On 1/4/2014 7:29 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Jan 4, 2014, at 9:16 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/4/2014 6:37 PM, LizR wrote:
On 5 January 2014 15:01, Jason Resch <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What is moving if it's not time?
Our minds are, from one slice in spacetime to the next.
Jason,
I agree completely with all your other replied to Edgar, but I think the above one
could be misleading. I know what you mean (it's similar to the famous phrase about our
minds "crawling up our worldlines") but it creates just the sort of mental picture
that presentists will leap on with cries of "AHA! So it does move after all!!!"
So, let me just put the record straight. Our minds are NOT moving from one slice of
space-time to the next. Nothing is. However, the slices are connected in a manner
determined by the laws of physics (which could, for example, be demonstrated by
viewing the whole schmeer as a Feynman diagram, as you mentioned)
Not really as a Feynman diagram. Those are always drawn in momentum space (because
energy/momentum is what's conserved) and are assumed to occupy only a negligible space.
and this is sufficient to give us the illusion that there is a "moving present
moment". In practice (if we leave aside a comp type explanation and assume our minds
are generated by the activity of our brains) then that brain activity is sufficient to
give a powerful illusion that we are "moving through time". But, as the guy in
"Memento" demonstrates, this is an merely illusion, caused by the persistence of
memory, which effectively gives us a physical connection to the past via the
arrangement of the worldlines of the molecules making up our physical structure.
You don't really have to say it's an illusion. It's a description of the world and the
fact that you put different t-labels on events at the same (x y z) doesn't undo the
fact that there are different events at those different t-values. Memory provides an
arrow of psychological time - but it doesn't always follow the arrow of physics
(entropy increase).
Doesn't the von neumann-landauer limit imply information can only be stored in the
direction of time in which entropy increases?
I think it depends on what you mean by "stored". Computation can be reversible, so you
can move information around without erasing it or doing something irreversible. If
"stored" necessarily means "irreversibly" then I think that's right. I think it's the
difference between taking the 2nd law as fundamental and taking it as a merely
statistically probable. At a sufficiently microscopic level all the physics is CPT invariant.
Brent
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