The Arrow Of Time

[John Clark]

To all those out there who think their own privet theory can explain consciousness I’d be curious to know how you can account for the single most important thing about conscious beings, they can observe the arrow of time. I am almost tempted to say that the very definition of a conscious being is something that can see the arrow of time. And yet at the fundamental level all the laws of physics are reversible, in fact even the laws of logic are; if I gave you line 9 of a valid proof in pure number theory you could deduce both what line 10 must be and what line 8 must have been. So why do we perceive that time has a preferred direction?

Yes I know that there are vastly more high entropy states than low ones so it’s overwhelmingly likely that tomorrow entropy will be higher than it was today, but by using the very same reversible logic and reversible physical laws we could also conclude that entropy was almost certainly higher yesterday than it was today, but that is clearly not the case. So if the arrow of time doesn't come from physical law it must come from the initial conditions and we need to add a past hypothesis, that is in the distant past for some reason entropy was much lower than it is today. 

Perhaps the arrow is caused by the fact that there was a discontinuity at one end of the time line called the Big Bang and, although we don’t yet know enough to be certain, there may not even be another end to the line and it may go on endlessly. So maybe it’s like the preferred direction in space that we all experience, we all know there is a difference between up and down but it’s a local difference, people in other parts of the Earth have other ideas of what the direction of up and down are. Maybe the direction of time is also a local situation cause by the very low entropy conditions of the Big Bang, where “local” means the observable universe. If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

And I don’t want to hear that the arrow of time is just a illusion unless you can say exactly how this illusion works, after all both consciousness and illusions are perfectly legitimate subjective phenomenon.

  John K Clark  

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/23/2013 11:32 AM, John Clark wrote:
>
> Yes I know that there are vastly more high entropy states than low

> ones so it�s overwhelmingly likely that tomorrow entropy will be

> higher than it was today, but by using the very same reversible logic
> and reversible physical laws we could also conclude that entropy was
> almost certainly higher yesterday than it was today, but that is
> clearly not the case. So if the arrow of time doesn't come from
> physical law it must come from the initial conditions and we need to
> add a past hypothesis, that is in the distant past for some reason
> entropy was much lower than it is today.
>

Logically we would infer that entropy was lower yesterday, and will be
higher tomorrow.

Consciousness can distinguish past from future because accumulation of
memories is not a time symmetric process.

> Perhaps the arrow is caused by the fact that there was a discontinuity

> at one end of the time line called the Big Bang and, although we don�t

> yet know enough to be certain, there may not even be another end to

> the line and it may go on endlessly. So maybe it�s like the preferred

> direction in space that we all experience, we all know there is a

> difference between up and down but it�s a local difference, people in

> other parts of the Earth have other ideas of what the direction of up
> and down are.

Yes. The direction of future time is the direction that interactions
actually go in.

> Maybe the direction of time is also a local situation cause by the

> very low entropy conditions of the Big Bang, where �local� means the
> observable universe.

Sounds like a tautology to me, not an explanation.

> If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to
> explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must
> explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

Why is it necessary to assume that there was ever a state of nothingness?


Kermit

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 10:32 AM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

To all those out there who think their own privet theory can explain consciousness I’d be curious to know how you can account for the single most important thing about conscious beings, they can observe the arrow of time. I am almost tempted to say that the very definition of a conscious being is something that can see the arrow of time. And yet at the fundamental level all the laws of physics are reversible, in fact even the laws of logic are; if I gave you line 9 of a valid proof in pure number theory you could deduce both what line 10 must be and what line 8 must have been. So why do we perceive that time has a preferred direction?

Storing information (setting a bit) requires energy.  Energy can only be used to perform useful work in the same direction we consider the arrow of time to point.  Therefore, this is only one preferred direction of time through which brains can operate, and it happens to be the one in which entropy generally increases.

Jason

 

Yes I know that there are vastly more high entropy states than low ones so it’s overwhelmingly likely that tomorrow entropy will be higher than it was today, but by using the very same reversible logic and reversible physical laws we could also conclude that entropy was almost certainly higher yesterday than it was today, but that is clearly not the case. So if the arrow of time doesn't come from physical law it must come from the initial conditions and we need to add a past hypothesis, that is in the distant past for some reason entropy was much lower than it is today. 

Perhaps the arrow is caused by the fact that there was a discontinuity at one end of the time line called the Big Bang and, although we don’t yet know enough to be certain, there may not even be another end to the line and it may go on endlessly. So maybe it’s like the preferred direction in space that we all experience, we all know there is a difference between up and down but it’s a local difference, people in other parts of the Earth have other ideas of what the direction of up and down are. Maybe the direction of time is also a local situation cause by the very low entropy conditions of the Big Bang, where “local” means the observable universe. If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

And I don’t want to hear that the arrow of time is just a illusion unless you can say exactly how this illusion works, after all both consciousness and illusions are perfectly legitimate subjective phenomenon.

  John K Clark  

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 03:32, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

To all those out there who think their own privet theory can explain consciousness I’d be curious to know how you can account for the single most important thing about

When it comes to privet theories, I tend to hedge my bets :)

 

conscious beings, they can observe the arrow of time. I am almost tempted to say that the very definition of a conscious being is something that can see the arrow of time. And yet at the fundamental level all the laws of physics are reversible, in fact even the laws of logic are; if I gave you line 9 of a valid proof in pure number theory you could deduce both what line 10 must be and what line 8 must have been. So why do we perceive that time has a preferred direction?

Because we're embedded in the entropy gradient. Not an answer in itself, but it's a necessary precondition to constructing one to accept that fact. Assuming primitive materialism for a moment, brains are made of atoms which are embedded in the entropy gradient via long stretches of causal connections stretching back to the BB (and into the presumably infinite future). The links in these chains are individually time reversible, but the reversibility is swamped by the global existence of an entropy gradient.

Yes I know that there are vastly more high entropy states than low ones so it’s overwhelmingly likely that tomorrow entropy will be higher than it was today, but by using the very same reversible logic and reversible physical laws we could also conclude that entropy was almost certainly higher yesterday than it was today, but that is clearly not the case. So if the arrow of time doesn't come from physical law it must come from the initial conditions and we need to add a past hypothesis, that is in the distant past for some reason entropy was much lower than it is today. 

So far so good. That is the answer to Boltzmann's speculation that the world had come into existence as a statistical fluctuation. The universe has a boundary condition in one time direction, but apparently not the other one (due to accelerating expansion. It's possible conscious beings exist because of dark energy, effectively).

Perhaps the arrow is caused by the fact that there was a discontinuity at one end of the time line called the Big Bang and, although we don’t yet know enough to be certain, there may not even be another end to the line and it may go on endlessly. So maybe it’s like the preferred direction in space that we all experience, we all know there is a difference between up and down but it’s a local difference, people in other parts of the Earth have other ideas of what the direction of up and down are. Maybe the direction of time is also a local situation cause by the very low entropy conditions of the Big Bang, where “local” means the observable universe. If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

This is also my opinion. To be exact, the BB created what looks like a very simple state (one that was more or less in theormodynamic equilibrium at any given moment, I believe) but the expansion of space keeps "stoking up" the entropy gradient. So it's the *shape* of space-time that creates the gradient. Intuitively, the expansion creates more available states for the universe to occupy in one time direction compared to the opposite one (if you consider space-time to made of Planck cells for example, there should be more of them in the future than the past. This is true even if the Holographic principle is invoked, if not quite true to the same extent).

And I don’t want to hear that the arrow of time is just a illusion unless you can say exactly how this illusion works, after all both consciousness and illusions are perfectly legitimate subjective phenomenon.

I try to believe that whenever my birthday rolls around, but so far, so....not.

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 12:23, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 10:32 AM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

To all those out there who think their own privet theory can explain consciousness I’d be curious to know how you can account for the single most important thing about conscious beings, they can observe the arrow of time. I am almost tempted to say that the very definition of a conscious being is something that can see the arrow of time. And yet at the fundamental level all the laws of physics are reversible, in fact even the laws of logic are; if I gave you line 9 of a valid proof in pure number theory you could deduce both what line 10 must be and what line 8 must have been. So why do we perceive that time has a preferred direction?

Storing information (setting a bit) requires energy.  Energy can only be used to perform useful work in the same direction we consider the arrow of time to point.  Therefore, this is only one preferred direction of time through which brains can operate, and it happens to be the one in which entropy generally increases.

I wouldn't say "happens to be". This is necessarily so. However this is also just an observation based on the existence of an entropy gradient: the actual process is time reversible (unless it involves neutral kaon decay).

[ghi...@gmail.com]

excuse the naïve question, but how does this idea of time as entropy work with effects of time observed in Relativity? For example, why would time as entropy go slower in a gravitational field? Or why would time as entropy be frame dependent? Why is time dramatically slower near the speed of light, relative to some slow moving frame?

 

Or the concept of spacetime...how does that work with time as entropy?

 

I'm not saying there has to be a complete explanation, but is there some sense of how this would work?

 

Apologies for ignorance / naivety here. Don't know a lot about the subject.

 

My personal thought would be that the fact our best physical theories don't satisfactorily explain time should be read to mean, we will need a more fundamental physical theory before time can be explained.

 

It seems doubtful time itself will be a concept through which we will be able to discover this more fundamental theory, because there doesn't seem to be any physical way to get a grip on time. Which means no way to formulate basic theories of a falsifiable nature.

 

My guess would be for a more fundamental theory of causality that will reveal time as just one of its many manifestations.

 

As an aside about Consciousness...quick question to John. I remember in the old FoR days some of your arguments built on a proposition you had that consciousness was invisible to natural selection. At the time, I pointed out that, if brain arrangements involving consciousness were a little more efficient than other arrangments, that difference in efficiency would be felt by natural selection. I never got an answer....or not that I noticed. Do you have an answer to this?

 

 

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 07:47, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/23/2013 11:32 AM, John Clark wrote:

Yes I know that there are vastly more high entropy states than low ones so it’s overwhelmingly likely that tomorrow entropy will be higher than it was today, but by using the very same reversible logic and reversible physical laws we could also conclude that entropy was almost certainly higher yesterday than it was today, but that is clearly not the case. So if the arrow of time doesn't come from physical law it must come from the initial conditions and we need to add a past hypothesis, that is in the distant past for some reason entropy was much lower than it is today.

Logically we would infer that entropy was lower yesterday, and will be higher tomorrow.

Consciousness can distinguish past from future because accumulation of memories is not a time symmetric process.

Perhaps the arrow is caused by the fact that there was a discontinuity at one end of the time line called the Big Bang and, although we don’t yet know enough to be certain, there may not even be another end to the line and it may go on endlessly. So maybe it’s like the preferred direction in space that we all experience, we all know there is a difference between up and down but it’s a local difference, people in other parts of the Earth have other ideas of what the direction of up and down are.

Yes.  The direction of future time is the direction that interactions actually go in.

This isn't an answer to Mr Clark's question though, just an observation (it can be paraphrased "there exists an entropy gradient") 

Maybe the direction of time is also a local situation cause by the very low entropy conditions of the Big Bang, where “local” means the observable universe.

Sounds like a tautology to me, not an explanation.

It isn't quite correct either, as I say in my other post. The entropy gradient is created dynamically by the expansion of the universe rather than all at once in the big bang.

If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

Why is it necessary  to assume that there was ever a state of nothingness?

That is indeed a different question entirely. The explanation for the AOT comes from the existence of an expanding universe but doesn't have any traction with its origin, rather as evolution explains the development of life but not its origin.

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 12:43, <ghi...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, June 23, 2013 4:32:48 PM UTC+1, John K Clark wrote:

To all those out there who think their own privet theory can explain consciousness I’d be curious to know how you can account for the single most important thing about conscious beings, they can observe the arrow of time. I am almost tempted to say that the very definition of a conscious being is something that can see the arrow of time. And yet at the fundamental level all the laws of physics are reversible, in fact even the laws of logic are; if I gave you line 9 of a valid proof in pure number theory you could deduce both what line 10 must be and what line 8 must have been. So why do we perceive that time has a preferred direction?

Yes I know that there are vastly more high entropy states than low ones so it’s overwhelmingly likely that tomorrow entropy will be higher than it was today, but by using the very same reversible logic and reversible physical laws we could also conclude that entropy was almost certainly higher yesterday than it was today, but that is clearly not the case. So if the arrow of time doesn't come from physical law it must come from the initial conditions and we need to add a past hypothesis, that is in the distant past for some reason entropy was much lower than it is today. 

Perhaps the arrow is caused by the fact that there was a discontinuity at one end of the time line called the Big Bang and, although we don’t yet know enough to be certain, there may not even be another end to the line and it may go on endlessly. So maybe it’s like the preferred direction in space that we all experience, we all know there is a difference between up and down but it’s a local difference, people in other parts of the Earth have other ideas of what the direction of up and down are. Maybe the direction of time is also a local situation cause by the very low entropy conditions of the Big Bang, where “local” means the observable universe. If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

And I don’t want to hear that the arrow of time is just a illusion unless you can say exactly how this illusion works, after all both consciousness and illusions are perfectly legitimate subjective phenomenon.

  John K Clark  

 

excuse the naïve question, but how does this idea of time as entropy work with effects of time observed in Relativity? For example, why would time as entropy go slower in a gravitational field? Or why would time as entropy be frame dependent? Why is time dramatically slower near the speed of light, relative to some slow moving frame?

You are making a "level confusion" here, i.e. confusing time with the arrow of time. Entropy is an emergent effect which gives time a direction, at least as experienced by macroscopic beings such as us. This direction is what we call the AOT, i.e. it's the fact that we observe macroscopic events in one time direction (towards the future from the past) to be significantly different to the hypothetical time-reversed versions, which are only ever observed at the microscopic level (atoms colliding and suchlike). The AOT doesn't create time, or drive it, or define it, or anything else of that sort. It isn't a fundamental property, while time is - or if it isn't, it's emergent at a lower level than the AOT.

Try replacing "entropy" in the above questions with "evolution", say, since that's another emergent effect. For example "why would time as evolution be frame dependent?" Then you will see that the questions don't make sense.

[ghi...@gmail.com]

Liz - thanks...I shall have to go away and think about what you've said here :O)

 

Couple of questions though:

 

a) Does your view above require there is such thing as 'directionless time' in existence, which the emergent effect of entropy gives direction to? It's just that I thought I'd seen some physicists say they believed time is wholly emergent from entropy (i.e. not just the direction but the whole shebang). Am I wrong about that?

 

b) If some pre-existent 'time' can get its direction from entropy, does that require just one concept of direction to exist in physical law, attachable to time? What about other emergent properties that open up different directions? Why wouldn't time be influenced by those also? One example would be the, sort of, 'networky' properties of very large scale structures thought to be primarily dominated by Dark Matter? I mention those only because networks have their own universal laws....currently being discovered down the hall in Network Science. Some of these probably reflect emergent concepts of directionality itself. Why wouldn't time go in directions like that instead of the directionality of entropy? Or as well as? Or some resultant in the middle?

 

I suppose I'm just asking whether this idea of emergent entropy providing a direction for time, requires the direction of entropy to be the only direction things happen in.  

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 13:45, <ghi...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Liz - thanks...I shall have to go away and think about what you've said here :O)

 

Couple of questions though:

 

a) Does your view above require there is such thing as 'directionless time' in existence, which the emergent effect of entropy gives direction to? It's just that I thought I'd seen some physicists say they believed time is wholly emergent from entropy (i.e. not just the direction but the whole shebang). Am I wrong about that?

I haven't come across that, and it appears to be putting things the wrong way around. The arrow of time can be said to come from entropy (or to just be another term for the same thing) but not time itself.

 

b) If some pre-existent 'time' can get its direction from entropy, does that require just one concept of direction to exist in physical law, attachable to time? What about other emergent properties that open up different directions? Why wouldn't time be influenced by those also? One example would be the, sort of, 'networky' properties of very large scale structures thought to be primarily dominated by Dark Matter? I mention those only because networks have their own universal laws....currently being discovered down the hall in Network Science. Some of these probably reflect emergent concepts of directionality itself. Why wouldn't time go in directions like that instead of the directionality of entropy? Or as well as? Or some resultant in the middle?

I believe there is some Anthropic principle argument for why time has to have one dimension, rather than several. (I will now wait to be jumped on from a great height for invoking the AP...)

 

I suppose I'm just asking whether this idea of emergent entropy providing a direction for time, requires the direction of entropy to be the only direction things happen in.  

I think so, as far as we know. I guess the MWI suggests that things happen "sideways in time" as well (as they used to say in SF stories).

[ghi...@gmail.com]

On Monday, June 24, 2013 2:53:04 AM UTC+1, Liz R wrote:

On 24 June 2013 13:45, <ghi...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Liz - thanks...I shall have to go away and think about what you've said here :O)

 

Couple of questions though:

 

a) Does your view above require there is such thing as 'directionless time' in existence, which the emergent effect of entropy gives direction to? It's just that I thought I'd seen some physicists say they believed time is wholly emergent from entropy (i.e. not just the direction but the whole shebang). Am I wrong about that?

I haven't come across that, and it appears to be putting things the wrong way around. The arrow of time can be said to come from entropys (or to just be another term for the same thing) but not time itself.

 

I would have thought between time and the arrow of time the first and more important question would be what is 'time' without its arrow. Is that one well understood then? What is this thing, directionless time? I mean, what does it do if it has no direction. Is it a point? Or lots of points? or does it go in all directions...perhaps randomly. What properties describe it, or how is it defined?

 

 

b) If some pre-existent 'time' can get its direction from entropy, does that require just one concept of direction to exist in physical law, attachable to time? What about other emergent properties that open up different directions? Why wouldn't time be influenced by those also? One example would be the, sort of, 'networky' properties of very large scale structures thought to be primarily dominated by Dark Matter? I mention those only because networks have their own universal laws....currently being discovered down the hall in Network Science. Some of these probably reflect emergent concepts of directionality itself. Why wouldn't time go in directions like that instead of the directionality of entropy? Or as well as? Or some resultant in the middle?

