> [Krimel] > I would add that probability also diminishes as one moves backwards into > the "past". Our memories and recordings of the past give us the illusion > of fixity. But they are replications of settled probabilities. If one were > actually able to move backwards in time, one would confront to same > quantum uncertainties and problems of entropy (in reverse) that we > encounter moving forward it time. > > It is the illusion of memory that makes the past seem fixed and confuses > folks like Ham who see space/time as static.
David M I suspect we live in a reality where the wave function does collapse with or without observation, which is why we find the past is fixed and cannot be reoccupied by us. That's my experience at least. So this email is now fixed for ever. Feel free to prove me wrong. [Krimel] Your memory and recordings of the past create the illusion of fixity. These e-mails are just such records. Your memories are just such records. Time is not reversible because of entropy and quantum indeterminacy. This is what separates those theories from classical physics in which the laws of physics work perfectly well in either temporal direction. Thermodynamics and QM tell us why time can't run backward but if it did it would be subject to the same indeterminacies as it does running forward. Furthermore if we could move to some point in "a" past we could not get back to the present we started in. Also consider that even if we could return to a specific past, if would not be the past we originally started from because we would be in it. Our presence would alter the probability structure. Our memories and recordings, like these e-mails, create the illusion of fixity in the past, but we can see through this illusion even in a mundane way without reference to physics. My favorite example is the Kennedy assassination. Several publicly funded and a host of private crack pots have attempted to reconstruct this event using photos, home movies, sound recordings and eye witness testimony. After 40 years of tireless effort the results are still inconclusive. Even our illusion of fixity can not tell us what "actually" happened. I would say this is true of all historical events and the farther back you look the less certainty you will find. In this sense the past is for us just as much a model of what was, as the future is a model of what will be. In some sense we 'can' travel in time and I suspect that this fifth dimensional aspect of our being is what produces consciousness. It is the ability to remember the past and to project into the future that really makes us, if not unique then 'special'. We can take various points of view not only of social relationships and spatial relationships but of temporal relationships. We are constantly interacting with these multifaceted perspectives; processing them in parallel and constructing serial narratives out of them. There is in nature the manifestation of recursion and iteration. The values of the probabilities that collapse in the present are fed into the equations that become the future. This process continues moment to moment eon to eon. It exhibits the property of self similarity across scale. Pick a time scale from nanoseconds to millennia and you can zoom in zoom out, refocus. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
