Time and Possibility

Let's divide your entire life, from your first conscious experience to your last, into 1 hour slices.

And let's instantiate each slice as it's own mini-universe. Each mini-universe complete with it's own initial conditions and causal laws - but containing only what is necessary to generate a given slice of your experience.

These mini-universes are made of the same stuff (whatever it actually is) as our universe, and each mini-universe exists as a independent isolated entity within the timeless Meillassouxian space of possibilities.

So if (as an example) quarks and electrons cause consciousness, this means that a mini-universe would spring into existence for each 1 hour slice, with each mini-universe containing only the minimum complement of quarks and electrons with the necessary initial states required to cause one particular hour of your experience. And, after one hour, the mini-universe ends.

This is conceivable, right?

So now we have these 525,600 mini-universes (assuming you have ~60 years of conscious experience over the course of your life), each holding 1 hour's worth of reality, each causally disconnected from all of the the other slices and everything else. And each existing eternally in the space of possibilities.

Would this kind of existence be worse than your current existence? Would it "feel" different?

What test could you perform that would assure you that the above scenario isn't actually your present situation?

Okay, now let's say that instead of 525,600 slices that are each 1 hour long, we have 1,892,160,000 slices that are each 1 second long. How would your total experience differ?

Now let's say we go to .001 second long slices. And then .00000000001 second slices. And so on. At some point does your conscious experience become noticeably distorted, or disappear? If so at what point, and why?

After Finitude

An interesting review:

The notion of 'absolute time' that accompanies Meillassoux's acausal ontology is a time that seems endowed with only one dimension – the instant. It may well be that 'only the time that harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality, while obeying no determinate law – the time capable of destroying, without reason or law, both worlds and things – can be thought as an absolute.' The sense in which such an absolute can be thought as distinctively temporal is less obvious. Rather than any sort of articulation of past, present and future, Meillassoux's time is a matter of spontaneous and immediate irruption ex nihilo. Time is reduced, here, to a succession of 'gratuitous sequences'.

What does it mean to say that something did exist, but no longer does? This concept seems to require the further existence of an actual dimension of "Time".

But applying Meillassoux's principle of facticity: why should there be an actual time dimension? Why should things necessarily exist "in time"?

It seems more likely to me that time is just an aspect of subjective experience. In reality, all events exist simultaneously, eternally, and without order. Time only *seems* to flow in an ordered succession of moments, from past to future.

The actual ordering of events is irrelevant, because our experience imposes it's own ordering "from within".

The Granite Universe

The world that I perceive seems pretty orderly. When I drive to work, it's always where I expect it to be. The people are always the same. I pick up where I left off on the previous day, and life generally proceeds in an orderly and predictable way. Even when something unexpected happens, I can generally trace back along a chain of cause and effect and determine why it happened, and understand both why I didn't expect it and why I probably could have.

In my experience thus far, there have been no "Alice in Wonderland" style white rabbits that suddenly appear in a totally inexplicable way, make a few cryptic remarks while checking their pocket watch, and then scurry off.

Why do I never see such white rabbits?

Well, at first glance, something like physicalism seems like the obvious choice to explain my reality's perceived order - to explain both what I experience AND what I *don't* experience. The world is reducible to fundamental particles (waves, strings, whatever) which have certain properties (mass, velocity, spin, charge, etc) that determine how they interact, and it all adds up to what I see.

In this view, what I see is ultimately determined by the starting conditions of the universe, plus the physical laws that govern the interaction of the fundamental elements of the universe, applied over how-many-ever billions of years. While no explanation is given for the initial conditions, or why the fundamental laws of physics are what they are, if you get past that then from a cause-and-effect stand point physicalism offers a pretty solid explanation for why my world is orderly and predictable, and why I don't see white rabbits.

And in the form of functionalism/computationalism + evolution it even offers a pretty good foundation for explaining the existence and mechanism of human behavior and ability.