I believe there is some Anthropic principle argument for why time has to have one dimension, rather than several. (I will now wait to be jumped on from a great height for invoking the AP...)

 

I wasn't thinking so much of time having lots of dimensions, so much as what sort of criteria would refute the concept of time being one object and the direction of time being provided by another. I was thinking maybe there has to only be the one direction. I guess if AP says time can only have one dimension that would be the case. Unless that one dimension can be a resultant.

 

Anyway, cheers. 

[Bill Taylor]

Good old Arrow of Time!   Always sure to raise a lot of dust and hackles!
It's like a bout of malaria, or plague of measles, that always comes back
after the appropriate interval, to spottify the next generation of babies.

So I will join in to help spread immunity.   ;-)

On Monday, June 24, 2013 3:32:48 AM UTC+12, John K Clark wrote:

 the single most important thing about conscious beings, 

they can observe the arrow of time. I am almost tempted to say 

that the very definition of a conscious being is something

that can see the arrow of time.

So our cat Squiggles is unconcious then?   Damn!

And yet at the fundamental level all the laws of physics are reversible,

Only if one takes a sufficiently narrow view of what is a law of physics.
 

in fact even the laws of logic are; if I gave you line 9 of 

a valid proof in pure number theory you could deduce both 

what line 10 must be and what line 8 must have been.

Well, neither could be deduced for sure, and you'd have
a much better chance with line 8 than with 10.

So why do we perceive that time has a preferred direction?

OC you should say a preferred *sense*, but who wants to know that.

> in the distant past for some reason entropy was much lower than it is today. 

 
A much more precise formulation.

Perhaps the arrow is caused by the fact that 

there was a discontinuity at one end of the time line

Yes, that's a formal cause; whether it's an efficient one is a whole nother matter.
 

maybe it’s like the preferred direction in space that we all experience, 

we all know there is a difference between up and down

And we all easily forget that time, unlike space and other Hilbertian dimensions
is *essentially* 1-dimensional.  THIS is perhaps the key featuire of time,
that the smulchers never notice, in their keenness to compare it to space.
 

why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

That is of course a good question.  (though whether a "why" question about
things that are *everything*, is meaningful, is a prior philosophical question).
 
But even if we disposed of THAT question satisfactorily, it would still
leave us with an unanswered question:  why, when it became something,
did the something start out with such fantastically HUGE neg-entropy?

Here is something to ponder, regarding that.

Let's suppose that the universe will eventually reverse and crunch bigly.
(Even if it won't we can still imagine.)   After all that time, entropy
will be fairly low, random photons and neutrinos and not much else;
even the black holes (already with vast entropy) will evaporate
and gain even more.  BUT, this ultra-high entropy universe will
finally be collapsing again, and it will eventually head toward
a Big Crunch, though one with huge entropy, (unlike the Bang.)

So what will happen?  All the photons and neutrinos (and stray
bits of baryonic matter and B-holes, if any have survived in a shorter
expansion phase), ALL this junk will be re-converted into pure energy,
the photon waves gathering vastly shorter wavelengths in those last
few attoseconds, and, actually, looking not so much like high entropy
any more; but wait - there's more.

Let us suppose that at the appropriately small scale it re-bounces
and starts to re-produce a second BB.  This bang will still have the same
ultra-high local energy density, and at ABOUT THE SAME TIME
as in our case, will start to produce quarks then baryons as happened
last time, and they will condense willy-nilly out of such an expanding
(but initially ultra-hyper-hot mess).  AND NOTE - they condense out
as mostly, *hydrogen nuclei*, same as last time.  Same as last time,
because in a BB there doesn't really seem to BE room for entropy
or negentropy - when everything is together, it loses meaning.

So at last, when nuclei have separated, and electrons have appeared
and attached to become atoms, everything is mostly hydrogen,
WHICH IS, BY ITSELF, the very highest neg-entropy form of matter.
It's the fact that most stuff is hydrogen rather than anything else,
that "causes" (formally) the huge amount of neg-entropy we start with,
and allows stars and life and modern art to appear and do their thing.
Their highly neg-entropic thing.

And this fact, hydrogen condensation, which casues neg-entropy,
is due to the intrinsic "laws of physics", and due, OC, to starting
with the right energy density.  And every BB and BC and re-BB has
the same quantity of energy, (due to the laws of physics), and
the same starting volume, (due to the laws of physics), so will
bang out the same way and produce a low-entropic hydrogen
universe (due to the laws of physics).

This all seems so obvious to me that I cannot think why it
has not appeared in popularizations of these matters.

Now OC, the universe may only ever have had one BB,
and may never even have one BC, but that is neither here
nor there.  The half-cycle (at least) that we ARE in, is
going to behave just the same way as if it were part of
a ceaseless sequence of full cycles.

Provided only that it keeps the same energy, the same
initial size (10^-37 or whtever it is that QGrav determines),
and at least one BB, and the laws of physics dictate this
low entropic start.

Or so it seems to me.

-- Tentative Taylor

** Consciousness - the result of quantum effects in the brain,
                             amplified by chaos theory.

** Galaxies - the rsult of quantium effects in the big bang,
                    amplified by chaos theory.

[LizR]

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 17:28, <ghi...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, June 24, 2013 2:53:04 AM UTC+1, Liz R wrote:

On 24 June 2013 13:45, <ghi...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

Liz - thanks...I shall have to go away and think about what you've said here :O)

 

Couple of questions though:

 

a) Does your view above require there is such thing as 'directionless time' in existence, which the emergent effect of entropy gives direction to? It's just that I thought I'd seen some physicists say they believed time is wholly emergent from entropy (i.e. not just the direction but the whole shebang). Am I wrong about that?

I haven't come across that, and it appears to be putting things the wrong way around. The arrow of time can be said to come from entropys (or to just be another term for the same thing) but not time itself.

 

I would have thought between time and the arrow of time the first and more important question would be what is 'time' without its arrow. Is that one well understood then? What is this thing, directionless time? I mean, what does it do if it has no direction. Is it a point? Or lots of points? or does it go in all directions...perhaps randomly. What properties describe it, or how is it defined?

I believe it's generally thought to be a dimension with somewhat different properties from the 3 dimensions of space.  The AOT gives a direction to it, without that you would have thermodynamic equilibrium. In fact a lot of bits of the universe are at thermodynamic equilibrium, but unless it happens globally you get an entropy gradient. Which I suspect you can't get rid of while the universe continues to expand, although it's possible it may be caused by neutral kaon decay (the only subatomic particle interaction known to violate time symmetry).

 

b) If some pre-existent 'time' can get its direction from entropy, does that require just one concept of direction to exist in physical law, attachable to time? What about other emergent properties that open up different directions? Why wouldn't time be influenced by those also? One example would be the, sort of, 'networky' properties of very large scale structures thought to be primarily dominated by Dark Matter? I mention those only because networks have their own universal laws....currently being discovered down the hall in Network Science. Some of these probably reflect emergent concepts of directionality itself. Why wouldn't time go in directions like that instead of the directionality of entropy? Or as well as? Or some resultant in the middle?

I believe there is some Anthropic principle argument for why time has to have one dimension, rather than several. (I will now wait to be jumped on from a great height for invoking the AP...)

 

I wasn't thinking so much of time having lots of dimensions, so much as what sort of criteria would refute the concept of time being one object and the direction of time being provided by another. I was thinking maybe there has to only be the one direction. I guess if AP says time can only have one dimension that would be the case. Unless that one dimension can be a resultant.

If time could have more than one entropy gradient life would be a lot more interesting (not to mention science fictional). See "Collision with Chronos" by Barrington Bayley for an attempt at describing a universe with more than one entropy gradient.

[Bill Taylor]

On Monday, June 24, 2013 12:38:12 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

 

When it comes to privet theories, I tend to hedge my bets :)

LOL!!
 
And if you let rooms to a vegetarian, you'll have a herbacious boarder.

> Because we're embedded in the entropy gradient.

Yes, John's query was kinda assuming this, as you next observe...

> Not an answer in itself, but it's a necessary precondition

A formal cause, in fact, as opposed to an efficient cause.

> This is also my opinion. To be exact, the BB created
> what looks like a very simple state (one that was more or less
> in theormodynamic equilibrium at any given moment, I believe)

Yes, but as I noticed before, this simplicity was broken,
at the point where (a) hydrogen atomes condensed out, but
(b) did not get to form (many) helium or metal atoms.

> if you consider space-time to made of Planck cells for example,
> there should be more of them in the future than the past.

Yes, that's an amusing oddity.  The ongoing MWI history of things
produces more and more staes as well, as previously fungible
states, i.e. single states, become multiple by decoherence.
I wonder if both effects are in some sense "the same", and if
they are ignorable due to the fact that in both cases the extra
stuff isn't really doing anything exciting, mostly.  These types
of speculations are beyond us at the moment, but hey - when
did that stop anyone.  This is Usenet!!

> This is true even if the Holographic principle is invoked,
> if not quite true to the same extent).

Please explain.  I know it not.

-- Backward Bill

[Bill Taylor]

On Monday, June 24, 2013 12:46:41 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

Logically we would infer that entropy was lower yesterday, and will be higher tomorrow.

Yes, but only if the "prior distribution" was appropriate. 
If we are  "in the middle" of a huge super-era of over-all randomness,
(a uniform or Boltzman prior), then it'd likely be higher entropy
both yesterday AND tomorrow (as John implied); but if we are
in the middle of a universe with a big-bang or Hubble prior,
then it is as people have been saying.  John has been asking
"WHY are we (apparently) in the middle of a bigbang-prior
universe, rather than a random-prior universe?

BTW - those are cool terms, don't you think? -
the Boltzman prior and the Hubble prior.   :)

 

Consciousness can distinguish past from future because 

accumulation of memories is not a time symmetric process.

CIGAR!!
 

Yes.  The direction of future time is the direction that interactions actually go in.

This isn't an answer to Mr Clark's question though, just an observation

(it can be paraphrased "there exists an entropy gradient") 

I think I tend to disagree.  Kermit has a good point, I think.
Namely, because it's "easy" for ripples to spread out and
it's "hard" for ripples to be fixed up to contract in just right,
interactions automatically tend to be dissipative.

If we start with a bunch of unstabl-ish particles, they will
decay to a MWI style ripple of gabillions of photons
and stuff, spreadin out.  But in a random sea of photons,
we are NEVER gonna see some MWI photons just converging
inwards, de-rippling at the *precise* times and distances
to heap up into an unstable particle.

This asymmetry, which Kermit is observing and asking about,
is what needs to be explained, and IS explained by the scenario
above - ripples spread out, not in; (no matter that there are
"backward solutions" to the relevant wave equations).
Backward solutions don't *have to* appear - they can
be fictitious, just as is a negative solution to a quadratic
equation governing an unalterably positive quantity.

It is a fact of nature, even logical nature (like Conway's Life),
that ripples go OUT, not IN.  A fact of logical nature, not
mere physical nature.   This is partly what I was getting at
earlier, when I said that there is no difficulty with the Arrow,
if one takes a suitably broad scope for "the laws of physics";
they subsist upon and thus include the laws of logic.

Wherever there is time at all; ripples will spread out,
not converge precisely in.  It's part of what time IS.

This seems obvious to me.  But I know many will disagree.

-- Baffled Bill

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 19:04, Bill Taylor <wfc.t...@gmail.com> wrote:> This is also my opinion. To be exact, the BB created

> what looks like a very simple state (one that was more or less
> in theormodynamic equilibrium at any given moment, I believe)

Yes, but as I noticed before, this simplicity was broken,
at the point where (a) hydrogen atomes condensed out, but
(b) did not get to form (many) helium or metal atoms.

This is one amongst many examples of how the expansion of the universe causes irreversible global changes (or rather, irreversible without recreating those early conditions). To start with (perhaps) the hypothetical inflaton field "condenses out" into matter when it becomes suitably diluted, then the quark-gluon plasma forms bound states, then atomic nuclei form, then atoms, then stars, planets, life, broken eggs, coffee mixing with milk......These are all, by hypothesis, due to the universe expanding, which reduces the matter/energy density and also slows particles down relative to their neighbours, effectively cooling them (because faster ones end up in a different part of space-time). This expansion and cooling leads to a whole slew of irreversible changes, some of them mentioned above, or to put it succintly, it creates an entropy gradient. Since the expansion is ongoing, the universe can never quite reach thermodynamic equilibrium; however, the rate of change slows more and more as it goes on...

> if you consider space-time to made of Planck cells for example,
> there should be more of them in the future than the past.

Yes, that's an amusing oddity.  The ongoing MWI history of things
produces more and more staes as well, as previously fungible
states, i.e. single states, become multiple by decoherence.

 

Yes I have long wondered if that might be involved in the "Planck cell" thingy. See below for more thoughts on this.

 

I wonder if both effects are in some sense "the same", and if
they are ignorable due to the fact that in both cases the extra
stuff isn't really doing anything exciting, mostly.  These types
of speculations are beyond us at the moment, but hey - when
did that stop anyone.  This is Usenet!!

The speculation isn't beyond us.

> This is true even if the Holographic principle is invoked,
> if not quite true to the same extent).

Please explain.  I know it not.

The HP is the (I assume hypothetical) idea that the physics of a 3D chunk of space-time can be described by physics of a different sort on a 2D surface enclosing that space-time. This would be an amusing oddity except that it's supported by a couple of apparently unrelated facts - the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, which is proportional to its mass, and the amount of information you can store in a volume of space is also proportional to its surface area, one of the mind blowingly counter intuitive discoveries of late 20th century physics, I believe.

 My thought when I first heard this (after the "what?!") was - perhaps the information inside a spherical region IS proportional to its volume, as you'd expect, but most of it is in other universes (branches of the multiverse) so to us it appears that it's proportional to the surface area.

[Gary Oberbrunner]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 2:47 AM, Bill Taylor <wfc.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

Same as last time,
because in a BB there doesn't really seem to BE room for entropy
or negentropy - when everything is together, it loses meaning.

Right -- the denominator in entropy is how many possible (allowed) states there are.  Statistically, it's a measure of how "mixed up" things are.  In a BB or BC, the number of possible states goes (in the limit, in those last few attoseconds) to 1, and everything is simultaneously as mixed up as it could possibly be, and not mixed up at all.

--
Gary

[LizR]

This is why I suggest deriving the entropy gradient from the expansion of the universe, which is able to generate it continually (at an ever-decreasing rate) rather than suggesting it derives from an initial low entropy condition.

Obviously the expansion derives from the BB somehow, but that's another question.

[Gary Oberbrunner]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 3:28 AM, Bill Taylor <wfc.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wherever there is time at all; ripples will spread out,
not converge precisely in.  It's part of what time IS.

This seems obvious to me.  But I know many will disagree.

I agree -- I'd just say it differently.  There are vastly more solutions (if you pick randomly from the solution space) that have the ripples going out, than in.  So it's vastly more likely we experience that happening.

--
Gary

[LizR]

On 24 June 2013 19:28, Bill Taylor <wfc.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think I tend to disagree.  Kermit has a good point, I think.

Namely, because it's "easy" for ripples to spread out and
it's "hard" for ripples to be fixed up to contract in just right,
interactions automatically tend to be dissipative.

That's an observation, not an explanation. What makes it hard or easy, given the presumed existence of time symmetry in the underlying interactions?

My suggestion is the expansion of the universe. Continually opening up more empty space between particles makes it easy for things to spread out.

[Bill Taylor]

On Monday, June 24, 2013 8:27:10 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

Yes, but as I noticed before, this simplicity was broken,
at the point where (a) hydrogen atomes condensed out, but
(b) did not get to form (many) helium or metal atoms.

This is one amongst many examples of how the expansion of the universe causes irreversible global changes (or rather, irreversible without recreating those early conditions).

Yes, undoubtedly one among many.  I pin-point it though,
as being the most obviously directly responsible for the neg-entropy
we are flooded with, that causes eggs and elephants.

BTW, an interesting bagatelle:  Most people, if you ask
them, what do we gain from the sun, will answer "energy".
This is incorrect.  We do get energy from the sun, but
we lose just as much by radiating it away at around 10^ C.
So we are NOT gaining energy - just as well, as otherwise
we would have had a climate catastrophe billions of years ago!
What we gain from the sun, is NEGENTROPY!  This is NOT,
overall, immediately lost again, but slowly accumulates,
to produce elephants and eggs, not necessarily on that order.

> This is true even if the Holographic principle is invoked,

OK, got it now.  Thanks for your simple but effective explanation.
The amount of stuff on the inside is determined by the amount
of stuff around some surface.  Cool.  And well-named.

It reminds me of Green's theorem, Gauss's theorem,
Stokes' theorem, and OC the fundmental theorem
of calculus, which are all essentially the same,
and all say that you can calculate the amount of stuff
inside by merely integrating the stuff over the surface.
Way cool!

Whether it applies to stuff other than what it traditionally
does, is another question, and in math it requires the "stuff"
to be at least continuously varying.   This is doubtful
in general.  But it's still a cool principle.

> the amount of information you can store in a volume
> of space is also proportional to its surface area,
> one of the mind blowingly counter intuitive discoveries
> of late 20th century physics, I believe.

It IS fascinating.  It may be due to the fact that to *retrieve*
the information usefully, (which is implied by "stored"),
one can only do area-like things, starting from the outside.
It's noteworthy that Mother Nature has observed this
principle in forming higher animal brains - stretching out
the area rather than trying for solid volume!
The fact that this large area is crunched up
like a wet dishcloth is merely technical.

 perhaps the information inside a spherical region IS proportional to its volume, as you'd expect, but most of it is in other universes (branches of the multiverse) so to us it appears that it's proportional to the surface area.

Hmmmm...  no, that doesn't sound like it's going to fly, to me.

-- Wittering Willy
 

[Bill Taylor]

On Monday, June 24, 2013 9:07:34 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

On 24 June 2013 19:28, Bill Taylor <wfc.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think I tend to disagree.  Kermit has a good point, I think.

