If Time is Emergent, why does Present follow from Past?

[The Undead Martyr]

Time is a huge problem in physics today, as there is no real need for it to make the physical laws that define the universe we live in work. The only real reason for time at all is for us as observers of the universe. Again, there is a large hole in physics today in the general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to be mutually exclusive at extremely short distances and high energies. Both have amazing predictive powers, but one has to be wrong. Even if QM has time emerging from entanglement, this means nothing to GR.

It is nice to see you take an interest in this stuff, but be wary of the questions you ask and remember what happened to Socrates. :cheers:

It is not that they're wrong so much as they operate under a given set of parameters. Different tools for different tasks, if you will.

Newton is technically "wrong" as is Maxwell but at relativistically slow speeds Newton is fine- you can put a satellite in orbit over Mars without relativity.

Time is a local variable, and its intervals are not of equivalent value for different reference frames. The same is true of length/distance etc. Only together in terms of Spacetime do you have an invariant measurement.

Also, if you were to fall into a black hole, IIRC you'd basically watch the entire universe's history from then on over the blink of an eye due to the effects of general relativity.

[Sci-2]

Time's Arrow: Can physics explain the nature of time?

Time appears to be the ultimate form of progress: an unavoidable direction imposed on the universe. Some physicists claim this is an illusion. How should we make sense of time? As a dimension, a flow, a place, a process, a social construct, or something altogether more mysterious?

The Panel
Physician, poet and thinker Raymond Tallis, philosopher and broadcaster Angie Hobbs, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili, and philosopher of time Craig Bourne go in search of time's direction.

[Sci-2]

Why would Time Travelers Try to Kill Their Younger Selves?

An examination of the "motivation problem" for time travelers.

[Sci-2]

Interesting bit of history:

Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that Failed:Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations

On April 6, 1922, Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein met at the Société française de philosophie in Paris to discuss the meaning of relativity. In the years that followed, the philosopher and the physicist became engaged in a bitter dispute.2It is commonly asserted that during their confrontation Bergson lost to the young physicist; as subsequent commentators have insisted, Bergson made an essential mistake because he did not understand the physics of relativity.

Their debate exemplified the victory of “rationality” against “intuition.” It was a key moment which demonstrated that intellectuals (like Bergson) were unable to keep up with revolutions in science. For the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, the “historical origins” of the “Science Wars” lay in Einstein’s and Bergson’s fateful meeting. Since then, they have seen the malaise of le bergsonisme continuing to spread—recently reaching“Deleuze, after passing through Jankélévitch and Merleau-Ponty.”

Bergson, however, never acknowledged any such defeat. In his view, it was Einstein and his interlocutors who did not understand him...

...The political views of Bergson and Einstein and the history of scientific internationalism have been amply studied before. Yet the scientific Bergson-Einstein debate and the political Bergson-Einstein debate, taking place simultaneously, have been considered to be independent from each other. It is evident, however, that both Bergson and Einstein (as well as those around them) often drew connections between the two. This article explores these connections symmetrically to expose the ways in which boundaries between nature,science, and politics shifted during this period. It is pertinent to study these shifts first to understand the ancillary debates in science and politics that have thus far dominated historiography.

This episode marks an important change in the place of science and philosophy in history. Einstein and Bergson’s debate covered much more than the nature of time and simultaneity. At stake in their debate was the status of philosophy vis à vis physics. It was, in essence,a controversy about who could speak for nature and about which of these two disciplines would have the last word..

[Kevvy]

In the words of George Carlin, there's no present. It's either the immediate future or recent past.

[paddington]

Why would Time Travelers Try to Kill Their Younger Selves?

An examination of the "motivation problem" for time travelers.

Motivation is simple, I'd go back to giving myself winning lottery numbers, stock tips, winning race horse. I really can't see a problem in motivating myself to time travel.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Motivation is simple, I'd go back to giving myself winning lottery numbers, stock tips, winning race horse. I really can't see a problem in motivating myself to time travel.

Just watch out for the crazy wide eyed scientist guy. Or some kid.

(Me? I'd go back to the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and save Doctor Who from getting wiped. Actually, perhaps the reason no one has found Marco Polo after all this time is that someone already went back to rescue those episodes before we could find them...).

[Sci-2]

Science confirming religion again. Religion has always said that time is an artifact of the physical reality and that the metaphysical reality is without time.

So add that to evolution, nuclear chemistry (aka alchemy) and the abundance of the existence of planets in the universe as things which religion stated as truths which science later confirmed.

It's good to see religion and science continuing to come together in harmony.

