A very common thought in speculative Design. Eben if it is a bit true event in the future, an imagined event can change the present as the perception of the past. See utopias and dystopia as example. If we say this known known in the future it already affected the present and also the past. It gets interesting for the unknowns unknowns if those will change the past and present. But already accepting that there unknown unknowns changes the present.
A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
291–300 of 455 posts
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#292> 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.
> 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 "arro…
> If, for example, your universe is entropically uniform, is there an "arrow of time"?
No. For a system at thermodynamics equilibrium entropy is constant, neither increasing nor decreasing. So there is no arrow of time, no sense in which one direction is "the future" and the other "the past".
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#293It'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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Pointing out or calling out people posting BS, that is clearly BS, does not fall into any category of logical fallacy - those arguing the case that it does on the other hand ...
I've heard people in that field talk about the possibility of loops in the time dimension, but infinitesimally short period of time is involved and local. Not enough to call it the past though.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
The "arrow of time" conception of entropy: 1) does not work locally and only works at large enough scales, and; 2) is essentially isomorphic to the concept of time.
So no, it's not at all incompatible with retro-causality. When you think about retro-causality, the idea that time "moves" is completely superfluous. Time is probably not even a real thing.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
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 gen…
Alain Aspect tested it with his delayed choice quantum eraser, didnt he ? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect%27s_experiment)
At least in France we take as fait accompli that causality is non trivial and that objects are non local at best: either you can consider objects as one despite immense distance between them, or you accept information passed between them in reverse time. Both are hard to swallow.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
>had to be propagated all the way back to the start of the universe in order to happen ;)
Technically, casualty required that anyway. My understanding that it's infinity in space, not time that matters here. i.e. predicting your decision to have a ham sandwich may require predicting the entire universe and since we're part of the universe and can't look from 'outside' that decision would be unpredictable from inside the universe.
>And yes, provability is a major problem with all these kinds of theories.
I think showing that quantum effects are negligible for human brains would do, at least regarding your decision to have a ham sandwich?
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#297> 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.
How so?
The idea doesn't seem so different from matter being the default (vs. antimatter), relative speeds much closer to zero than to the speed of light being what's commonly observable etc.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
The direction of causality should also be reversed from what I can tell. Instead of a bullet slowing down as it hits air molecules and pushes them out of the way, the air molecules push on the bullet because the bullet will be sucked into the barrel in the future.
More on topic, I think our existing theories of reality tell us that the future probably affects the past, or at very least, is predetermined. If you know the solution to a differential equation, you know the state at any point in time. There's no going off the rails, so to speak. And if the system is constrained in any dimension (i.e. it's nonholonomic) then the state at any given moment relies on the full trajectory up to that point, as opposed to just the previous state. But you can flip that on its head and say that the future state determines the present trajectory. E.g. to turn a bicycle left, you have to first turn right.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gen…
> It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like metaphysics? Sure, but some claims which cannot be tested experimentally or observationally are nonetheless important. For example, the claim “it’s important that scientific hypotheses be tested experimentally or observationally.”
While I agree that not everything in science can be tested experimentally or observationally, arguably this one can:
Models created using both empirical experimentation and logical reasoning match reality much better than those based on "pure logics" (if that even is possible).