Namely, because it's "easy" for ripples to spread out and
it's "hard" for ripples to be fixed up to contract in just right,
interactions automatically tend to be dissipative.

That's an observation, not an explanation. What makes it hard or easy,

As I said: a more basic thing, a logical law, not merely physical.
(Except to the exent that our physics has "time" at all.)

My suggestion is the expansion of the universe.

Continually opening up more empty space between particles

makes it easy for things to spread out.

It's a nice try, but I think it fails as an explanation.
Let's try one of the groups favorite things - a thought
experiment that has no possibility of veri/falsification,
even in principle.

Imagine a universe rather like ours, say with particles streaming
every which way more or less at random; but this universe
has NO expansion or contraction, and is globally like a 3-D
torus, so there is no boundary either - photons and
maybe some baryons just go whirtling round and round for ever.

Every time there is a particle-changing interaction,
whether due to instability or collisions or whatever,
there is an outward-rippling bunch of MWI waves
dissipating away.  So if there had been some neg-entropy
it would still be whittled away, quickly or slowly
(depending on energy density, just like here).

Now, if your point held, there would have to be,
equally often, a reverse process, whereby waves
would be constantly imploding inwards *just perfectly*
"tuned", so as to recreate the single interaction that
started it off.

This constant *utter perfection tuning* is simply not going
to happen.   And as this is a thought experiment of the list's
favorite type, what will happen is whatever we can get away with
saying will happen.  And as this is MY thought experiment,
what will happen is what I say will happen.

So, your point fails.  There is still an arrow of time,
(formally) determined by increasing entropy, BUT it
is not  due to expansion, because there isn't any.
It is due to the mere existence of time, and
the physical laws there which are much the same
as ours.  The fact that *individual interactions*
are time-symmetric is neither here nor there.
They are swamped by mere probabilistics.
-                    Q.E.D.    (quod easily done)

It's all a bit like what Gary O said in his clever re-run
of the same point - there are vastly more solutions
of the relevant equations that show entropy increase
than otherwise.

-- Tut-tutting Taylor

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013  Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

> Logically we would infer that entropy was lower yesterday,

No, consider all the logically possible microstates of Kermit Rose that would produce the macrostate that both you and I would recognize as Kermit Rose, the vast majority of those microstates must have evolved from high entropy states because they outnumber the low ones by an astronomical (too weak a word but I don't know of a stronger one) number.  But nobody thinks that is really true, and yet it is undeniable that you just can not deduce a asymmetry in time from thermodynamics or from any of the known laws of physics; this dichotomy is sometimes called Loschmidt's Paradox or Loschmidt's Objection.

To deduce the arrow of time the laws of physics are not enough, you must make a additional assumption, the Past Hypothesis, the assumption that the universe started out in a very low entropy condition. Today physicists say that the father of thermodynamics Ludwig Boltzmann should have deduced the existence of the Big Bang in the 19'th century without ever looking through a telescope because he had everything he needed to do so, but unfortunately he did not make the connection.   
 

> and will be higher tomorrow.

Yes, deducing that entropy will be higher tomorrow is easy to make from the laws of physics alone, but concluding that it must have been lower yesterday is impossible without the Past Hypothesis.  

> Consciousness can distinguish past from future because accumulation of memories is not a time symmetric process.

Yes but the question is why. With the laws of physics and logic being reversible where does the asymmetry in time come from, why do we remember the past but not the future, why can we change the future but not the past? Physical laws tell us how things change and if the asymmetry isn't there then it must have something to do with the initial boundary conditions.

>> If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

> Why is it necessary  to assume that there was ever a state of nothingness?

Just tell me how a super low entropy state came into existence and I will be happy. But whatever the reason for it happening is the fact remains that existence of the arrow of time implies that at one time the universe must have been in a very low state of entropy. 

  John K Clark 


 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 8:23 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Storing information (setting a bit) requires energy. Energy can only be used to perform useful work in the same direction we consider the arrow of time to point. 

I know that. The question is where does that asymmetry come from? It's not in the laws of physics or logic so the only other place to look for it is in the initial boundary conditions.

  John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

That might be related to John difficulty with the FPI in the infinite iteration of the WM-duplications, which explains well how first person appearances of randomness can emerge in a completely 3p deterministic frame.

In the 3p picture, there is no randomness at all, but almost all observers, who can be shown indeed to have non compressible "WM"-histories (like WWMWWWMMWMM ...) will feel having a random experience, and will feel has being unable to predict its first person future.

The situation is not identical, but I think that the difficulty is related.

Bruno

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/24/2013 11:36 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013  Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

> Logically we would infer that entropy was lower yesterday,

No, consider all the logically possible microstates of Kermit Rose that would produce the macrostate that both you and I would recognize as Kermit Rose, the vast majority of those microstates must have evolved from high entropy states because they outnumber the low ones by an astronomical (too weak a word but I don't know of a stronger one) number. 

Exactly.  This is the explanation for why most interactions increase entropy.

But nobody thinks that is really true,

Huh?????

Are you saying you do not believe entropy is increasing?

and yet it is undeniable that you just can not deduce a asymmetry in time from thermodynamics or from any of the known laws of physics;

This is not true.  Diffusion of gas, radiation, and matter of all types follow specific laws of physics which are clearly asymmetric.

It is only at the sub atomic particle level at there is apparent time symmetry.

this dichotomy is sometimes called Loschmidt's Paradox or Loschmidt's Objection.

It is not a paradox because it is a misunderstanding of basic physics.

To deduce the arrow of time the laws of physics are not enough, you must make a additional assumption, the Past Hypothesis, the assumption that the universe started out in a very low entropy condition. Today physicists say that the father of thermodynamics Ludwig Boltzmann should have deduced the existence of the Big Bang in the 19'th century without ever looking through a telescope because he had everything he needed to do so, but unfortunately he did not make the connection.   

The arrow of time exists.  The problem for physicists was to make their physics consistent with that fact.

Personally I think the idea that low entropy at the time of the big bang explains the arrow of time is somewhat silly.

We know from the fact that entropy, by the way entropy is defined, must, for a closed system, never decrease.

Therefore, as we look back in time we expect to see the total entropy be less than it is today.

Whatever the entropy was at the proposed beginning of our area of the universe, it was lower than it is today.

We formally predict the low entropy at the beginning times.

I think it is silly to reverse that prediction, and say that that low entropy explains the arrow of time.

It is the other way around.  The arrow of time explains why the beginning times are expected
to be on average at much lower entropy.

 

 

> and will be higher tomorrow.

Yes, deducing that entropy will be higher tomorrow is easy to make from the laws of physics alone, but concluding that it must have been lower yesterday is impossible without the Past Hypothesis.  

Don't you believe that we can generalize from,

"tomorrow, today will be yesterday".

> Consciousness can distinguish past from future because accumulation of memories is not a time symmetric process.

Yes but the question is why. With the laws of physics and logic being reversible where does the asymmetry in time come from,

Our having or not having an explanation will not change the facts.
I too would like a more complete explanation.

We already know one quite general time asymmetric process, namely diffusion.

There may be others that we have not yet discovered.

why do we remember the past but not the future,

Personally, I find it enough explanation that it is because I have lived through the past, but not lived through the future.

Work, energy, effort are all interrelated in the time forward processes.

why can we change the future but not the past?

We do not change the future.  We change only our image of what the future will be.
For us, there is only one future, but we can work to make that one future more to our liking.

Physical laws tell us how things change and if the asymmetry isn't there then it must have something to do with the initial boundary conditions.

The asymmetry is present is the process of diffusion which has had a very explicit mathematical formulation, and therefore should be considered
one of the laws of physics.

 

>> If this is in fact the cause of the arrow then for your theory to explain the most important single thing about consciousness it must explain why 13.8 billion years ago nothing decided to become something.

My own opinion is that if we stipulate that at some point "nothing" became something,
then you must logically stipulate that it also happened elsewhere infinitely often.
I won't say else-when because our sense of time is local to our own universe.  There is no way to say of two different
universes, created independently, which came first.
 
It might be reasonable to stipulate that once energy is created from nothingness, that further creation of energy is inhibited
by the presence of the energy now present.  That might be why there is an upper bound on the total mass of the visible universe.
It might also be the explanation for a lower bound for the total mass of the visible universe.

> Why is it necessary  to assume that there was ever a state of nothingness?

Just tell me how a super low entropy state came into existence and I will be happy.

:)  What ever the degree of the entropy state was at the beginning of the universe, we would classify it as super low.

When we figure out the origin of our local universe, then we will have the answer to all your questions.

But whatever the reason for it happening is the fact remains that existence of the arrow of time implies that at one time the universe must have been in a very low state of entropy. 

Sure.  We agree.  What we do not agree on is that that low state of entropy in the beginning times is an explanation for anything.

It is only because the laws of physics mandate that in a closed system entropy cannot decrease,
that we have entropy being thought of as a physics explanation of the arrow of time.

Personally I did not need that physics explanation to know that there is a difference between past and future.

Kermit

[LizR]

On 25 June 2013 11:06, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/24/2013 11:36 AM, John Clark wrote:

and yet it is undeniable that you just can not deduce a asymmetry in time from thermodynamics or from any of the known laws of physics;

This is not true.  Diffusion of gas, radiation, and matter of all types follow specific laws of physics which are clearly asymmetric.

It is only at the sub atomic particle level at there is apparent time symmetry.

I hope you see how you just contradicted yourself there, Kermit! Or rather, bear in mind that when we talk about laws of physics we need to distinguish those we consider fundamental from those that are thought to be emergent. All the laws you mention in the first paragraph are emergent, and require something over and above the fundamental (time-symmetric) laws to explain how they come to be time asymmetric.

For which I will yet again nominate the expansion of the universe, the obvious "elephant in the room".

this dichotomy is sometimes called Loschmidt's Paradox or Loschmidt's Objection. 

It is not a paradox because it is a misunderstanding of basic physics.

No, it's a paradox because the basic physics is time symmetric and the rest is emergent. Hence some extra ingredient apart from basic physics is needed to make the emergent processes time asymmetric.

To deduce the arrow of time the laws of physics are not enough, you must make a additional assumption, the Past Hypothesis, the assumption that the universe started out in a very low entropy condition. Today physicists say that the father of thermodynamics Ludwig Boltzmann should have deduced the existence of the Big Bang in the 19'th century without ever looking through a telescope because he had everything he needed to do so, but unfortunately he did not make the connection.    

The arrow of time exists.  The problem for physicists was to make their physics consistent with that fact.

Personally I think the idea that low entropy at the time of the big bang explains the arrow of time is somewhat silly.

The big bang appears to have been, at any given instant, more or less in thermodynamic equilibrium. What stopped it remaining there was the expansion of space with time. I will explain this in more detail below.

We know from the fact that entropy, by the way entropy is defined, must, for a closed system, never decrease.

Therefore, as we look back in time we expect to see the total entropy be less than it is today.

Whatever the entropy was at the proposed beginning of our area of the universe, it was lower than it is today.

We formally predict the low entropy at the beginning times.

I think it is silly to reverse that prediction, and say that that low entropy explains the arrow of time.

It is the other way around.  The arrow of time explains why the beginning times are expected
to be on average at much lower entropy.

That sounds like a circular argument to me. You need to explain the low entropy past, if there is one, not just say that it must be so by definition. 

> Consciousness can distinguish past from future because accumulation of memories is not a time symmetric process.

Yes but the question is why. With the laws of physics and logic being reversible where does the asymmetry in time come from,

Our having or not having an explanation will not change the facts.
I too would like a more complete explanation.

We already know one quite general time asymmetric process, namely diffusion.

That is emergent, hence can't be used to explain time asymmetry. It isn't fundamental physics, hence must be generated from something else. Like eggs breaking, radiation spreading outwards, diffusion, etc etc - these are all emergent processes built from countless tiny reversible processes, the problem is to explain how the AOT is imposed on them.

If you look at the Big Bang step by step you can see how time symmetric processes emerge at various stages purely because space is expanding. I explained this in a bit more detail earlier in a reply to Bill, but basically the overall effect of the expansion is to cool matter and reduce its density. This gives rise to a series of time asymmetries, upon which it seems reasonable to say the entropy gradient is founded.

* Hypothetical inflaton field dilutes enough to turn into matter...

* Quark-gluon plasma dilutes and cools enough to turn into bound states (nucleons)...

* nucleons dilute and cool enough to form nuclei...

* nuclei dilute and cool enough to form atoms...

* atoms dilute and cool enough to form stars...

(Can you spot a trend here?! :)

...the universe continues to dilute and cool indefniitely. It continues to "try" to reach thermodynamic equilibrium, but it can never actually reach it so long as the expansion continues. Each step in the process is slower than the previous one, however. For example, the black hole evaporation era will last a googol years or so, while our current phase - the "stelliferous" era - is expected to last only some 10 to the 11 or so years.

Note - all the above processes are only time-asymmetric because of the cosmic expansion. If you recreate the high energy conditions of the early big bang in the LHC, for example, they can be reversed, because the underlying physics is time symmetric with one famous (but apparently unimportant, on the cosmic scale) exception concerning how neutral kaons decay.

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/24/2013 7:48 PM, LizR wrote:

On 25 June 2013 11:06, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/24/2013 11:36 AM, John Clark wrote:

It is only at the sub atomic particle level at there is apparent time symmetry.

I hope you see how you just contradicted yourself there, Kermit! Or rather, bear in mind that when we talk about laws of physics we need to distinguish those we consider fundamental from those that are thought to be emergent. All the laws you mention in the first paragraph are emergent, and require something over and above the fundamental (time-symmetric) laws to explain how they come to be time asymmetric.

For which I will yet again nominate the expansion of the universe, the obvious "elephant in the room".

I agree that the time-asymmetric physical processes emerged from the time symmetric physical processes.

I also agree that it would be nice to have an explanation for how this happened.

However, it is obvious that it did happen.

It is not a paradox because it is a misunderstanding of basic physics.

No, it's a paradox because the basic physics is time symmetric and the rest is emergent. Hence some extra ingredient apart from basic physics is needed to make the emergent processes time asymmetric.

I will not quibble if you wish to call it a paradox until you get a satisfactory explanation for how time asymmetric processes
emerged from the time symmetric processes.

The big bang appears to have been, at any given instant, more or less in thermodynamic equilibrium. What stopped it remaining there was the expansion of space with time. I will explain this in more detail below.

I am surprised and puzzled.  Is not an essential component of the big bang hypothesis that the universe began expanding from the instant
of creation?

I think it is silly to reverse that prediction, and say that that low entropy explains the arrow of time.

It is the other way around.  The arrow of time explains why the beginning times are expected
to be on average at much lower entropy.

That sounds like a circular argument to me. You need to explain the low entropy past, if there is one, not just say that it must be so by definition.

:)  ok. We both think the other person has a circular argument.

Entropy was defined to be heat transferred divided by average temperature.

Whenever heat transfers from a high temperature place to a lower temperature place,
by the definition of entropy, entropy will increase.

In place 1, the entropy is q1/t1, where q1 is the heat energy at place 1 and t1 is the average temperature at place 1.
In place 2, the entropy is q2/t2, where q2 is the heat energy at place 2 and t2 is the average temperature at place 2.

Stipulate that t2 < t1.  Heat will flow from place 1 to place 2.

After the heat flows from place 1 to place 2,
the two places will have the same temperature, t3, intermediate between t1 and t2.

t2 < t3 < t1.

However the total heat will be the same, q1 + q2.

It is a consequence of arithmetic that

(q1 + q2) /t3  > q2/t2 + q1/t1.


This is the reason that entropy always increases.

It is a direct consequence of the definition of entropy.


The parallel re-definition of entropy at the subatomic level,
I don't know what it is,
will, with every irreversible process, result in increase in entropy.

And, in practice, there are irreversible processes at the subatomic level.

The same way of thinking that leads you to say that subatomic processes are time symmetric
would allow you to say that all processes at every level are time symmetric.

In the scenario of a man diving from a board into a pool of water, you might say that this is
necessarily a time asymmetric process.

However, in principle it could be time symmetric.  Just imagine a huge kinetic force that propelled the
man backwards upward from the water back onto the board.  The force would be precisely in the direction necessary
to time reverse the dive.

There is nothing in the laws of mechanics that forbids the existence of such a force.

That is emergent, hence can't be used to explain time asymmetry. It isn't fundamental physics, hence must be generated from something else. Like eggs breaking, radiation spreading outwards, diffusion, etc etc - these are all emergent processes built from countless tiny reversible processes, the problem is to explain how the AOT is imposed on them.

AOT????

Ah... You mean time asymmetry.

If you look at the Big Bang step by step you can see how time symmetric processes emerge at various stages purely because space is expanding. I explained this in a bit more detail earlier in a reply to Bill, but basically the overall effect of the expansion is to cool matter and reduce its density. This gives rise to a series of time asymmetries, upon which it seems reasonable to say the entropy gradient is founded.

ok.  I agree that the expansion of space is time asymmetric.

* Hypothetical inflaton field dilutes enough to turn into matter...

* Quark-gluon plasma dilutes and cools enough to turn into bound states (nucleons)...

* nucleons dilute and cool enough to form nuclei...

* nuclei dilute and cool enough to form atoms...

* atoms dilute and cool enough to form stars...

(Can you spot a trend here?! :)

:)

...the universe continues to dilute and cool indefniitely. It continues to "try" to reach thermodynamic equilibrium, but it can never actually reach it so long as the expansion continues. Each step in the process is slower than the previous one, however. For example, the black hole evaporation era will last a googol years or so, while our current phase - the "stelliferous" era - is expected to last only some 10 to the 11 or so years.

Note - all the above processes are only time-asymmetric because of the cosmic expansion. If you recreate the high energy conditions of the early big bang in the LHC, for example, they can be reversed, because the underlying physics is time symmetric with one famous (but apparently unimportant, on the cosmic scale) exception concerning how neutral kaons decay.