Wanted to say I've been reading the works of comparative religion professor Jeffery Kripal, and he goes into this a lot. I think you might like The Serpents Gift, which discusses gnosis relating to the transcendence of time.

Also, thanks for other post elucidating your position!

[Sci-2]

Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen?

The conviction that laws somehow give us a full accounting of events seems often to be based on the idea that they govern the world's substance or matter from outside, "making" things happen. If this is the case, however, then we must provide some way for matter to recognize and then obey these external laws. But, plainly, whatever supports this capacity for recognition and obedience cannot itself be the mere obedience. Anything capable of obeying wholly external laws is not only its obedience but also its capability, and this capability remains unexplained by the laws.

If, with so many scientists today, we construe laws as rules, we can put the matter this way: much more than rule-following is required of anything able to follow rules; conversely, no set of rules can by themselves explain the presence or functioning of that which is capable of following them.

It is, in other words, impossible to imagine matter that does not have some character of its own. To begin with, it must exist. But if it exists, it must do so in some particular manner, according to its own way of being. Even if we were to say, absurdly, that its only character is to obey external laws, this "law of obedience" itself could not be just another one of the external laws being obeyed. Something will be "going on" that could not be understood as obedience to law, and this something would be an essential expression of what matter was. To apprehend the world we would need to understand this expressive character in its own right, and we could never gain such an understanding solely through a consideration of external laws.

So we can hardly find coherence in the rather dualistic notion that physical laws reside, ghost-like, in some detached, abstract realm from which they impinge upon matter. But if, contrary to our initial assumption, we take laws to be in one way or another bound up with the world's substance — if we take them to be at least in part an expression of this substance — then the difficulty in the conventional view of law becomes even more intense. Surely it makes no sense to say that the world's material phenomena are the result — the wholly explained result — of matter obeying laws which it is itself busy expressing. In whatever manner we prefer to understand the material expression of the laws, this expression cannot be a matter of obedience to the laws being expressed! If whatever is there as the substance of the world at least in part determines the laws, then the laws cannot be said to determine what is there.

I think Talbott has the right of it...I find the "laws" of nature to be rather bizarre. They're just extrapolations from observed regularities. There has to be some property inside things, an internal essence, that maintains these regularities and provides the "oomph" to causality. (Unless you accept the "laws" have coercive power, at which point you hit the meta-law regression problem!)

It gets weirder if the QM level of "matter" offers possible randomness/retrocausality/timelessness/entanglement. So at what point is the essence that causes things to obey natural laws and obey an Arrow of Time injected into whatever matter is?

[maarsen]

The essence of the physical laws of nature is that all actions follow a path of minimum energy. In all of the infinite ways in which a particle can move from point A to point B, the actual path will be the one that requires the minimum amount of energy.

[Jo498]

The idea that laws have to be "injected" into "dead" matter is more or less a result of the austere conception of matter we inherited from 17th century "mechanistic philosophy". The formed matter of aristotelian-scholastic natural philosophy has essences (forms) that also imply tendencies for change, motion etc. But the early moderns wanted to get rid of all of this, because most of it could not be mathematized as geometrical configurations and locomotion could. So we get Cartesian or Hobbesian conceptions of matter. Such matter needs external causes or laws, because it is just extension or corpuscles without any "inner principle of change" (as an aristotelian form/essence/physis would have been). Enters God as a lawgiver and sometimes also only real cause to get matter into motion (as in occasionalism).

Our conception of physical reality has become much richer (e.g. fields, later quanta and whatever) than the corpuscularian view of the 17th century and we have a much more sophisticated math to describe it, but in other respects we are still stuck with this view of inert matter. Some people think because of the fancy math there is not much more that could be said about it. But the metaphysical problem is quite independent of the complexity of the math. We still want to know why matter behaves according to the fancy equations. I think we have to go back to a more "aristotelian" conception with "active, "formed" matter with essential tendencies for certain processes, interactions and activities. The regularities follow from special configurations of (inter)acting things. This does not solve all of the problems, e.g. not the "arrow of time", but it "pulls" at least some of the laws down "into" the things.

Maybe the direction of time is just a brute fact, maybe it follows from thermodynamics or from an expanding universe (these were ideas entertained when I first read about this stuff 15+ years ago). In any case, if one does not believe that the mathematical description has all the information there is to have, it is not so strange that we often have to discard some solutions more or less ad hoc, because they would have coming the waves in from the boundary converging and throwing the stone up from the surface of the pond.

