If only physicists were a bit more curious about philosophy…
A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
11–20 of 455 posts
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#12Earlier 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.
The factual past is what actually happened, history is what we wrote down.
Perception and reality are not in fact the same thing.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#13Earlier 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.
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.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The factual past is what actually happened, history is what we wrote down. Perception and reality are not in fact the same thing.
To be fair there is some disagreement over what exactly "the past" _is_. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwzN5YwMzv0 discusses this a bit.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#15As 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?
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#16> 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.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The factual past is what actually happened, history is what we wrote down. Perception and reality are not in fact the same thing.
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.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#18As 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?
The block universe: https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#19“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?
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#20Human 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…
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.