However, if the universe began to contract instead of expand, then time would still go forward, not backward.
The contraction would not be the mirror image of the expansion.

I'm not quite so quick to dismiss the importance of neutral kaon decay at the cosmic scale.

Kermit

[LizR]

On 25 June 2013 14:51, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/24/2013 7:48 PM, LizR wrote:

On 25 June 2013 11:06, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/24/2013 11:36 AM, John Clark wrote:

It is only at the sub atomic particle level at there is apparent time symmetry.

I hope you see how you just contradicted yourself there, Kermit! Or rather, bear in mind that when we talk about laws of physics we need to distinguish those we consider fundamental from those that are thought to be emergent. All the laws you mention in the first paragraph are emergent, and require something over and above the fundamental (time-symmetric) laws to explain how they come to be time asymmetric.

For which I will yet again nominate the expansion of the universe, the obvious "elephant in the room".

I agree that the time-asymmetric physical processes emerged from the time symmetric physical processes.

I also agree that it would be nice to have an explanation for how this happened.

However, it is obvious that it did happen.

Well, science is about trying to work out why. Otherwise....it's obvious apples fall off trees, but let's just leave it at that.

It is not a paradox because it is a misunderstanding of basic physics.

No, it's a paradox because the basic physics is time symmetric and the rest is emergent. Hence some extra ingredient apart from basic physics is needed to make the emergent processes time asymmetric.

I will not quibble if you wish to call it a paradox until you get a satisfactory explanation for how time asymmetric processes
emerged from the time symmetric processes.

Of course. Hopefully you can see the explanatory gap. It's a paradox - well, it's flatly impossible - unless you have some cause either within or outside the laws of physics. So far, "within" is kaon decay, and "outisde" (as far as we know) is some global boundary condition like the universe as a whole being time asymmetric.

The big bang appears to have been, at any given instant, more or less in thermodynamic equilibrium. What stopped it remaining there was the expansion of space with time. I will explain this in more detail below.

I am surprised and puzzled.  Is not an essential component of the big bang hypothesis that the universe began expanding from the instant of creation?

Yes it is, why does that puzzle you? The expansion drives the constituents of the universe away from thermodynamic equilibrium, without the expansion they would rapidly come to equilibrium.

I think it is silly to reverse that prediction, and say that that low entropy explains the arrow of time.
It is the other way around.  The arrow of time explains why the beginning times are expected
to be on average at much lower entropy.

That sounds like a circular argument to me. You need to explain the low entropy past, if there is one, not just say that it must be so by definition.

:)  ok. We both think the other person has a circular argument.

Well I'm trying to explain it, you appear to be just saying "it is so by definition". Maybe tautology is the word I'm looking for? 

Entropy was defined to be heat transferred divided by average temperature.

Whenever heat transfers from a high temperature place to a lower temperature place,
by the definition of entropy, entropy will increase.

In place 1, the entropy is q1/t1, where q1 is the heat energy at place 1 and t1 is the average temperature at place 1.
In place 2, the entropy is q2/t2, where q2 is the heat energy at place 2 and t2 is the average temperature at place 2.

Stipulate that t2 < t1.  Heat will flow from place 1 to place 2.

After the heat flows from place 1 to place 2,
the two places will have the same temperature, t3, intermediate between t1 and t2.

t2 < t3 < t1.

However the total heat will be the same, q1 + q2.

It is a consequence of arithmetic that

(q1 + q2) /t3  > q2/t2 + q1/t1.


This is the reason that entropy always increases.

It is a direct consequence of the definition of entropy.

Plus the first (?) law of thermodynamics, the observation that heat flows freom hot to cold. Which is an emergent process resulting from the universe being far from thermodynamic equilibrium in the past.

The parallel re-definition of entropy at the subatomic level,
I don't know what it is,
will, with every irreversible process, result in increase in entropy.

There are no irreversible processes at that level. That's Loschmidt's paradox. 

And, in practice, there are irreversible processes at the subatomic level.

Only the ones that were driven by the cosmic expansion, which are reversible if the relevant conditions are recreated, e.g. in the LHC.

The same way of thinking that leads you to say that subatomic processes are time symmetric
would allow you to say that all processes at every level are time symmetric.

Now you're getting the point of the paradox, perhaps...?

In the scenario of a man diving from a board into a pool of water, you might say that this is
necessarily a time asymmetric process.

However, in principle it could be time symmetric.  Just imagine a huge kinetic force that propelled the
man backwards upward from the water back onto the board.  The force would be precisely in the direction necessary
to time reverse the dive.

There is nothing in the laws of mechanics that forbids the existence of such a force.

Correct, so the "paradox" (or puzzle, at least) is to explain where the asymmetry comes from.

That is emergent, hence can't be used to explain time asymmetry. It isn't fundamental physics, hence must be generated from something else. Like eggs breaking, radiation spreading outwards, diffusion, etc etc - these are all emergent processes built from countless tiny reversible processes, the problem is to explain how the AOT is imposed on them.

AOT????

Ah... You mean time asymmetry.

"Arrow of Time" 

If you look at the Big Bang step by step you can see how time symmetric processes emerge at various stages purely because space is expanding. I explained this in a bit more detail earlier in a reply to Bill, but basically the overall effect of the expansion is to cool matter and reduce its density. This gives rise to a series of time asymmetries, upon which it seems reasonable to say the entropy gradient is founded.

ok.  I agree that the expansion of space is time asymmetric.

It's the only fundamental time asymmetric process we know of, apart from neutral kaon decay. So the question you have to ask yourself, as Clint Eastwood might say, is - do you think an occasional particle decay is more likely to be responsible for the arrow of time, or the expansion of the entire universe? Because so far those are the only two candidates we have to explain it.

* Hypothetical inflaton field dilutes enough to turn into matter...

* Quark-gluon plasma dilutes and cools enough to turn into bound states (nucleons)...

* nucleons dilute and cool enough to form nuclei...

* nuclei dilute and cool enough to form atoms...

* atoms dilute and cool enough to form stars...

(Can you spot a trend here?! :)

:)

...the universe continues to dilute and cool indefniitely. It continues to "try" to reach thermodynamic equilibrium, but it can never actually reach it so long as the expansion continues. Each step in the process is slower than the previous one, however. For example, the black hole evaporation era will last a googol years or so, while our current phase - the "stelliferous" era - is expected to last only some 10 to the 11 or so years.

Note - all the above processes are only time-asymmetric because of the cosmic expansion. If you recreate the high energy conditions of the early big bang in the LHC, for example, they can be reversed, because the underlying physics is time symmetric with one famous (but apparently unimportant, on the cosmic scale) exception concerning how neutral kaons decay.

However, if the universe began to contract instead of expand, then time would still go forward, not backward.
The contraction would not be the mirror image of the expansion.

You have no way to know that, it's completely hypothetical. I can almost feel Bill marshalling objections. You may as well invoke invisible pink unicorns.

I'm not quite so quick to dismiss the importance of neutral kaon decay at the cosmic scale.

You may be right, although at first sight it seems fairly minor by comparison with the expansion of the entire universe. But obviously it may be a factor, or even the factor, if you can just explain away those pesky time-asymmetries I mentioned that were created by the cosmic expansion.

I've mentioned a number of examples of how the cosmic expansion is thought to have caused various time asymmetric processes, which may well be sufficient to create the observed entropy gradient. These processes set up a whole slew of initial conditions from which entropy can only go downhill (namely the creation of matter, nucleons, atoms, stars, etc). 

I have never seen a similar list explaining how T-symmetry violation in the weak force sets up conditions for an arrow of time, but if someone can provide such a list, it would be interesting to compare them.

But so far, the current state of affairs is that the cosmic expansion provides an explanation for the arrow of time, via the creation of various initial conditions, that seem to me to be more than sufficient (and to Bill, by the way - he was convinced by just one of the items on my list!) 

[Jason Resch]

So is it right to say your question is not so much what explains the arrow of time, but why the universe was in a state of low entropy in the past?

Jason

[LizR]

I've attempted to answer this in my last few posts. The expansion of the universe creates conditions in which various types of objects are created (matter, nucleons, atoms, stars.....from which we eventually get planets and life) which are able to behave in a time asymmetric matter. This line of thought is expanding on a comment Bill made about how certain types of bound systems lead to time asymmetry (and the expansion of the universe allows the existence of dissipative systems, the most obvious being stars). Note that this doesn't require any time asymmetry in the underlying physics, and indeed all these processes can be time-reversed with sufficient energy, e.g. in the LHC. But they effectively freeze into little bundles of time asymmetry which persist in the low energy universe.

[Jason Resch]

Liz,

I think that makes a lot of sense.  Very interesting thoughts.

Jason

--

[Bill Taylor]

On Tuesday, June 25, 2013 11:06:59 AM UTC+12, KermitRose wrote:

this dichotomy is sometimes called Loschmidt's Paradox or Loschmidt's Objection.

It is not a paradox because it is a misunderstanding of basic physics.

Or more precisely, a failure to mesh those baic laws into
even more basic logical laws, as I noted before.

 

To deduce the arrow of time the laws of physics are not enough, you must make a additional assumption, the Past Hypothesis, the assumption that the universe started out in a very low entropy condition.

Not so much an assumption, but a deduction from the rest.
But OC it still needs "explaining".

> The arrow of time exists.  The problem for physicists was to make their physics consistent with that fact.

Sure it is; the problem is too narrow a view of "physics".

> Personally I think the idea that low entropy at the time of the big bang explains the arrow of time is somewhat silly.

It's a bit like the explanation that the reason a stone rolls
down a hill, is because it started at the top.  Sure, that's
an "explanation", but a rather trivial one.  We would generally
prefer to hear something about perturbations, gravity, topography,
and the like.   But to the "start-at-the-topper", these are tedious details.

> We formally predict the low entropy at the beginning times.

Strictly speaking, that's a retrodiction, but who cares.

> It is the other way around.  The arrow of time explains why the beginning times are expected
> to be on average at much lower entropy.

This squabble comes about by confusing formal causes and efficient causes.

why do we remember the past but not the future,

Or more generally, why are their records of (only) the past.

> Personally, I find it enough explanation that it is because I have lived through the past, but not lived through the future.

Be careful that such explanations are not just re-statements of the question.
Such hidden equivalences creep in easily, and can be difficult to detect.
OTOH, if the explanation satisfies you, that's it.  (But the fact that
you continue to debate it suggests that you slightly suspect there
is more to it, that maybe you might be misssing something.)

Work, energy, effort are all interrelated in the time forward processes.

why can we change the future but not the past?

I's very amusing in a sci-fi sort of way:-  we can, in principle,

1) see the past perfectly, but not change it;
2) change the future, but not see it perfectly.

> We do not change the future.

Sure we do.  Every time we step on a butterfly in the Amazon.
(And personally I think efforts should be made to find which
one is causing all the hurricanes, and pin the bastard!)

Just tell me how a super low entropy state came into existence and I will be happy.

You've been told!  It happens after every big crunch.

> Personally I did not need that physics explanation to know that there is a difference between past and future.

And I don't need modern fancy theories to tell me that the sun
moves around the earth once every day!

-- Blustering Bill

[Bill Taylor]

On Tuesday, June 25, 2013 7:45:33 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

 This line of thought is expanding on a comment Bill made about how certain types of bound systems lead to time asymmetry

 
It seems to me you have agreed with my destruction
of your claim that AOT is "caused" by expansion.

My bound system is non-expansive but still AOT-ish.

So, expansion is NOT needed for AOT, so is NOT the true cause.

Thanks for the agreement.

b

[LizR]

On 26 June 2013 03:15, Bill Taylor <wfc.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, June 25, 2013 7:45:33 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

 This line of thought is expanding on a comment Bill made about how certain types of bound systems lead to time asymmetry

 
It seems to me you have agreed with my destruction
of your claim that AOT is "caused" by expansion.

My bound system is non-expansive but still AOT-ish.

The conditions for the system to become bound are caused by the expansion. While the universe is too hot and dense, those bound systems can't exist.

[Russell Standish]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 08:15:02AM -0700, Bill Taylor wrote:
>
> It seems to me you have agreed with my destruction
> of your claim that AOT is "caused" by expansion.
>
> My bound system is non-expansive but still AOT-ish.
>
> So, expansion is NOT needed for AOT, so is NOT the true cause.
>
> Thanks for the agreement.
>
> b
>

Expansion is required to explain how the universe started off in a
state of maximum entropy, but is now in a state substantially less
than maximum entropy.

Or in other words, the evolution of order and structure. It's a
slightly different arrow of time to the second law, but still rather
important.

It also points to an answer for how the universe found itself in a low
entropy state to begin with. Any maximum entropy state is minimum
complexity, thus preferentially selected over non-maximum entropy
states from the Plenitude. But being an expanding universe allows for
both entropy to grow and for information (or negentropy) to grow, an
essential requirement for conscious observers to arise.

It was David Layzer who first came up with this line of argument,
IIRC:

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/layzer/

Cheers

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/24/2013 11:42 PM, LizR wrote:

On 25 June 2013 14:51, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

> This is the reason that entropy always increases.

It is a direct consequence of the definition of entropy.

Plus the first (?) law of thermodynamics, the observation that heat flows freom hot to cold.

Yes.

Which is an emergent process

Yes.

resulting from the universe being far from thermodynamic equilibrium in the past.

No.

However, if the universe began to contract instead of expand, then time would still go forward, not backward.

The contraction would not be the mirror image of the expansion.

You have no way to know that, it's completely hypothetical. I can almost feel Bill marshalling objections. You may as well invoke invisible pink unicorns.

Of course no matter what we say about a hypothetical universe switching from expanding to contracting,
it is completely hypothetical.

However, I do believe it makes much more sense to visualize the contraction going its own way and not be just a mirror of the expansion.  This is because
many asymmetries have emerged and those asymmetries will make impossible a mirror image replay of the expansion.

In particular, animals and people will not be born by emerging from graves or ashes.

Personally, I'm not completely convinced that the universe is expanding.  I've considered a model in which the universe is locally contracting,
but cosmically neither contracting nor expanding.  Because of the local contracting, it appears that the universe is expanding.

I have never seen a similar list explaining how T-symmetry violation in the weak force sets up conditions for an arrow of time, but if someone can provide such a list, it would be interesting to compare them.

The neutron decays into proton and electron by weak force interaction.

The occasion for the neutron decay being irreversible is that the neutron be alone, away from interaction with other neutrons and protons.

But so far, the current state of affairs is that the cosmic expansion provides an explanation for the arrow of time, via the creation of various initial conditions, that seem to me to be more than sufficient (and to Bill, by the way - he was convinced by just one of the items on my list!) 

Perhaps Cosmic expansion would make neutron decay into proton and electron more likely to be irreversible.

Kermit

[LizR]

On 26 June 2013 14:17, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 08:15:02AM -0700, Bill Taylor wrote:
>
> It seems to me you have agreed with my destruction
> of your claim that AOT is "caused" by expansion.
>
> My bound system is non-expansive but still AOT-ish.
>
> So, expansion is NOT needed for AOT, so is NOT the true cause.
>
> Thanks for the agreement.
>
> b
>

Expansion is required to explain how the universe started off in a
state of maximum entropy, but is now in a state substantially less
than maximum entropy.

Or in other words, the evolution of order and structure. It's a
slightly different arrow of time to the second law, but still rather
important.

It also points to an answer for how the universe found itself in a low
entropy state to begin with. Any maximum entropy state is minimum
complexity, thus preferentially selected over non-maximum entropy
states from the Plenitude. But being an expanding universe allows for
both entropy to grow and for information (or negentropy) to grow, an
essential requirement for conscious observers to arise.

It was David Layzer who first came up with this line of argument,
IIRC:

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/layzer/

That sounds roughly like what I was saying. I think the second law arrow emerges from the expansion arrow, which allows more states to become available, and also creates bound systems that can behave in an asymmetric manner.

[LizR]

On 26 June 2013 14:31, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

The neutron decays into proton and electron by weak force interaction.

The occasion for the neutron decay being irreversible is that the neutron be alone, away from interaction with other neutrons and protons.

Not sure if neutron decay violates T symmetry, I don't think it does.

The expansion allows neutrons and protons to exist, i.e. it stops them being quark soup, so it's a precondition for this to happen.

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 7:06 PM, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

>>But nobody thinks that is really true,

> Huh????? Are you saying you do not believe entropy is increasing?

Nobody thinks entropy is ALWAYS increasing, everybody thinks it's increasing from the present to the future but
NOBODY thinks it's increasing from the present to the past, and yet that's exactly what the fundamental laws of physics says it should do. Obviously something is missing and that something is the Past Hypothesis.
 

> The asymmetry is present is the process of diffusion which has had a very explicit mathematical formulation, and therefore should be considered one of the laws of physics. [...] We know from the fact that entropy, by the way entropy is defined, must, for a closed system, never decrease.

The arrow of time is so deeply ingrained into our way of thinking that it tends to sneak in even when we don't want it to. The law of diffusion and the ways entropy behaves were discovered by scientists setting up experiments and then observing the results, but already they've introduced time asymmetry into the mix and that's the very thing they are trying to investigate! Why didn't they observe the results and then set up the experiment? If the scientist's brains worked as symmetrically in time as the fundamental laws of physics do they could remember the future just as well as they remember the past and there would be absolutely no problem in doing science in that manner. But our human minds don't work that way, why not? If the answer isn't in the laws of physics then the asymmetry must come from a boundary condition at one end of the time line but not at the other.

 

> Diffusion of gas, radiation, and matter of all types follow specific laws of physics which are clearly asymmetric.

Gas diffuses, that is to say it moves into a higher entropy state, for one reason and one reason only, there are vastly more high entropy states than low ones. So, if things move at random that explains why the future will have a higher entropy, there are just far far far far more ways to be high entropy than low entropy. But what can we deduce about the past state that produced the state we're in right now? Using the exact same logic we conclude that it was almost certainly a high entropy state. And that can't be right.

