(February 24, 2017 at 2:52 pm)bheath Wrote:

(February 24, 2017 at 2:20 pm)Alex K Wrote: I see you have no refutation of my idea, just mockery!

It's an interesting idea. I have no clue how to approach it, but it sounds like another framing of a cyclical universe. Once past the singularity, does time move "forward"?

What does get me is that the same organism is not said to result from evolution twice. So how does that figure into a cyclical universe?

Actually, I've purposefully written my proposition to be indistinguishable from reality in any scientific sense. The redefinition of time going backwards while everything stays the way we experience it, is just an empty change of convention. But - there's a deeper idea behind that which I find endlessly fascinating, namely that it might simply be the direction of larger entropy which we perceive as the future, because our brainss can only remember into the direction of lower entropy. An old colleague of mine has written a paper with others where they argue that the timeline might approach the big bang from both sides, and the big bang being a point of low entropy, both directions on the timeline leading away from the big bang would be perceived as futures, simply because entropy is increasing away from the big bang. This way, the timeline itself could be infinite in both directions, but there would technically be two infinite futures and only a finite past. I thought that this added a very fascinating aspect to the usual discussion of past infinite time vs. a first mover and all that. These kinds of scenarios convince me again and again that the traditional philosophical approaches to these questions are way too naive.

(February 24, 2017 at 5:53 pm)Alex K Wrote:

(February 24, 2017 at 2:52 pm)bheath Wrote: It's an interesting idea. I have no clue how to approach it, but it sounds like another framing of a cyclical universe. Once past the singularity, does time move "forward"?

What does get me is that the same organism is not said to result from evolution twice. So how does that figure into a cyclical universe?

Actually, I've purposefully written my proposition to be indistinguishable from reality in any scientific sense. The redefinition of time going backwards while everything stays the way we experience it, is just an empty change of convention. But - there's a deeper idea behind that which I find endlessly fascinating, namely that it might simply be the direction of larger entropy which we perceive as the future, because our brainss can only remember into the direction of lower entropy. An old colleague of mine has written a paper with others where they argue that the timeline might approach the big bang from both sides, and the big bang being a point of low entropy, both directions on the timeline leading away from the big bang would be perceived as futures, simply because entropy is increasing away from the big bang. This way, the timeline itself could be infinite in both directions, but there would technically be two infinite futures and only a finite past. I thought that this added a very fascinating aspect to the usual discussion of past infinite time vs. a first mover and all that. These kinds of scenarios convince me again and again that the traditional philosophical approaches to these questions are way too naive.

Oh shit! We can only remember things moving away from entropy and towards singularity... Have I got the right? That's fascinating.

(February 24, 2017 at 6:00 pm)bheath Wrote:

(February 24, 2017 at 5:53 pm)Alex K Wrote: Actually, I've purposefully written my proposition to be indistinguishable from reality in any scientific sense. The redefinition of time going backwards while everything stays the way we experience it, is just an empty change of convention. But - there's a deeper idea behind that which I find endlessly fascinating, namely that it might simply be the direction of larger entropy which we perceive as the future, because our brainss can only remember into the direction of lower entropy. An old colleague of mine has written a paper with others where they argue that the timeline might approach the big bang from both sides, and the big bang being a point of low entropy, both directions on the timeline leading away from the big bang would be perceived as futures, simply because entropy is increasing away from the big bang. This way, the timeline itself could be infinite in both directions, but there would technically be two infinite futures and only a finite past. I thought that this added a very fascinating aspect to the usual discussion of past infinite time vs. a first mover and all that. These kinds of scenarios convince me again and again that the traditional philosophical approaches to these questions are way too naive.

Oh shit! We can only remember things moving away from entropy and towards singularity... Have I got the right? That's fascinating.

Exactly. That's my current view of the situation!

I find it plausible due to the following thought experiment: if we look at very simple physical systems of several point masses interacting with each other, what we find is that with only two masses interacting, the arrow of time is invisible: If you are watching a movie of just two planets circling each other, you won't be able to tell whether it is running backwards or not!