[Sci-2]

The idea that laws have to be "injected" into "dead" matter is more or less a result of the austere conception of matter we inherited from 17th century "mechanistic philosophy". The formed matter of aristotelian-scholastic natural philosophy has essences (forms) that also imply tendencies for change, motion etc. But the early moderns wanted to get rid

Maybe the direction of time is just a brute fact, maybe it follows from thermodynamics or from an expanding universe (these were ideas entertained when I first read about this stuff 15+ years ago). In any case, if one does not believe that the mathematical description has all the information there is to have, it is not so strange that we often have to discard some solutions more or less ad hoc, because they would have coming the waves in from the boundary converging and throwing the stone up from the surface of the pond.

Came across a David Bohm interview you might like:

Omni: What do you think is the order of the holomovement?

Bohm: It may lie outside of time as we ordinarily know it. If the universe began with the Big Bang and there are black holes, then we must eventually reach places where the notion of time and space breaks down. Anything could happen. As various cosmologists have put it, if a black hole came out with a sign flashing COCA COLA, it shouldn't be surprising. Within the singularity none of the laws as we know them apply. There are no particles; they are all disintegrated. There is no space and no time. Whatever is, is beyond any concept we have at present. The present physics implies that the total conceptual basis of physics must be regarded as completely inadequate. The grand unification [of the four forces of the universe] could be nothing but an abstraction in the face of some further unknown.

I propose something like this: Imagine an infinite sea of energy filling empty space, with waves moving around in there, occasionally coming together and producing an intense pulse. Let's say one particular pulse comes together and expands, creating our universe of space-time and matter. But there could well be other such pulses. To us, that pulse looks like a big bang; In a greater context, it's a little ripple. Everything emerges by unfoldment from the holomovement, then enfolds back into the implicate order. I call the enfolding process "implicating," and the unfolding "explicating." The implicate and explicate together are a flowing, undivided wholeness. Every part of the universe is related to every other part but in different degrees.

There are two experiences: One is movement in relation to other things; the other is the sense of flow The movement of meaning is the sense of flow. But even in moving through space, there is a movement of meaning. In a moving picture, with twenty-four frames per second, one frame follows another, moving from the eye through the optic nerve, into the brain. The experience of several frames together gives you the sense of flow. This is a direct experience of the implicate order.

In classical mechanics, movement or velocity is defined as the relation between the position now and the position a short time ago. What was a short time ago is gone, so you relate what is to what is not. This isn't a logical concept. In the implicate order you are relating different frames that are copresent in consciousness. You're relating what is to what is. A moment contains flow or movement. The moment may be long or short, as measured in time. In consciousness a moment is around a tenth of a second. Electronic moments are much shorter, but a moment of history might be a century.

Omni: So a moment enfolds all the past?

Bohm: Yes, but the recent past is enfolded more strongly. At any given moment we feel the presence of all the past and also the anticipated future. It's all present and active....

[PyroclasticFlow]

Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement

If the universe is static from the outside, then it's like an object frozen in place right? A giant (infinite?) black sphere?

But if the universe came into being (or always was) [all at once] then why do have a seemingly coherent past leading up to our present? Isn't that bizarrely convenient?

It feels like the math and the reality are getting further apart here...

Show me your math equation heathen

[DireWolfSpirit]

I've always enjoyed Sagan

discussing the 4th dimension and flatland-http://youtu.be/iTG0hG-8qrc

[Sci-2]

I've always enjoyed Sagan

discussing the 4th dimension and flatland-http://youtu.be/iTG0hG-8qrc

Flatland for the win for sure.

=-=-=

Scientists show future events decide what happens in the past

Quantum physics is a weird world. It studies subatomic particles, which are the essential building blocks of reality. All matter, including ourselves are made up of them. But, the laws governing the tiny microscopic world seem to be different to those dictating how larger objects behave in our own macroscopic reality.

Quantum laws tend to contradict common sense. At that level, one thing can be two different things simultaneously and be at two different places at the same time. Two particles can be entangled and, when one changes its state, the other will also do so immediately, even if they are at opposite ends of the universe – seemingly acting faster than the speed of light.

Particles can also tunnel through solid objects, which should normally be impenetrable barriers, like a ghost passing through a wall. And now scientists have proven that, what is happening to a particle now, isn't governed by what has happened to it in the past, but by what state it is in the future – effectively meaning that, at a subatomic level, time can go backwards.

To bamboozle you further, this should all be going on right now in the subatomic particles which make up your body.

I think people who casually accept retrocausality haven't thought this through, just as people who think Past/Present/Future is illusory. We experience time going forward, and we experience a present.

So the illusion has forward, linear time. But this is a case where illusion is reality, in the sense that an illusion of change is changing within the context of that illusion.