>>this dichotomy is sometimes called Loschmidt's Paradox or Loschmidt's Objection.

> It is not a paradox because it is a misunderstanding of basic physics.

It stops being a paradox only when you add the Past Hypothesis to the laws of physics. Consider all the states the world could be in, every one of those states came from another state and will evolve into another state. If you look at the particular state we're in right now you see that there are a few states that have lower entropy than we do but the vast vast vast vast majority have higher entropy, so the probability is overwhelming that we evolved from one of those states and entropy was higher yesterday than today. But absolutely nobody including Loschmidt ever thought that can be true, everybody including Loschmidt thought we must be one on those very very very very rare medium entropy states that evolved from a lower entropy state, and the only way that belief is not almost certainly wrong is if we introduce the Past Hypothesis; and Boltzmann should indeed have announced the discovery of the Big Bang in about 1870 without ever touching a telescope.

> The arrow of time exists.  The problem for physicists was to make their physics consistent with that fact.

There is no way the laws of physics alone can explain the way things are now, you also need to know the initial conditions. 

> Personally I think the idea that low entropy at the time of the big bang explains the arrow of time is somewhat silly.

 

I don't understand why initial boundary conditions are silly or unnecessary in understanding why things are the way they are now. If I drop a ball and ask you where it is now there is no way you can answer no matter how well you know the fundamental laws of physics unless you also know the velocity and position of the ball at some point in the past.   

> What we do not agree on is that that low state of entropy in the beginning times is an explanation for anything.
It is only because the laws of physics mandate that in a closed system entropy cannot decrease,

If we could remember the future but not the past we'd say that in a closed system entropy cannot increase, and if we could remember both the past and future we'd say that entropy can never change. But there happens to be a discontinuous event in the direction of the timeline that humans call "the past" making it asymmetrical, and so they remember the past but not the future and say that in a closed system entropy cannot decrease.

> Personally I did not need that physics explanation to know that there is a difference between past and future.

Nobody doubts that there is a difference between past and future, they just want to know where that difference comes from.

 John K Clark

[Bill Taylor]

But this is a thought experiment!    (And I did post fair warning about this!)
In a thought experiement of this type, anything one says can exist, exists.

So it is still possible to have AOT without expansion.

I still win.

-- Trashing Taylor

[Bill Taylor]

On Wednesday, June 26, 2013 2:17:38 PM UTC+12, Russell Standish wrote:

> My bound system is non-expansive but still AOT-ish.
>
> So, expansion is NOT needed for AOT, so is NOT the true cause.

Expansion is required to explain how the universe started off in a
state of maximum entropy,

Not at all!  There are many different reasons it could so start.
 

but is now in a state substantially less
than maximum entropy.

My thought experiment explained in detail how this could happen.

It also points to an answer for how the universe found itself in a low
entropy state to begin with.

However, I have showed AOT doesn't need expansion.
The reason is logical, not physical.  I can't lose.

-- Terrible Taylor

[John Clark]

On 25 June 2013 14:51, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote

>>>>This is the reason that entropy always increases.

>>> It is a direct consequence of the definition of entropy.

>> Plus the first (?) law of thermodynamics, the observation that heat flows freom hot to cold.

  > Yes.

 
Actually heat always flowing from hot to cold is the second law of thermodynamics, the first says energy cannot be created or destroyed.

>>  Which is an emergent process

> Yes.

It is emergent because entropy is just a measure of the number of microstates that can produce the same macrostate, and there are many more ways to be high entropy than low. For example a crystal of salt has low entropy because there are only a few ways you can put atoms of sodium and chlorine into a lattice and still make it look like a salt crystal, but a glass of salt water has high entropy because there are lots of ways you could arrange the sodium and chlorine and hydrogen and oxygen atoms and still make it look like a glass of salt water.

 

> Personally, I'm not completely convinced that the universe is expanding. I've considered a model in which the universe is locally contracting, but cosmically neither contracting nor expanding.  Because of the local contracting, it appears that the universe is expanding.

That possibility has been investigated for over 80 years and has been largely discounted. If things are contracting locally then the spectrum of nearby galaxies should be blue shifted, and except for a few very very close ones like the Andromada Galaxy they aren't. And how do you explain the fact that now the universe not only seems to be expanding but is accelerating?

> I have never seen a similar list explaining how T-symmetry violation in the weak force sets up conditions for an arrow of time, but if someone can provide such a list, it would be interesting to compare them.

Although it's true that the weak force violates time symmetry it can't explain the arrow of time because it does obey CPT symmetry (that stands for Charge Parity Time). A Kaon particle decays by the weak force and it does very weakly prefer one direction of time when it does so, but if you reverse the electrical charge of the Kaon and its decay products and look at the entire process in a mirror then you can't tell if it's going forward or backward in time.

  John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> That might be related to John difficulty with the FPI in the infinite iteration

You've forgotten IHA. 

But Bruno, how do you explain the single most important thing about conscious beings, the Arrow of Time?

  John K Clark

 

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/26/2013 1:41 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> That might be related to John difficulty with the FPI in the infinite iteration

You've forgotten IHA. 

Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

But Bruno, how do you explain the single most important thing about conscious beings, the Arrow of Time?

Arrow of time is also very important for every interaction among [particles,waves] of  [matter,energy].

  John K Clark

Kermit

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/26/2013 11:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

On 25 June 2013 14:51, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote

>>Liz:   Which is an emergent process.

> Yes.

It is emergent because entropy is just a measure of the number of microstates that can produce the same macrostate, and there are many more ways to be high entropy than low. For example a crystal of salt has low entropy because there are only a few ways you can put atoms of sodium and chlorine into a lattice and still make it look like a salt crystal, but a glass of salt water has high entropy because there are lots of ways you could arrange the sodium and chlorine and hydrogen and oxygen atoms and still make it look like a glass of salt water.

Thank you John for explaining the meaning of entropy that applies even to subatomic particle interactions.

 

> Personally, I'm not completely convinced that the universe is expanding. I've considered a model in which the universe is locally contracting, but cosmically neither contracting nor expanding.  Because of the local contracting, it appears that the universe is expanding.

That possibility has been investigated for over 80 years and has been largely discounted. If things are contracting locally then the spectrum of nearby galaxies should be blue shifted, and except for a few very very close ones like the Andromada Galaxy they aren't. And how do you explain the fact that now the universe not only seems to be expanding but is accelerating?

The accelerating of the apparent expansion is in fact, predicted by my model.

Imagine a cluster of rocks in space falling toward the Earth.  At 1000 kilometers up, each rock will be a certain distance from each of the other rocks.
As they fall Earthward, the closer rocks will fall faster because they are closer and the further away rocks will fall slower because they are farther away.
From the prospective of each rock, all the other rocks, except those at the same distance from the Earth center, will appear to be accelerating away.  The farther away, the greater the relative acceleration.

Also, there will be a slight tendency for rocks equally distant to move closer to each other because they are falling along convergent radii.

In this model, the Andromeda Galaxy and our galaxy are nearly the same distance from the attracting center of the universe,
while other galaxies are different distances. 
We also need to consider orbital motions of our galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy within our local cluster of galaxies.
 
The galaxies that we can see are only about 2.5 percent of all the galaxies in the universe.

At some maximal distance from this universal center, new galaxy clusters are forming, and beginning their fall toward the center.

This is my model.  Can anyone explain how it must necessarily fail?

 

> I have never seen a similar list explaining how T-symmetry violation in the weak force sets up conditions for an arrow of time, but if someone can provide such a list, it would be interesting to compare them.

Although it's true that the weak force violates time symmetry it can't explain the arrow of time because it does obey CPT symmetry (that stands for Charge Parity Time). A Kaon particle decays by the weak force and it does very weakly prefer one direction of time when it does so, but if you reverse the electrical charge of the Kaon and its decay products and look at the entire process in a mirror then you can't tell if it's going forward or backward in time.

John, I acknowledge that the Kaon particle decay is CPT symmetric.

However I am surprised that you do not admit that its violation of Charge parity  symmetry and time symmetry does not show
an arrow of time for the Kaon decay.

Kermit

  John K Clark

[Kermit Rose]

Here is the way I perceive the arrow of time.

As everyone as noted, we define the past and future directions in time.
The past has already happened. The future has not yet happened.

We have already defined the concept of time, and it makes sense to everyone,
because it is consistent with their personal experiences.

We observe that for every sub atomic particle interaction there is a
charge parity time symmetric interaction.

For every strong force interactions and for every electromagnetic force
interactions
there exist a time symmetric interaction. Because those interactions
are also symmetric with
respect to the triad, charge, parity, and time,
they are also symmetric with respect to the doublet, charge and parity.

These time symmetries are very useful for figuring out what interactions
can occur,
and it is neat to be able to diagram one particle going forward in time
while its anti-particle
goes backward in time.

However, the rule that a cause must come earlier in time than the effect
must still apply.

If we see a particle decay, the cause of that decay must come earlier in
time than the decay.

Because of this it is not possible to make a cause--> effect type of
explanation using the
travel backward in time diagrams.

The arrow of time is completely determined by causes coming earlier in
time than their effect.


Kermit Rose

[LizR]

Now that is a circular argument, forsooth. The arrow of time is caused by....the arrow of time, using different words. You have fallen victim to the common fallacy in these discussions of assuming our personal experience / common sense notions are meaningful at the subatomic level, my dear.

The point of using cosmic expansion and bound states to explain the entropy gradient is that they actually have some explanatory power!

[Russell Standish]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 07:08:36AM -0700, Bill Taylor wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 26, 2013 2:17:38 PM UTC+12, Russell Standish wrote:
> >
> >
> > > My bound system is non-expansive but still AOT-ish.
> > >
> > > So, expansion is NOT needed for AOT, so is NOT the true cause.
> >
> > Expansion is required to explain how the universe started off in a
> > state of maximum entropy,
>
>
> Not at all! There are many different reasons it could so start.
>
>
> > but is now in a state substantially less
> > than maximum entropy.
> >

You cut my reason in two to make some point. What point? How is that
addressing what I wrote? I'll say it again:

"Expansion is required to explain how the universe started off in a

state of maximum entropy, but is now in a state substantially less
than maximum entropy."

Sure, I can imagine the universe did not start in a state of maximum
entropy. But such is not very likely (I think the conundrum originally
pointed to on this thread, though stated in terms of "a low entropy
state").

But is is clear that entropy is a long way from maximal now. We are
not in a heat death situation. To get from a heat death to not a heat
death requires expansion of the phase space.

>
> My thought experiment explained in detail how this could happen.
>
> It also points to an answer for how the universe found itself in a low
> > entropy state to begin with.
>
>
> However, I have showed AOT doesn't need expansion.

Sure - Bolzmann's original model did not have expansion, as expanding
universes were not known about in his day. That's not a big deal. My
comment, if you'd listened, was what expansion is needed for.

> The reason is logical, not physical. I can't lose.
>
> -- Terrible Taylor
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/25/2013 11:56 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 7:06 PM, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

> Huh????? Are you saying you do not believe entropy is increasing?

Nobody thinks entropy is ALWAYS increasing, everybody thinks it's increasing from the present to the future but
NOBODY thinks it's increasing from the present to the past, and yet that's exactly what the fundamental laws of physics says it should do. Obviously something is missing and that something is the Past Hypothesis.
 

??????????????   What language are you speaking????


In my language, if something is increasing from the present to the past, I say that it is decreasing!

> The asymmetry is present is the process of diffusion which has had a very explicit mathematical formulation, and therefore should be considered one of the laws of physics. [...] We know from the fact that entropy, by the way entropy is defined, must, for a closed system, never decrease.

The arrow of time is so deeply ingrained into our way of thinking that it tends to sneak in even when we don't want it to.

As it should.

Time as a one way street is a framework in which we must understand reality.  If we throw away that framework, we create a huge
handicap for ourselves.

The law of diffusion and the ways entropy behaves were discovered by scientists setting up experiments and then observing the results, but already they've introduced time asymmetry into the mix

As they should.

and that's the very thing they are trying to investigate!

No.  The one way direction of time is not something that can be proven or disproved.

Why didn't they observe the results and then set up the experiment?

???  What results?  Are you thinking backwards in time again?

If the scientist's brains worked as symmetrically in time as the fundamental laws of physics do they could remember the future just as well as they remember the past and there would be absolutely no problem in doing science in that manner.

I see your point.

But our human minds don't work that way, why not?

Because it makes sense that time be a one way street, and it does not make sense otherwise.

If the answer isn't in the laws of physics then the asymmetry must come from a boundary condition at one end of the time line but not at the other.

No.  Look elsewhere.

As Bill Taylor pointed out, explaining ever increasing entropy by it being less at the beginning of the universe is like
explaining that a ball rolls downhill because at the beginning it was at the top of the hill.

Knowing that the ball started out at the top of the hill does not explain what caused it to roll down hill rather than stay at the top.

Look for an explanation to explain why asymmetric processes can emerge from symmetric processes.

Until you can explain how asymmetric processes can emerge from symmetric processes, then you can not explain increase in entropy.

 

> Diffusion of gas, radiation, and matter of all types follow specific laws of physics which are clearly asymmetric.

Gas diffuses, that is to say it moves into a higher entropy state, for one reason and one reason only, there are vastly more high entropy states than low ones.

Yes.  I appreciate your clarifying this aspect of entropy.

So, if things move at random that explains why the future will have a higher entropy, there are just far far far far more ways to be high entropy than low entropy. But what can we deduce about the past state that produced the state we're in right now? Using the exact same logic we conclude that it was almost certainly a high entropy state. And that can't be right.

Huh?????   Your argument clearly shows that the future time is expected to have higher entropy.

This implies that present time has higher entropy than past time, because present is the future with respect to the past.

Therefore past time has lower entropy.

I cannot see how you managed to infer the opposite.

>>this dichotomy is sometimes called Loschmidt's Paradox or Loschmidt's Objection.

> It is not a paradox because it is a misunderstanding of basic physics.

It stops being a paradox only when you add the Past Hypothesis to the laws of physics. Consider all the states the world could be in, every one of those states came from another state and will evolve into another state. If you look at the particular state we're in right now you see that there are a few states that have lower entropy than we do but the vast vast vast vast majority have higher entropy, so the probability is overwhelming that we evolved from one of those states and entropy was higher yesterday than today.

????  Makes no sense to me.  Is there another way you can explain what you have in mind?

But absolutely nobody including Loschmidt ever thought that can be true, everybody including Loschmidt thought we must be one on those very very very very rare medium entropy states that evolved from a lower entropy state, and the only way that belief is not almost certainly wrong is if we introduce the Past Hypothesis; and Boltzmann should indeed have announced the discovery of the Big Bang in about 1870 without ever touching a telescope.

What makes sense to me is that if some quantity is never decreasing, and sometimes increasing,
that it will be less in the past, and more in the future.  It is simple logic.

> The arrow of time exists.  The problem for physicists was to make their physics consistent with that fact.

There is no way the laws of physics alone can explain the way things are now, you also need to know the initial conditions.

The fact that entropy never decreases for a closed system has nothing to do with initial conditions.

> Personally I think the idea that low entropy at the time of the big bang explains the arrow of time is somewhat silly.

 

I don't understand why initial boundary conditions are silly or unnecessary in understanding why things are the way they are now. If I drop a ball and ask you where it is now there is no way you can answer no matter how well you know the fundamental laws of physics unless you also know the velocity and position of the ball at some point in the past.   

The position of the bouncing ball is a quite different matter.  In the bouncing ball image, entropy would correspond to the rule that the ball continues
to bounce.  The rule that the ball continues to bounce is independent of the initial position of the ball.

> What we do not agree on is that that low state of entropy in the beginning times is an explanation for anything.
It is only because the laws of physics mandate that in a closed system entropy cannot decrease,

If we could remember the future but not the past we'd say that in a closed system entropy cannot increase, and if we could remember both the past and future we'd say that entropy can never change.

True, but not relevant to the discussion.

But there happens to be a discontinuous event in the direction of the timeline that humans call "the past" making it asymmetrical, and so they remember the past but not the future and say that in a closed system entropy cannot decrease.

I do not understand your language.  If you throw away the convention of past, present, and future, then you have no way of discussing
any dynamic process.

> Personally I did not need that physics explanation to know that there is a difference between past and future.

Nobody doubts that there is a difference between past and future, they just want to know where that difference comes from.

I suggest you take the one way street aspect of time as a fundamental, and use it to explain everything else.

Kermit

 John K Clark

[LizR]

On 27 June 2013 13:36, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

Time as a one way street is a framework in which we must understand reality.  If we throw away that framework, we create a huge
handicap for ourselves.

No.  The one way direction of time is not something that can be proven or disproved.

These statements seem contradictory. Unless you are saying we shouldn't think about the nature of time, just shut up and get on with...whatever. 

Nobody doubts that there is a difference between past and future, they just want to know where that difference comes from.

I suggest you take the one way street aspect of time as a fundamental, and use it to explain everything else.

That might be OK (although consider how many people have said something like "I suggest you take God as fundamental and use Him to explain everything else...") if it wasn't for the pesky way almost all the laws of physics have time symmetry built in at the bottom level. If there was something fundamental that drove time in one direction, we could accept it, but there doesn't seem to be.

Hence there is a need for an explanation, whether it be down to CPT violation by neutral kaons or the expansion of the universe, or both, or something else we haven't thought of yet.

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/26/2013 9:53 PM, LizR wrote:

On 27 June 2013 13:36, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

Time as a one way street is a framework in which we must understand reality.  If we throw away that framework, we create a huge
handicap for ourselves.

No.  The one way direction of time is not something that can be proven or disproved.

These statements seem contradictory. Unless you are saying we shouldn't think about the nature of time, just shut up and get on with...whatever.

No.  we should definitely think about he nature of time.  We should realize that time is a construct of our mind.  It does not exist in reality.

Our concept of time is a vast oversimplification of the reality.

We can look at the hands of a clock move around in a circle.  We can design digital clocks to count seconds.