But physicalism has a major drawback: It doesn't obviously explain the experience of consciousness that goes with human behavior and ability. Particles, waves, mass, spin, velocity...no matter how you add them up, there doesn't seem to be any way to get conscious experience.

Which is a problem, since consciousness is the portal through which we access everything else. My conscious experience is what I know. I "know" of other things only when they enter into my conscious awareness.

So, physicalism does explain why we see, what we see, and why we don't see white rabbits. But it doesn't seem to explain the conscious experience OF seeing what we see.

Further, by positing an independently existing and well ordered external universe to explain our orderly perceptions, we have just pushed the question back one level. The new questions are, why does this external universe exist and why is it so orderly? And this initially seems justified by the fact that physicalism explains how it is possible for us to make correct predictions.

BUT, actually it explains nothing.

Nothing has been explained because we are PART of the system that we are trying to explain by appealing to physicalism. If the order and predictability of our experiences are due to the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics, then we inhabit a universe whose entire future, including our existence and all of our activities and experiences, is fixed. Frozen in place by unbreakable causal chains.

Effectively (and maybe actually), the entire future of the universe can be seen as existing simultaneously with its beginning. We could just as well say that the entire past, present, and future came into being at one instant, and we are just experiencing our portion of it in slices.

But there is no "explanation" here. This "block universe" just IS. It just exists. It came into being for no reason, for no purpose, with no meaning. It exists in the form that it does, and there is no answer to the question "why?". We are part of that universe, existing entirely within it and contained by it. Therefore we also just exist. For no reason, for no purpose, with no meaning, our future history also frozen in place by causal chains. What is true for the universe as a whole is true for it's contents.

To try an make what I'm saying more clear: let's imagine a real block. Say, a block of speckled granite. Now let's consider two adjacent specks of white and gray. Why are they adjacent? What caused them to be adjacent? Well, if we consider this block of granite within the context of our universe, then we can say that there is a reason in that context as to why they are adjacent. There is an explanation, which has to do with the laws of physics and the contingent details of the geologic history of the area where this block of granite was formed (which is in turn derived from the contingent details of the initial state of our entire universe).

But if we take this block of granite to be something that just exists, uncaused and unique, like our universe, then there can be no explanation. The two specks are just adjacent. That's it. No further explanation is possible. The block of granite just exists as it is and that's the way it is. We *can* say something like, "there's a vein of white and a vein of gray in this block, and those two specks exist at the boundary of the veins and so they are adjacent", but while this sounds like an explanation, it really is just a statement of observed fact. It doesn't "explain" anything. And even this observation is made from "outside" the block, an option not available with our universe.

If some sort of conscious intelligence exists within speck patterns of the 2-D slices of the granite block (2-D because we've lost a dimension on our example...the third spatial dimension of the block will be time for these speck-beings), then who knows whether they will even be conscious of being made from specs of granite and of existing within this granite block with it's grey and white veins. Maybe the speck-patterns that they are formed from will be such that their experience is of living in a 3+1 dimensional world such as ours. But regardless, there can be no explanation as to why their experiences are what they are. Their experiences will be as uncaused as the existence of the block whose speckled nature gives rise to those experiences.

So physicalism in fact offers no advantage over just asserting that our conscious experience just exists. Why are my perceptions orderly and why are my predictions about what will happen next usually correct? Because that's just the way it is...and this is true whether you posit an external universe or just conclude that conscious experience exists uncaused.

Entropy and Memory

It’s overwhelmingly probable that all of your memories are false.

Consider:

Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder.

If a deck of cards is ordered by suit and then within each suit by ascending rank, then that’s a low entropy state. This is because out of the 8.06 * 10 to the 67th (52!) possible unique arrangements of the cards in a standard 52 card deck, there’s only 24 that fit that particular description.

A “random looking” arrangement of the deck is a high entropy state, because there are trillions of unique arrangements of a standard 52 card deck that will fit the description of looking “randomly shuffled”.

