"There is a god because e = mc²"

[bheath]

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.