We can calculate how many seconds it takes light to reach us from the moons of Jupiter.

But in order to build a model of space time, it is necessary to make some simplifying assumptions.

One of those essential assumptions is to identify past time with negative numbers, and future time with positive numbers.

Present time is identified with 0.

This is a flaw in our simple concept of time.

Present time is really a time interval, not a point in time.

But the main point is that we define time measurement as always increasing.  We never experience an undo operation in reality.

Subjective time is always the future becoming the present.




Special relativity pointed to one of the flaws in our concept of time. 
objects in different frames of reference experience time at different rates.

We have not yet developed the math to express how time would be experienced at every point in space.

The only thing we can be sure of is that at each point, what has already happened will be called the past,
and what has not yet happened will be called the future.

Nobody doubts that there is a difference between past and future, they just want to know where that difference comes from.

I suggest you take the one way street aspect of time as a fundamental, and use it to explain everything else.

That might be OK (although consider how many people have said something like "I suggest you take God as fundamental and use Him to explain everything else...")

:)  Excellent point.

Of course, it is quite debatable whether or not the God hypothesis has ever been used to explain anything.

Mostly it has just required all sorts of rationalizations to stay alive.

The concept of time as a one way street for particle interactions is a framework by which we can organize our knowledge.

It may be the reversing the direction of time gives us an equally valid framework for most types of particle interactions.
This is not a problem for the useability of the time only forward model.

if it wasn't for the pesky way almost all the laws of physics have time symmetry built in at the bottom level.

That is your current perception.  I do not yet know how to argue against it.

If there was something fundamental that drove time in one direction, we could accept it, but there doesn't seem to be.

Space has more than one dimension.  Space has at least three dimensions.  It seems to me that this is a fundamental aspect of reality
that drives time in one direction.

Hence there is a need for an explanation, whether it be down to CPT violation by neutral kaons

Slight quibble here:  It is CP violation by neutral kaons, not CPT violation.

or the expansion of the universe,

The expansion of the universe is one of the factors that must be considered in the discussion of entropy.
How it impacts entropy I am not prepared to say.

or both, or something else we haven't thought of yet.

:)  I feel very sure it is something we have not yet talked about.

Kermit

[LizR]

On 27 June 2013 14:48, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/26/2013 9:53 PM, LizR wrote:

On 27 June 2013 13:36, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

Time as a one way street is a framework in which we must understand reality.  If we throw away that framework, we create a huge
handicap for ourselves.

No.  The one way direction of time is not something that can be proven or disproved.

These statements seem contradictory. Unless you are saying we shouldn't think about the nature of time, just shut up and get on with...whatever. 

No.  we should definitely think about he nature of time.  We should realize that time is a construct of our mind.  It does not exist in reality.

 

It gives a convincing imitation of existing, though. 

if it wasn't for the pesky way almost all the laws of physics have time symmetry built in at the bottom level.

That is your current perception.  I do not yet know how to argue against it.

It isn't my perception. You can find it in lots of books, papers and so on about fundamental particle interactions. They mainly respect T-symmetry, with one well known exception that may have some relevance to the arrow of time (but wasn't necessary for any of the stages I identified which created time asymmetry due to the cosmic expansion, so unless I missed something major it is probably only a small component).

If there was something fundamental that drove time in one direction, we could accept it, but there doesn't seem to be.

Space has more than one dimension.  Space has at least three dimensions.  It seems to me that this is a fundamental aspect of reality
that drives time in one direction.

I may need just a little more explanation of that.

Hence there is a need for an explanation, whether it be down to CPT violation by neutral kaons

Slight quibble here:  It is CP violation by neutral kaons, not CPT violation.

If there was no T violation then it wouldn't be relevant. 

or the expansion of the universe,

The expansion of the universe is one of the factors that must be considered in the discussion of entropy.
How it impacts entropy I am not prepared to say.

Well I am, and I did a few posts ago. I will dig up the list if you have forgotten it....maybe I will anyway.....lemme see........

Ah yes.

Expansion causes the inflaton field to turn into matter

Expansion causes quark soup to turn into nucleons

Expansion causes nucleons to turn into atoms

Expansion causes atoms to turn into stars

(That's enough time asymmetry produced from symmetric processes by the cosmic expansion for now -- Ed).

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/26/2013 11:11 PM, LizR wrote:

On 27 June 2013 14:48, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

No.  we should definitely think about he nature of time.  We should realize that time is a construct of our mind.  It does not exist in reality.

 

It gives a convincing imitation of existing, though.

:)  Other things that give a convincing imitation of existing are:

[1] The direct transfer of momentum of the golf club to the golf ball.
Closer to reality is that the golf ball is not a rigid object.  Instead the golf club dents the golf ball.  For a very brief interval of time,
the ball is sitting on the tee, with the club head pushed into the golf ball.  Then the golf ball's elasticity comes into play, and the ball springing
back to its original shape is the force that causes the ball to fly away from the golf club.

[2] Your dining room table appears to be flat.  How flat it is depends on what distance scale you examine it.
At the molecular level, it is not flat at all.

[3]  We speak of the present moment.  It takes a measurable interval of time for the brain impulses to travel from one given area of the brain to
another given area.  The time interval of the "Present moment" cannot be less than a measurably non zero time interval.
So the present being only a point in time is another common illusion.

if it wasn't for the pesky way almost all the laws of physics have time symmetry built in at the bottom level.

That is your current perception.  I do not yet know how to argue against it.

It isn't my perception. You can find it in lots of books, papers and so on about fundamental particle interactions. They mainly respect T-symmetry, with one well known exception that may have some relevance to the arrow of time (but wasn't necessary for any of the stages I identified which created time asymmetry due to the cosmic expansion, so unless I missed something major it is probably only a small component).

Correction:  It is your current perception due to your having read and accepted lots of books, papers, and so on about fundamental particle interactions.

If there was something fundamental that drove time in one direction, we could accept it, but there doesn't seem to be.

Space has more than one dimension.  Space has at least three dimensions.  It seems to me that this is a fundamental aspect of reality
that drives time in one direction.

I may need just a little more explanation of that.

It ties in with your expansion of the universe hypothesis.

If the expansion was to be a causal agent for time asymmetry, then that expansion needs to be in a two or three dimensional space. 
And it might be that two dimensions is not enough.

More research on this point would be appropriate.  I might not know as much as I think I know about it.

Hence there is a need for an explanation, whether it be down to CPT violation by neutral kaons

Slight quibble here:  It is CP violation by neutral kaons, not CPT violation.

If there was no T violation then it wouldn't be relevant.

Exactly.  That is why I point out this quibble point.

This web page explains the meaning of CPT, CP, and P violations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation



CP violation is equivalent to time asymmetry.

No case of CPT violation has yet been found.


Kermit

[LizR]

On 27 June 2013 15:53, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/26/2013 11:11 PM, LizR wrote:

On 27 June 2013 14:48, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

No.  we should definitely think about he nature of time.  We should realize that time is a construct of our mind.  It does not exist in reality.

 

It gives a convincing imitation of existing, though.

:)  Other things that give a convincing imitation of existing are:

[1] The direct transfer of momentum of the golf club to the golf ball.
Closer to reality is that the golf ball is not a rigid object.  Instead the golf club dents the golf ball.  For a very brief interval of time,
the ball is sitting on the tee, with the club head pushed into the golf ball.  Then the golf ball's elasticity comes into play, and the ball springing
back to its original shape is the force that causes the ball to fly away from the golf club.

[2] Your dining room table appears to be flat.  How flat it is depends on what distance scale you examine it.
At the molecular level, it is not flat at all.

[3]  We speak of the present moment.  It takes a measurable interval of time for the brain impulses to travel from one given area of the brain to
another given area.  The time interval of the "Present moment" cannot be less than a measurably non zero time interval.
So the present being only a point in time is another common illusion.

Your third example indicates the existence of time. 

if it wasn't for the pesky way almost all the laws of physics have time symmetry built in at the bottom level.

That is your current perception.  I do not yet know how to argue against it.

It isn't my perception. You can find it in lots of books, papers and so on about fundamental particle interactions. They mainly respect T-symmetry, with one well known exception that may have some relevance to the arrow of time (but wasn't necessary for any of the stages I identified which created time asymmetry due to the cosmic expansion, so unless I missed something major it is probably only a small component).

Correction:  It is your current perception due to your having read and accepted lots of books, papers, and so on about fundamental particle interactions.

So it's the perception of most scientists working in the field. OK.

If there was something fundamental that drove time in one direction, we could accept it, but there doesn't seem to be.

Space has more than one dimension.  Space has at least three dimensions.  It seems to me that this is a fundamental aspect of reality
that drives time in one direction.

I may need just a little more explanation of that.

It ties in with your expansion of the universe hypothesis.

If the expansion was to be a causal agent for time asymmetry, then that expansion needs to be in a two or three dimensional space. 
And it might be that two dimensions is not enough.

More research on this point would be appropriate.  I might not know as much as I think I know about it.

So you're saying that expansion of 3 dimensional space is responsible for time asymmetry. As you know I'm fine with that hypothesis.

Hence there is a need for an explanation, whether it be down to CPT violation by neutral kaons

Slight quibble here:  It is CP violation by neutral kaons, not CPT violation.

If there was no T violation then it wouldn't be relevant.

Exactly.  That is why I point out this quibble point.

This web page explains the meaning of CPT, CP, and P violations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation

CP violation is equivalent to time asymmetry.

No case of CPT violation has yet been found.

Yes, I'm getting mixed up. The weak force exhibits T asymmetry, which is the important detail in discussions of the AOT. That is what I was intending to refer to.

However, so far my list of expansion caused time asymmetries is standing up quite well, and T-symmerty violations in the weak force appear minor or unnecessary to the existence of an antropy gradient. At least I haven't heard any objections so far, so if anyone has any I'd like to know about it.

[Bill Taylor]

On Thursday, June 27, 2013 3:11:35 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

 We should realize that time is a construct of our mind.  It does not exist in reality.

 

It gives a convincing imitation of existing, though. 

LOL!   Nice one!   
Along with all those other things that have been claimed not to exist, such as

** space
** consciousness
** objective physical reality  (oops sorry, Brunologists!)

If there was something fundamental that drove time in one direction, we could accept it, but there doesn't seem to be.

Other than the simple probabilitstics of macroscopic action.   (i.e. Ripples!)
 

Space has more than one dimension.  Space has at least three dimensions. 

Do you have a reference for that?
 

It seems to me that this is a fundamental aspect of reality
that drives time in one direction.

Not at all.  A universe with one time dimension and 5 space dimensions
is quite acceptable to the holy see.
 

> Expansion causes the inflaton field to turn into matter

> Expansion causes quark soup to turn into nucleons

> Expansion causes nucleons to turn into atoms

> Expansion causes atoms to turn into stars

Though as noted, expansion is not really necessary for this last.
In strict logic, once we have lots of hydrogen, and also gravity,
then stars and elephants are bound to ensue because of
the huge locked-in neg-entropy of the hydrogen.

And even the earlier ones could be similarly nit-picked away, I suspect.
However, we are clearly never going to agree on this.
The start-at-the-topper will never see eye-to-eye with the topographer.

> (That's enough time asymmetry produced from symmetric processes by the cosmic expansion for now -- Ed).

Time asymmetry is quite producible from symmetric processes,
by merely starting with low entropy, WITHOUT expansion.
But admittedly expansion makes it a lot easier!
It facilitates the appearance of high negentropy
from mere high energy density.  But it is not *necessary*.

-- Bulldog Bill

[LizR]

On 27 June 2013 17:53, Bill Taylor <wfc.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

Time asymmetry is quite producible from symmetric processes,
by merely starting with low entropy, WITHOUT expansion.

"Nothing buttery" from you, Bill? Tsk. If you stopped the Big Bang at any stage it would rapidly com into thermal equilibrium. The only way to get high "negentropy" from a system that starts more or less at equilibrium is to expand the phase space, as John (and I, though not in the same words) jave pointed out.
 

But admittedly expansion makes it a lot easier!
It facilitates the appearance of high negentropy
from mere high energy density.  But it is not *necessary*.

I would be willing to be swayed by an actual argument to that effect, if you have one and it's good enough. "Once we have hydrogen" indeed! Try making that from quark soup without first cooling it down.

[Bruno Marchal]

Well, John, you are not so lucky with me. I defended the idea that consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably due to the salvia reports.

But, anyway, subjective time *is* obtained by the logic of Bp & p, confirming your feeling and Brouwer's theory of consciousness as subjective time. So, me, Brouwer, *and* the universal machine confirms your analysis (only salvia seems to throw a doubt on this, so I will not insist on this).

You take a modal logic (usual propositional logical symbol + the symbol "B"), and you interpret the propositional variables (p, q, r, ...) by arithmetical sentences, and "B" by the Gödel's provability arithmetical predicate. Then you define "knowing p", or Kp, for each arithmetical sentence p, by Bp & p.

Then we can show that the logic S4Grz axiomatizes soundly and completely the logic of that K:

K(p -> q) -> (Kp -> Kq)

Kp -> p

Kp -> KKp

+

K(K(p -> Kp) -> p) -> p  (the Grzegorczyk formula (Grz)).  (and the modus ponens rule, + the p/Bp rule).

The S4 theory gives already a temporal logic of evolving knowledge states, and the Grz logic makes that evolution irreversible or antisymmetrical, in many semantics of S4Grz.

With Kp defined by Bp & Dt & p, (the sensible "hypostase), we lost Kp -> KKp, and we get a notion of immediate "probability" confirmation, which can be used for the irreversible subjectivity in the self-duplication experience.

Bruno

  John K Clark

 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

On 26 Jun 2013, at 20:41, Kermit Rose wrote:

On 6/26/2013 1:41 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> That might be related to John difficulty with the FPI in the infinite iteration

You've forgotten IHA. 

Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

First Person Indeterminacy (in the self-duplication frame). It is the building conceptual block of the whole UDA and the AUDA. (Arithmetical translation of the UDA).

But Bruno, how do you explain the single most important thing about conscious beings, the Arrow of Time?

Arrow of time is also very important for every interaction among [particles,waves] of  [matter,energy].

Physics suggests that there is no time. Comp also, but that is not yet entirely clear. I suspect that in both case, time is a internal statistical view.

Completely symmetrical Turing universal systems exist.

Bruno

  John K Clark

Kermit

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/27/2013 3:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>
> consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least
> subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably
> due to the salvia reports.
>

Subjective time is also strongly related to brain temperature and to stress.

Kermit

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/27/2013 3:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 26 Jun 2013, at 20:41, Kermit Rose wrote:

Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

First Person Indeterminacy (in the self-duplication frame). It is the building conceptual block of the whole UDA and the AUDA. (Arithmetical translation of the UDA).

:)

Thank you. 

Next questions:

What is meant by First Person Indeterminacy?

What is a self-duplication frame?


Kermit

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 9:36 PM, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

>> Nobody thinks entropy is ALWAYS increasing, everybody thinks it's increasing from the present to the future but
NOBODY thinks it's increasing from the present to the past, and yet that's exactly what the fundamental laws of physics says it should do. Obviously something is missing and that something is the Past Hypothesis.

> ??????????????   What language are you speaking????

I am speaking a language in which time is not already assumed to have a preferred direction, and that is the only language you can speak if you want to figure out why the arrow of time points in one direction but not the other.
 

> In my language, if something is increasing from the present to the past, I say that it is decreasing!

Of course you say that, and you do so because you can remember the past but not the future. But why?
 

>>The arrow of time is so deeply ingrained into our way of thinking that it tends to sneak in even when we don't want it to.

 

> As it should.

Not if you're trying to figure it out! If you assume the thing you're trying to prove it's all pointless.
 

> Time as a one way street is a framework in which we must understand reality.  If we throw away that framework, we create a huge handicap for ourselves.

Then we must work under a handicap, there is no alternative. I never said this would be easy.

> >The law of diffusion and the ways entropy behaves were discovered by scientists setting up experiments and then observing the results, but already they've introduced time asymmetry into the mix

> As they should.

 If you introduce time asymmetry into a experiment then it can not tell you anything new about time asymmetry.

>> and that's the very thing they are trying to investigate!

> No.  The one way direction of time is not something that can be proven or disproved.

Baloney! If you can prove that there is a boundary condition at one end of the timeline but not the other then things MUST evolve differently when they move in one direction along it than the other.

>> Why didn't they observe the results and then set up the experiment?

> ???  What results? 

The results of the experiment of course.

> Are you thinking backwards in time again?

I most certainly am, the question is why aren't you?

> it makes sense that time be a one way street, and it does not make sense otherwise.

Because you can remember the past but not the future and we're trying to figure out why that is so.

> As Bill Taylor pointed out, explaining ever increasing entropy by it being less at the beginning of the universe is like
explaining that a ball rolls downhill because at the beginning it was at the top of the hill.

Yes it is indeed like that. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

> Knowing that the ball started out at the top of the hill does not explain what caused it to roll down hill rather than stay at the top.

A low entropy state evolves into a high entropy state not because there is some mysterious force of nature that makes  it happen but simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than low. And because our brains can remember the past but not the future we say that entropy increases with time. I want to know why our brains work that way.
 

> Until you can explain how asymmetric processes can emerge from symmetric processes, then you can not explain increase in entropy.

Asymmetry cannot come from symmetric processes like the laws of physics, that's why we must stick in something extra to explain the arrow of time, and that is the past hypothesis.

>> Although it's true that the weak force violates time symmetry it can't explain the arrow of time because it does obey CPT symmetry (that stands for Charge Parity Time). A Kaon particle decays by the weak force and it does very weakly prefer one direction of time when it does so, but if you reverse the electrical charge of the Kaon and its decay products and look at the entire process in a mirror then you can't tell if it's going forward or backward in time.

> John, I acknowledge that the Kaon particle decay is CPT symmetric. However I am surprised that you do not admit that its violation of Charge parity  symmetry and time symmetry does not show an arrow of time for the Kaon decay.