If you add a third mass (planet), suddenly there are events which you will be able to assign with some certainty to time running backwards or forward. For example, the third mass being ejected from the system and flying away looks like a very probable event that you would expect if observing the world "forward". The third mass coming in from infinity and getting precisely integrated into a three-body-system looks very unlikely. We begin to have something like a probability-based arrow of time, created by the complexity of nothing more than the three body problem.

This effect exponentiates if you add more and more particles until you get an absolutely compelling arrow of time based on the fact that all the microscopic parts of your system arrange into more likely configurations as time progresses towards what you call the future, the hallmark of increasing entropy. I believe that an argument can be made (and probably has been made many times and I simply haven't read the literature) that this scenario can be applied to a toy model of memory: memory is formed by matter arranging itself into stable, more likely configurations which encode what has happened "before".

As an abstract example, in our three body simulation, one particle flying away tells us from its trajectory that it once was part of the system and likely escaped from it, thus carrying a sort of memory of the three body system that existed in the "past".

Conversely, the third body coming in from infinity and getting integrated into the system, once we just have the integrated three-body-system before us, will not tell us any useful information about how the body was captured because quickly, chaos takes over and we simply have a messy complex three body movement in which information about the "past" is lost in the complexity of the movement.

To summarize, "memory" in form of stable physical configurations of matter carrying ordered information about what happened further away on the timeline, will only be preserved in the direction of increasing entropy. In the opposite direction, a certain extent of "reverse memory" is possible in the form of mathematical extrapolations of the laws of physics, but as the weather report shows us every day, this direction of "future memory" which we call prediction, is severely limited by the forces of entropy.

The above argument was made possible by Pinot Grigio ™

(February 24, 2017 at 6:18 pm)Alex K Wrote:

(February 24, 2017 at 6:00 pm)bheath Wrote: Oh shit! We can only remember things moving away from entropy and towards singularity... Have I got the right? That's fascinating.

Exactly. That's my current view of the situation!

I find it plausible due to the following thought experiment: if we look at very simple physical systems of several point masses interacting with each other, what we find is that with only two masses interacting, the arrow of time is invisible: If you are watching a movie of just two planets circling each other, you won't be able to tell whether it is running backwards or not!

If you add a third mass (planet), suddenly there are events which you will be able to assign with some certainty to time running backwards or forward. For example, the third mass being ejected from the system and flying away looks like a very probable event that you would expect if observing the world "forward". The third mass coming in from infinity and getting precisely integrated into a three-body-system looks very unlikely. We begin to have something like a probability-based arrow of time, created by the complexity of nothing more than the three body problem.

This effect exponentiates if you add more and more particles until you get an absolutely compelling arrow of time based on the fact that all the microscopic parts of your system arrange into more likely configurations as time progresses towards what you call the future, the hallmark of increasing entropy. I believe that an argument can be made (and probably has been made many times and I simply haven't read the literature) that this scenario can be applied to a toy model of memory: memory is formed by matter arranging itself into stable, more likely configurations which encode what has happened "before".

As an abstract example, in our three body simulation, one particle flying away tells us from its trajectory that it once was part of the system and likely escaped from it, thus carrying a sort of memory of the three body system that existed in the "past".

Conversely, the third body coming in from infinity and getting integrated into the system, once we just have the integrated three-body-system before us, will not tell us any useful information about how the body was captured because quickly, chaos takes over and we simply have a messy complex three body movement in which information about the "past" is lost in the complexity of the movement.

To summarize, "memory" in form of stable physical configurations of matter carrying ordered information about what happened further away on the timeline, will only be preserved in the direction of increasing entropy. In the opposite direction, a certain extent of "reverse memory" is possible in the form of mathematical extrapolations of the laws of physics, but as the weather report shows us every day, this direction of "future memory" which we call prediction, is severely limited by the forces of entropy.

So it's essentially involution.

involution?

(February 24, 2017 at 7:08 pm)Alex K Wrote: involution?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involution

Can you be more specific?

(February 24, 2017 at 7:14 pm)Alex K Wrote: Can you be more specific?

Involution in esoterism and mathematics might be of some interest. Basically, if we're moving backwards as you say and away from chaos, that's what this sounds like.