-
| intuitive interpretations, and is often used as a gateway to woo-
| woo theories. I'm allergic to woo, and thus treating all of this
| as a metaphorical truth works best for me.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorb...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment
| didericis wrote:
| This comment will probably give you hives, but the inability to
| interpret things like QM literally and the inability of the
| left brain to process things holistically seems relevant to the
| interpretability problem. See Iain McGilchrist's "The Matter
| with Things". (I promise it's less woo-woo than it appears)
| shkkmo wrote:
| You have confused "metaphorical truth" with "heuristic". You
| can actually verify that a specific gun is not loaded and thus
| know for certain that not all guns are loaded, this (among
| several other things) means it really isn't metaphysics at
| all..
|
| Metaphysics are u
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