Same with the egg. There are (relatively) few ways to arrange the molecules of an egg that will result in it looking unbroken, compared to the huge number of ways that will result in it looking broken. SO, unbroken egg…low entropy. Broken egg…high entropy.

AND the same with the universe…there are (again, relatively) few ways to arrange the atoms of the universe in a way that makes it resemble what we see with people and trees and planets and stars and galaxies, compared with the gargantuan number of ways to arrange things so that it resembles a generic looking cloud of dust.

OKAY. Now.

Of the relatively few ways that the elementary particles of the universe can be arranged so as to resemble what we see around us today, only a tiny fraction of those particle arrangements will have values for momentum and position that are consistent with them having arrived at that state 13.7 billion years after something like the Big Bang.

The vast majority of the particle arrangements that macroscopically resemble the world around us will *instead* have particles in states (e.g., with positions and velocities) that are consistent with the particles having previously been in something more like a giant dust cloud.

By which I mean: If we take their current positions and velocities, and work backwards to see where they came from, and go back far enough in time, eventually we will not arrive at the Big Bang. Instead we will arrive at a state resembling a giant dust cloud (probably a very thin, spread-out dust cloud).

SO, bottom line:

Out of all the possible configurations that the universe could be in, ones that have people, and planets, and stars, and galaxies are extremely rare.

Further, even if we then only consider those extremely rare possible configurations that have people, and planets, and stars, and galaxies – the ones with particles in states (e.g., with positions and velocities) that are consistent with having arrived at this configuration 13.7 billion years after something like the Big Bang are STILL rare.

We don’t know the exact state of our universe’s particles, but in statistical mechanics the Principle of Indifference requires us to consider all possible microscopic states that are consistent with our current macroscopic state equally likely.

So given all of the above, and our current knowledge of the laws of physics, the most likely explanation is that all of your current memories are false and that yesterday the universe was in a HIGHER state of entropy, not a lower state (as would be required by any variation of the Big Bang theory).

Physical systems with low states of entropy are very rare, by definition. So it’s very improbable (but not impossible) that the unlikely low entropy state of the universe of today is the result of having evolved from an EVEN MORE UNLIKELY lower entropy universe that existed yesterday.

Instead, statistically it’s overwhelmingly more probable that the unlikely low entropy state of the universe today is the result of a random fluctuation from a HIGHER entropy universe that existed yesterday.

And thus your memories of a lower entropy yesterday are most likely due to this random fluctuation, not due to yesterday actually having had a lower entropy than today.

[Based on my reading of Sean Carroll's book "From Eternity to Here"]

The Illusion of Time

This is a very good article. Reality is not what you think it is.

That Rovelli's approach yields the correct probabilities in quantum mechanics seems to justify his intuition that the dynamics of the universe can be described as a network of correlations, rather than as an evolution in time. "Rovelli's work makes the timeless view more believable and more in line with standard physics," says Dean Rickles, a philosopher of physics at the University of Sydney in Australia.

With quantum mechanics rewritten in time-free form, combining it with general relativity seems less daunting, and a universe in which time is fundamental seems less likely. But if time doesn't exist, why do we experience it so relentlessly? Is it all an illusion?

Yes, says Rovelli, but there is a physical explanation for it. For more than a decade, he has been working with mathematician Alain Connes at the College de France in Paris to understand how a time-free reality could give rise to the appearance of time. Their idea, called the thermal time hypothesis, suggests that time emerges as a statistical effect, in the same way that temperature emerges from averaging the behaviour of large groups of molecules (Classical and Quantum Gravity, vol 11, p 2899).

Imagine gas in a box. In principle we could keep track of the position and momentum of each molecule at every instant and have total knowledge of the microscopic state of our surroundings. In this scenario, no such thing as temperature exists; instead we have an ever-changing arrangement of molecules. Keeping track of all that information is not feasible in practice, but we can average the microscopic behaviour to derive a macroscopic description. We condense all the information about the momenta of the molecules into a single measure, an average that we call temperature.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time. "It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow," says Rovelli. "Time is the effect of our ignorance."