If the weak force caused the arrow of time then it would be easy to make a Kaon Telegraph machine that operated as described above that could send messages into the past informing you of today's winning lottery number. It doesn't work, therefore it's not the cause of the arrow of time.

>> It stops being a paradox only when you add the Past Hypothesis to the laws of physics. Consider all the states the world could be in, every one of those states came from another state and will evolve into another state. If you look at the particular state we're in right now you see that there are a few states that have lower entropy than we do but the vast vast vast vast majority have higher entropy, so the probability is overwhelming that we evolved from one of those states and entropy was higher yesterday than today.

 

> ????  Makes no sense to me.  Is there another way you can explain what you have in mind?

If you think that entropy causes the arrow of time then if you want to prove it you can't assume it and you have to start out by assuming time has no preferred direction and hope you can figure out a way to derive such a direction from entropy.

Looking at things from nowhen (that may not be a word but it should be) all the states that the universe could potentially be in evolved from another state and will evolve into yet another state. There are many many many many more high entropy states than low entropy states. Therefore it is very very very likely that our present medium entropy state will evolve into a high entropy state. Therefore it is also very very very likely that our present medium state was evolved from a high entropy state. Nobody thinks that last part can be true but it must be true unless we add in the past hypothesis, the idea that there is a boundary condition at one end of the timeline with the other end being unbounded.    

> The fact that entropy never decreases for a closed system has nothing to do with initial conditions.

You could know all the laws of physics that there are to know and you still wouldn't know where a baseball will be one second after it left the pitcher's hand unless you knew more about the initial conditions, like how fast the baseball was going one second ago; and there is no way you can figure out what direction the arrow of time should point unless you know something about the initial conditions that existed at the Big Bang.

> I suggest you take the one way street aspect of time as a fundamental, and use it to explain everything else.

It's silly to assume that something is fundamental if there is already a very good explanation for it. If the universe started out in a very low entropy state then time MUST be a one way street. That is a FACT although I don't pretend it solves all the mysteries of existence, we still don't know why the Big Bang happened, why there is something rather than nothing, but it's a good start.

  John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

Hopefully.

Bruno

[Bruno Marchal]

On 27 Jun 2013, at 13:58, Kermit Rose wrote:

On 6/27/2013 3:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 26 Jun 2013, at 20:41, Kermit Rose wrote:

Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

First Person Indeterminacy (in the self-duplication frame). It is the building conceptual block of the whole UDA and the AUDA. (Arithmetical translation of the UDA).

:)

Thank you. 

Next questions:

What is meant by First Person Indeterminacy?

If you can survive with a digital brain or body, you survive classical teleportation.

If you survive classical teleportation, you are duplicable.

To understand, you have to do the following thought experience. You are in Helsinki and you are told that you will be scanned, "read", and annihilate, "cut", and reconstituted ("pasted") in both Washington and Moscow.

The "first person discourse" is defined by the personal memory, like in a diary that the teleported person take with her. It is annihilated and/or reconstituted with the experiencer of the teleportation experience.

The "third person discourse" is in the diary of some external observer, meaning, not being destroyed or created in that experiment.

What do you expect to write, in the future about what you will lived in that experiment? Some training, and easy combinatory calculus show that, in the iteration of such self-duplication, almost all machines predict white noise. 

You cannot predict 'I will feel nothing, or die', because that contradicts comp (which we *assume*).

You cannot predict "I will feel to be in W and in M". Because this will be contradicted in both reconstituted diaries, describing in which precise city they feel to be reconstituted, and that was what the question was about.

You cannot predict W, (resp. M) despite it will be "accidentally" verified by one reconstituted, but comp makes it pure luck, as the iteration of it can illustrate.

This matters, as we are not in front of such random oracle, but we are on the border of the computable and the non computable. 

What is a self-duplication frame?

It means when taking seriously the distinction between the first person and the third person discourses when discussing about relative duplication, or superposition, of people or people's state.

Bruno

Kermit

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:13 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>I defended the idea that consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably due to the salvia reports.

I don't quite see how Salvia hispanica (commonly called "chia", the stuff used in chia pets) has to do with the price of eggs. 

>>Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

> First Person Indeterminacy

So FPI means First Person [Translation: I ]  Indeterminacy [Translation: Don't Know ]. Well I suppose "FPI" does sound more impressive to the rubes than "I dunno", especially if they don't know what FPI stands for and are afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid.

> It is the building conceptual block of the whole UDA and the AUDA.

You've forgotten IHA. 

>  But, anyway, subjective time *is* obtained by the logic of Bp & p, confirming your feeling and Brouwer's theory of consciousness as subjective time. So, me, Brouwer, *and* the universal machine confirms your analysis (only salvia seems to throw a doubt on this, so I will not insist on this). You take a modal logic (usual propositional logical symbol + the symbol "B"), and you interpret the propositional variables (p, q, r, ...) by arithmetical sentences, and "B" by the Gödel's provability arithmetical predicate. Then you define "knowing p", or Kp, for each arithmetical sentence p, by Bp & p. Then we can show that the logic S4Grz axiomatizes soundly and completely the logic of that K:

K(p -> q) -> (Kp -> Kq)

Kp -> p

Kp -> KKp

+

K(K(p -> Kp) -> p) -> p  (the Grzegorczyk formula (Grz)).  (and the modus ponens rule, + the p/Bp rule).

The S4 theory gives already a temporal logic of evolving knowledge states, and the Grz logic makes that evolution irreversible or antisymmetrical, in many semantics of S4Grz. With Kp defined by Bp & Dt & p, (the sensible "hypostase), we lost Kp -> KKp, and we get a notion of immediate "probability" confirmation, which can be used for the irreversible subjectivity in the self-duplication experience.

I very much doubt that a single organic being that resides on the surface of this planet could be found who can understand the above dog's breakfast and finds that it clearly explains why time has a preferred direction.

  John K Clark

[LizR]

On 28 June 2013 08:25, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:13 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>I defended the idea that consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably due to the salvia reports.

I don't quite see how Salvia hispanica (commonly called "chia", the stuff used in chia pets) has to do with the price of eggs. 

it isn't that one, it's something like "salvia divinorum" (?) and reputedly gives one insights into the nature of reality, time, etc.

A quick check confirms the spelling (and description)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum

I see that Bruno has already induced one of its reported effects in you (and Bill, I guess)... "Uncontrollable laughter"  So it works! :D

>>Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

> First Person Indeterminacy

So FPI means First Person [Translation: I ]  Indeterminacy [Translation: Don't Know ]. Well I suppose "FPI" does sound more impressive to the rubes than "I dunno", especially if they don't know what FPI stands for and are afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid.

Well, "I dunno" IS the basis for all scientific experiments, so I wouldn't dismiss it so lightly! But in this case it has a more specific meaning. In a quantum context (for example) it means that the observed uncertainty is a first person effect - the experimenter is uncertain about the result of the experiment because of branching. In comp it seems to have a similar meaning, as far as I know (there are certain things that are intrinsically uncertain from a person's point of view but certain to another viewpoint - in the MWI case the certainty is in the deterministic equations, the uncertainty is in the probabalistic outcome, as seen by any given experimenter.)

> It is the building conceptual block of the whole UDA and the AUDA.

You've forgotten IHA. 

What's IHA?

(UDA is the Universal Dovetailer Argument, I believe. I think AUDA is an enhanced (augmented?) version of it.)

 

>  But, anyway, subjective time *is* obtained by the logic of Bp & p, confirming your feeling and Brouwer's theory of consciousness as subjective time. So, me, Brouwer, *and* the universal machine confirms your analysis (only salvia seems to throw a doubt on this, so I will not insist on this). You take a modal logic (usual propositional logical symbol + the symbol "B"), and you interpret the propositional variables (p, q, r, ...) by arithmetical sentences, and "B" by the Gödel's provability arithmetical predicate. Then you define "knowing p", or Kp, for each arithmetical sentence p, by Bp & p. Then we can show that the logic S4Grz axiomatizes soundly and completely the logic of that K:

K(p -> q) -> (Kp -> Kq)

Kp -> p

Kp -> KKp

+

K(K(p -> Kp) -> p) -> p  (the Grzegorczyk formula (Grz)).  (and the modus ponens rule, + the p/Bp rule).

The S4 theory gives already a temporal logic of evolving knowledge states, and the Grz logic makes that evolution irreversible or antisymmetrical, in many semantics of S4Grz. With Kp defined by Bp & Dt & p, (the sensible "hypostase), we lost Kp -> KKp, and we get a notion of immediate "probability" confirmation, which can be used for the irreversible subjectivity in the self-duplication experience.

I very much doubt that a single organic being that resides on the surface of this planet could be found who can understand the above dog's breakfast and finds that it clearly explains why time has a preferred direction.

I'm not exactly an expert in modal logic but Bruno appears to be saying that logic alone gives rise to an arrow of time because of evolving knowledge states. I'm not sure I agree, because I think he has "smuggled" the arrow of time into the argument (logicians doing logic are entropy-based systems, after all! But maybe I'm missing the point...)

John, if there is something you don't understand, you should ask. Just deriding something because you don't personally understand it is not a scientific (or logical) approach.

Bruno, personally I don't see how you can get the A.O.T. from pure logic, but I would probably need to take a course to understand what I'm disagreeing with! (And what, in particular, is S4 theory...)

[Russell Standish]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 12:01:28PM -0400, John Clark wrote:
>
> A low entropy state evolves into a high entropy state not because there is
> some mysterious force of nature that makes it happen but simply because
> there are many more ways to be high entropy than low. And because our
> brains can remember the past but not the future we say that entropy
> increases with time. I want to know why our brains work that way.

It may not be the answer your looking for, but I would say
evolutionary processes are time assymetric (creation of information ex
nihilo), pretty much by definition, and brain processes are largely
evolutionary by nature. The latter is speculation, of course, but
there is quite a bit of evidence in its favour.

The expanding universe / expanding phase space is a necessary feature
to allow evolutionary processes to work, as I mentioned in my previous post.

Cheers

[Gary Oberbrunner]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 4:25 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:13 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>I defended the idea that consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably due to the salvia reports.

I don't quite see how Salvia hispanica (commonly called "chia", the stuff used in chia pets) has to do with the price of eggs. 

>>Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

> First Person Indeterminacy

So FPI means First Person [Translation: I ]  Indeterminacy [Translation: Don't Know ]. Well I suppose "FPI" does sound more impressive to the rubes than "I dunno", especially if they don't know what FPI stands for and are afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid.

FPI is simple.  If you accept comp (which you don't, John, so stop reading now) then a duplicator machine could create duplicates of you in two places (e.g. Washington and Moscow) - and delete the original.  You have no way of knowing, before the experiment, which of those two duplicates "you" will feel yourself to be.  Of course, there will be two separate instances of you, and each one will feel like he is "the only" real one.  But beforehand, you can't say "After the experiment, I will definitely be the one in Washington".  That's the first person indeterminacy.  

This is happening all the time with MWI; there are zillions of instances of "you" splitting off in all directions and which one you feel yourself to be after each split is indeterminate (of course from a 3rd person perspective, "all of them" is the right answer -- but from any one of their first-person perspectives that is a very wrong answer; they're all pretty sure they are The One).

 

--
Gary

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013  LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, "I dunno" IS the basis for all scientific experiments, so I wouldn't dismiss it so lightly! But in this case it has a more specific meaning. In a quantum context (for example) it means that the observed uncertainty is a first person effect - the experimenter is uncertain about the result of the experiment

Everybody, not just a experimenter, is always uncertain about everything; this is not exactly a new ground breaking discovery, so why the hell is it necessary to invent new jargon like "FPI" to describe this mundane fact? I will tell you why it is necessary, if you can't invent a new idea you can always invent a new jargon.

 

>>> It is the building conceptual block of the whole UDA and the AUDA.

 

>> You've forgotten IHA. 

> What's IHA?

 
I Hate Acronyms.

>>>  But, anyway, subjective time *is* obtained by the logic of Bp & p, confirming your feeling and Brouwer's theory of consciousness as subjective time. So, me, Brouwer, *and* the universal machine confirms your analysis (only salvia seems to throw a doubt on this, so I will not insist on this). You take a modal logic (usual propositional logical symbol + the symbol "B"), and you interpret the propositional variables (p, q, r, ...) by arithmetical sentences, and "B" by the Gödel's provability arithmetical predicate. Then you define "knowing p", or Kp, for each arithmetical sentence p, by Bp & p. Then we can show that the logic S4Grz axiomatizes soundly and completely the logic of that K:

K(p -> q) -> (Kp -> Kq)

Kp -> p

Kp -> KKp

+

K(K(p -> Kp) -> p) -> p  (the Grzegorczyk formula (Grz)).  (and the modus ponens rule, + the p/Bp rule).

The S4 theory gives already a temporal logic of evolving knowledge states, and the Grz logic makes that evolution irreversible or antisymmetrical, in many semantics of S4Grz. With Kp defined by Bp & Dt & p, (the sensible "hypostase), we lost Kp -> KKp, and we get a notion of immediate "probability" confirmation, which can be used for the irreversible subjectivity in the self-duplication experience.

>> I very much doubt that a single organic being that resides on the surface of this planet could be found who can understand the above dog's breakfast and finds that it clearly explains why time has a preferred direction.

> John, if there is something you don't understand, you should ask.

I doubt if you understand it as well as I do and I don't understand it at all, so why didn't you ask?
 

>Just deriding something because you don't personally understand it is not a scientific (or logical) approach.

 Good heavens, don't you think I've tried asking questions?!  During the last 2 years I have written at least 100 messages full of questions about Bruno's ideas, and he has written a equal number in response; and I stand by what I said, there is not a person alive who thinks the above clearly states why time has a preferred direction.

  John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 27 Jun 2013, at 22:25, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:13 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>I defended the idea that consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably due to the salvia reports.

I don't quite see how Salvia hispanica (commonly called "chia", the stuff used in chia pets) has to do with the price of eggs. 

There thousand of salvia. I was referring to salvia divinorum. It is a powerful dissociative hallucinogen, apparently non toxic, which produce an intense experience lasting 7 minutes.

It seems to illustrate in few minutes some consequences of comp that some people have difficulties to conceive.

>>Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

> First Person Indeterminacy

So FPI means First Person [Translation: I ]  Indeterminacy [Translation: Don't Know ]. Well I suppose "FPI" does sound more impressive to the rubes than "I dunno", especially if they don't know what FPI stands for and are afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid.

> It is the building conceptual block of the whole UDA and the AUDA.

You've forgotten IHA. 

Lol

>  But, anyway, subjective time *is* obtained by the logic of Bp & p, confirming your feeling and Brouwer's theory of consciousness as subjective time. So, me, Brouwer, *and* the universal machine confirms your analysis (only salvia seems to throw a doubt on this, so I will not insist on this). You take a modal logic (usual propositional logical symbol + the symbol "B"), and you interpret the propositional variables (p, q, r, ...) by arithmetical sentences, and "B" by the Gödel's provability arithmetical predicate. Then you define "knowing p", or Kp, for each arithmetical sentence p, by Bp & p. Then we can show that the logic S4Grz axiomatizes soundly and completely the logic of that K:

K(p -> q) -> (Kp -> Kq)

Kp -> p

Kp -> KKp

+

K(K(p -> Kp) -> p) -> p  (the Grzegorczyk formula (Grz)).  (and the modus ponens rule, + the p/Bp rule).

The S4 theory gives already a temporal logic of evolving knowledge states, and the Grz logic makes that evolution irreversible or antisymmetrical, in many semantics of S4Grz. With Kp defined by Bp & Dt & p, (the sensible "hypostase), we lost Kp -> KKp, and we get a notion of immediate "probability" confirmation, which can be used for the irreversible subjectivity in the self-duplication experience.

I very much doubt that a single organic being that resides on the surface of this planet could be found who can understand the above dog's breakfast and finds that it clearly explains why time has a preferred direction.

I have explained modal logic more than once on the everything list. This is supposed to be simple, but of course it is part of a branch of math, logic, which is not well taught.

If you know a bit of propositional logic, modal logic is the same with the adjunction of one unary symbol, the box, which I write often as "B", or as "[]". Then, syntactically, we can have axiom (like [] p -> [] [] p), and rules, like everywhere in logic. There is also different possible semantics, including Kripe semantics, where a modal frame is a set of so called world (which are just elements of some non empty set), and a binary relation on that set (called accessibility relation). The main close of the semantics is that []p is true in a "world" alpha if p is true in all worlds beta such that beta is accessible from alpha. Then many modal logic (including the one  axiomatizing provability) admits a sound and complete characterization in term of their accessibility Kripe structure.

Modal logic is something considered very simple. provability logic is not, so it comes quite handy that provability logic is characterized by a modal logic, the one I call G:

G is

AXIOMS:

B(p->q) -> (Bp -> Bq)

B(Bp -> p) -> Bp

RULES:

Modus Ponens:  A, A->E / E

Necessitation:  A / BA

All others logic are derived from G.

G os related to provability in arithmetic (or any Löbian theory/machine) by

1) interpret the propositional variable p by arithmetical sentences p'

2) translate modal formula in the following recursive way: A ===> T(A)

   If A is a propositional variable: T(A) = A'

   If A is ~B, T(A) is ~T(B)

  If A is (B & C), T(A) is (T(B) & T(C))

 the same for the other binary connectors,

And the main clause:

If A is BC, or []C, beweisbar('S') Beweisbar('T(C)')

In english, you just translate the modal box into the Gödel's beweisbar predicate, with the propositional letter interpreted by arithmetical sentence. 

Then you can study the modal variant like Kp (= Bp & p), which gives rise to a modal logic describing a time arrow, although a bifurcating one, which is not a problem in our context.

Any problem? It is technical of course, but computer science is technical, and it is hard to progress in comp without computer science. Like it is hard to do serious general relativity without a bit of serious differential geometry or tensor calculus.

Bruno

  John K Clark

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

Not from pure logic, that would be impossible.

