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A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#3
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.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#5
post #3

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 r…

Right, something along the lines of Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#8
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.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#9
post #4

Very tangentially related, but we rewrite the past all the time.

Wouldn’t that be a matter of perception and written history rather than the factual past?

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.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#10
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t that be a matter of perception and written history rather than the factual past?

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.

What? No. The factual past is what actually happened. Don't mistake the map for the territory.
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