But from comp and computer science. I am trying to explain this right now. the phi_i and the w_i is just the beginning of that.

but I would probably need to take a course to understand what I'm disagreeing with! (And what, in particular, is S4 theory...)

It is the classical modal theory universally accepted for a notion of introspective knowability:

it has the following axiom:

If (p -> q) is knowable, and if p is knowable then q is knowable

if p is knowable, then it is knowable that p is knowable

if p is knowable then p is true

Or, with [] p for p is knowable:

[] (p -> q) -> ([] p -> [] q)

[] p -> [] [] p

[] p -> p

Together with the rules modus ponens (from A and A -> B you can derive B, and from A you can derive [] A).

We will come back on this, after a review of classical propositional calculus. But I intent to NOT explain you logic, before you develop a good familiarization with elementary theoretical computer science (the phi_i and the w_i).

Bruno

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 Jun 2013, at 01:57, Gary Oberbrunner wrote:

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 4:25 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:13 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>I defended the idea that consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably due to the salvia reports.

I don't quite see how Salvia hispanica (commonly called "chia", the stuff used in chia pets) has to do with the price of eggs. 

>>Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

> First Person Indeterminacy

So FPI means First Person [Translation: I ]  Indeterminacy [Translation: Don't Know ]. Well I suppose "FPI" does sound more impressive to the rubes than "I dunno", especially if they don't know what FPI stands for and are afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid.

FPI is simple.  If you accept comp (which you don't, John, so stop reading now)

From his post, there are few doubt that John accepts comp (unlike Bill). But John stopped at UDA step 3. he fails to grasp the FPI, but his arguments (the recent one on the everything list) are contradictory, oscillating between not original and delirious. It seems that John has some difficulty to distinguish in the relevant way the first and third person account of the experience.

then a duplicator machine could create duplicates of you in two places (e.g. Washington and Moscow) - and delete the original.  You have no way of knowing, before the experiment, which of those two duplicates "you" will feel yourself to be.  Of course, there will be two separate instances of you, and each one will feel like he is "the only" real one.  But beforehand, you can't say "After the experiment, I will definitely be the one in Washington".  That's the first person indeterminacy.  

This is happening all the time with MWI; there are zillions of instances of "you" splitting off in all directions and which one you feel yourself to be after each split is indeterminate (of course from a 3rd person perspective, "all of them" is the right answer -- but from any one of their first-person perspectives that is a very wrong answer; they're all pretty sure they are The One).

OK. Hope it will help.

Bruno

 

--
Gary

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

We have discussed only the FPI.

and I stand by what I said, there is not a person alive who thinks the above clearly states why time has a preferred direction.

What is above is standard modal logic, considered as one of the simplest part of propositional logic. But I know that logic is not well taught, if taught at all.

Modal logic simplifies considerably the study of provability logic, mainly thanks to a theorem by Solovay, which is part of the goal in my current explanaton to Liz. Any problem with the phi_i and w_i? That also is standard in computability theory.

Bruno

  John K Clark

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[LizR]

On 28 June 2013 19:21, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

Bruno, personally I don't see how you can get the A.O.T. from pure logic,

Not from pure logic, that would be impossible.

But from comp and computer science. I am trying to explain this right now. the phi_i and the w_i is just the beginning of that.

OK, I am very interested to find out more (if my brain can take it :)

 

[LizR]

On 28 June 2013 17:11, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>Just deriding something because you don't personally understand it is not a scientific (or logical) approach.

 Good heavens, don't you think I've tried asking questions?!  During the last 2 years I have written at least 100 messages full of questions about Bruno's ideas, and he has written a equal number in response; and I stand by what I said, there is not a person alive who thinks the above clearly states why time has a preferred direction.

Well, Bruno appears to think so. His explanation doesn't mean much to me at the moment, but I am hoping to understand more.

And your remarks were derisory, regardless of how many things you have or have not written or read in the last 2 years. I am amazed that Bruno manages to just keep calmly attempting to explain his ideas in the face of that sort of response.

[Kim Jones]

On 28/06/2013, at 9:13 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

And your remarks were derisory, regardless of how many things you have or have not written or read in the last 2 years. I am amazed that Bruno manages to just keep calmly attempting to explain his ideas in the face of that sort of response.

Bruno is a true teacher. He does not lecture - he only answers questions. He never "loses it" with anyone; the mark of a sage, if you will. He makes no assumptions about anyone's abilities to understand anything but is clearly attempting at every step of the way to help anyone interested in his ideas to grok them. I have been reading him since 1998 and it took me the best part of ten years to fully grok the FPI because I am a mathematical idiot who could not add up a column of figures correctly if you held a gun to my head. Yet - I (believe) I now understand the FPI; mainly because of his persistent translations from the hieroglyphics of modal logic into reasonably OK English. I have spent perhaps hundreds of hours just mulling over the UDA and associated ideas. I believe the duplication gedanken experiment is something that everyone who does not understand it must persevere with; mainly by framing good questions and not giving up on themselves. If a discaculic innumerate like myself can grok the UDA (not the AUDA - there I have no hope whatsoever) then all of you "brains the size of a planet" simply need to try that little bit harder. Gary's summary of the whole thing a few posts back was excellent.

Kim

===========================

Kim Jones B.Mus.GDTL

Email:     kimj...@ozemail.com.au

Mobile:   0450 963 719

Landline: 02 9389 4239

Web:       http://www.eportfolio.kmjcommp.com

"Never let your schooling get in the way of your education" - Mark Twain

[Gary Oberbrunner]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

On 28 Jun 2013, at 01:57, Gary Oberbrunner wrote:

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 4:25 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:13 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>I defended the idea that consciousness was indeed strongly related to the time, or at least subjective time, but since recently I am less sure about that, notably due to the salvia reports.

I don't quite see how Salvia hispanica (commonly called "chia", the stuff used in chia pets) has to do with the price of eggs. 

>>Bruno, please remind us what the letters FPI refer to.

> First Person Indeterminacy

So FPI means First Person [Translation: I ]  Indeterminacy [Translation: Don't Know ]. Well I suppose "FPI" does sound more impressive to the rubes than "I dunno", especially if they don't know what FPI stands for and are afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid. 

FPI is simple.  If you accept comp (which you don't, John, so stop reading now)

From his post, there are few doubt that John accepts comp (unlike Bill). But John stopped at UDA step 3. he fails to grasp the FPI, but his arguments (the recent one on the everything list) are contradictory, oscillating between not original and delirious. It seems that John has some difficulty to distinguish in the relevant way the first and third person account of the experience.

 

I thought I remembered John saying at one point that the idea that we could be substituted (at any level) by a digital computer was a wild-eyed, essentially meaningless thought experiment, would never be practical, and thus was pointless to even consider.  Isn't that right, John? 

--
Gary

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/27/2013 12:54 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 27 Jun 2013, at 13:58, Kermit Rose wrote:

Next questions:

What is meant by First Person Indeterminacy?

If you can survive with a digital brain or body, you survive classical teleportation.

If you survive classical teleportation, you are duplicable.

I make a quibble about the use of the word "survive" in this context.

It is a copy of me that survives.  Not the original me, which had been destroyed.

So, a third person observer would say I had survived.  Subjectively, the story is different.

One subjectivity has been destroyed, and another created in its place.

To understand, you have to do the following thought experience. You are in Helsinki and you are told that you will be scanned, "read", and annihilate, "cut", and reconstituted ("pasted") in both Washington and Moscow.

Personally, I would not agree to the annihilation part.

The "first person discourse" is defined by the personal memory, like in a diary that the teleported person take with her. It is annihilated and/or reconstituted with the experiencer of the teleportation experience.

OK.

The "third person discourse" is in the diary of some external observer, meaning, not being destroyed or created in that experiment.

Would you not need three third person diaries? One in Helsinki, one in Washington, and one in Moscow?

What do you expect to write, in the future about what you will lived in that experiment?

I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Washington.
I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Moscow.

Some training, and easy combinatory calculus show that, in the iteration of such self-duplication, almost all machines predict white noise.

Huh??????????????    Where does the white noise come from?

You cannot predict 'I will feel nothing, or die', because that contradicts comp (which we *assume*).

I do not assume comp, especially since I  have no idea what it means.

I am assuming only everything I believe to be true.

You cannot predict "I will feel to be in W and in M". Because this will be contradicted in both reconstituted diaries, describing in which precise city they feel to be reconstituted, and that was what the question was about.

????

There would be two copies of me.  One would be in Washington, and one would be in Moscow.
Neither would be connected to the other.

You cannot predict W, (resp. M) despite it will be "accidentally" verified by one reconstituted, but comp makes it pure luck, as the iteration of it can illustrate.

Please say this in a different way.

This matters, as we are not in front of such random oracle, but we are on the border of the computable and the non computable. 

Please say this in a different way.

What is a self-duplication frame?

It means when taking seriously the distinction between the first person and the third person discourses when discussing about relative duplication, or superposition, of people or people's state.

Is this the same as making the distinction between objective and subjective?

Kermit

[Bill Taylor]

On Thursday, June 27, 2013 6:27:37 PM UTC+12, Liz R wrote:

I would be willing to be swayed by an actual argument to that effect,

It seems not.  

Bye 4 now  -- b
 

[Bruno Marchal]

To tell you my feeling, John Clark is still an excellent student compared to my (fake) usual opponent, who just defame under my back, and ignore any questions or text I wrote. Bill is closer to that type of behavior, to help in the comparison.

I will make a new attempt to explain the FPI to John. I might have find a way to show that John believes in 0=1, in case he still persists in not seeing the point. Sorry for possible repetitions, but I sincerely think it is worth to get the TOE compatible with computationalism.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bill Taylor]

On Friday, June 28, 2013 5:11:39 PM UTC+12, John K Clark wrote:

Everybody, not just a experimenter, is always uncertain about everything; this is not exactly a new ground breaking discovery, so why the hell is it necessary to invent new jargon like "FPI" to describe this mundane fact?

Hear hear!
 

I will tell you why it is necessary, if you can't invent a new idea you can always invent a new jargon.

Cynical but spot on.
 

> What's IHA?

 
I Hate Acronyms.

My wife is president of the local chapter of DAM - mothers against dyslexia.

>> I very much doubt that a single organic being that resides on the surface of this planet could be found who can understand the above dog's breakfast and finds that it clearly explains why time has a preferred direction.

> John, if there is something you don't understand, you should ask.

When something is clearly rubbish beyond all human comprehension,
there is no point asking about it.  Garbage in, garbage out.   Like"comp".
 

I doubt if you understand it as well as I do and I don't understand it at all, so why didn't you ask?  

Now now children, be nice!
 

>Just deriding something because you don't personally understand it is not a scientific (or logical) approach.

But deriding it because it is utter BS is OK.   (I assume?)

--  Time-reversed Taylor
 

[Bruno Marchal]

I am very glad to hear that.

I think I will have to re-explain a bit to Kermit, who seems to take the wagon, but missed some post. 

I might ask you to explain the matter to Kermit, but it is perhaps a bit too much earlier, so take the explanation I will give as some revision :)

We will need to address logic too. Here the problem is that many people believes they know propositional logic, but in fact they know only the semantics, or model theory, and logic is before proof theory, and this is not simple at all.

Let me illustrate by giving you a NOT easy exercise, yet quite typical.

At some point we will have to say which are the logical axiom that we will use, or implement to define precisely the machine that we will interview (AUDA is really UDA for the dummies, where the dummies will be played by some machine).

Here are two infinities of logical axioms. For all formula or sentences A, B, C, that we will allow, we accept the following as axioms:

axioms 1: A -> (B -> A)

axioms 2: (A -> (B -> C))   ->   ((A -> B) -> (A -> C))

The only inference rule will be that if you can prove or assume some formula A and some formula A -> B, then you can derive B from them. This is the MODUS PONENS inference rule.

Not so easy exercise: try to prove the (infinitely many) formula 

A -> A

from the two scheme of axioms above.  (a scheme of axioms is the given of many axioms by the use of some "metavariables". keep calm we will come back on this). 

Like many, I use scheme of axioms to avoid a substitution rule, which can be tedious to describe.

But if you like puzzle and sudoku, it is just that type of exercise: you have to derive A -> A from the two axioms above.

It is not simple, and what is important here does not consist in solving the problem, but in understanding that it is not simple.

Of course you can derive things like (A -> A) -> ((A -> A) -> (A -> A)) from axioms 1. Just substitute A and B by (A -> A). OK? We accept A -> (B -> A) for *all* formula A and B. So you have to find the "right substitution" so that wit the modus ponens rule you get (A -> A).

Solution soon,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

We will see what John will answer, but I think you are confusing with Bill. John really defended comp and seems to have no problem up to step 2. John Clark actually produced some comp thought experiment all by himself. But Bill made often the point that comp is non sensical, and that we cannot reason through thought experiments, so we can say that he stopped at step 0 (the definition of the comp thesis that I am using).

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Gary Oberbrunner]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

On 6/27/2013 12:54 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 27 Jun 2013, at 13:58, Kermit Rose wrote:

Next questions:

What is meant by First Person Indeterminacy?

If you can survive with a digital brain or body, you survive classical teleportation.

If you survive classical teleportation, you are duplicable.

I make a quibble about the use of the word "survive" in this context.

It is a copy of me that survives.  Not the original me, which had been destroyed.

So, a third person observer would say I had survived.  Subjectively, the story is different.

One subjectivity has been destroyed, and another created in its place.

To understand, you have to do the following thought experience. You are in Helsinki and you are told that you will be scanned, "read", and annihilate, "cut", and reconstituted ("pasted") in both Washington and Moscow.

Personally, I would not agree to the annihilation part.

The "first person discourse" is defined by the personal memory, like in a diary that the teleported person take with her. It is annihilated and/or reconstituted with the experiencer of the teleportation experience.

OK.

The "third person discourse" is in the diary of some external observer, meaning, not being destroyed or created in that experiment.

Would you not need three third person diaries? One in Helsinki, one in Washington, and one in Moscow?

Sure, but one would do if s/he has remote sensors.  Sometimes the 3p observer is assumed to be all-seeing.  As long as you don't get into relativistic effects that works. 

What do you expect to write, in the future about what you will lived in that experiment?

I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Washington.
I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Moscow.

Some training, and easy combinatory calculus show that, in the iteration of such self-duplication, almost all machines predict white noise. 

Huh??????????????    Where does the white noise come from?

Each iteration produces another random letter at the end.  You start H,W, then next W, then M, then M, then W, then M, ... those WMWWMWW strings are "incompressible" (i.e. random) which is equivalent to binary white noise. By "Almost all" he means that a few will go WWWWWWW or MMMMMM or some other regular pattern, but those are in the tiny minority.

You cannot predict 'I will feel nothing, or die', because that contradicts comp (which we *assume*).

I do not assume comp, especially since I  have no idea what it means.

I am assuming only everything I believe to be true.

The whole FPI presumes comp (which means you would willingly get into the machine, i.e. you believe a digital substitute will really "be" you in some sense.)  If you don't buy that premise, or at least think it's worth thinking through the consequences of, then the rest of Bruno's arguments are of ZERO interest to you.  They ALL depend on comp, and tease out several very interesting consequences of it.  (The hope is to find a reductio ad absurdum which would make us reject comp, or else fail to do so.)  But be clear he means to assume it *for the purpose of this investigation*.  You don't actually have to be ready to do it yourself to consider the consequences.

You cannot predict "I will feel to be in W and in M". Because this will be contradicted in both reconstituted diaries, describing in which precise city they feel to be reconstituted, and that was what the question was about.

????

There would be two copies of me.  One would be in Washington, and one would be in Moscow.
Neither would be connected to the other.

He's saying you cannot sensibly write in the diary *before the experiment* that "I expect to feel myself both in W and M".   After the experiment each copy will, as you say, feel itself in only one place.  So if you did write that you'd expect to feel yourself in both places, both copies would look around them and say that prediction turned out to be false.

You cannot predict W, (resp. M) despite it will be "accidentally" verified by one reconstituted, but comp makes it pure luck, as the iteration of it can illustrate.

Please say this in a different way.

If you write in the diary beforehand "I predict I'll end up in W" you'll only be right by chance half the time.  If you iterated the experiment and predicted the string WWWMW, for instance, you'd only have a 1/32 chance of being right. 

--
Gary

[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 Jun 2013, at 14:39, Kermit Rose wrote:

On 6/27/2013 12:54 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 27 Jun 2013, at 13:58, Kermit Rose wrote:

Next questions:

What is meant by First Person Indeterminacy?

If you can survive with a digital brain or body, you survive classical teleportation.

If you survive classical teleportation, you are duplicable.

I make a quibble about the use of the word "survive" in this context.

It is a copy of me that survives.  Not the original me, which had been destroyed.

So, a third person observer would say I had survived.  Subjectively, the story is different.

One subjectivity has been destroyed, and another created in its place.

This is not a quibble. This means that you don't accept comp. You say no to the doctor who proposed you an artificial digital brain, given that he will destroy the original biological brain.

You would not use the classical teleportation as a mean of transport.

Personally, I don't know, and my point is not to pretend that comp is true, but only to show that IF comp is true, then elementary arithmetic is the theory of everything, and that we can explain both matter and mind from it, or from anything turing equivalent.

To understand, you have to do the following thought experience. You are in Helsinki and you are told that you will be scanned, "read", and annihilate, "cut", and reconstituted ("pasted") in both Washington and Moscow.

Personally, I would not agree to the annihilation part.

But would you accept that your daughter marry someone who works on mars, and use classical teleportation twice a day?

I mean, can you "accept" comp for the sake of the argument. Can you conceive that some people accept comp and practice it everyday, or would you try by all means to convince them that they are just killing themselves all the time?

The "first person discourse" is defined by the personal memory, like in a diary that the teleported person take with her. It is annihilated and/or reconstituted with the experiencer of the teleportation experience.

OK.

Good. UDA uses only that notion of first person, which, as you can see, is given in pure third person terms. It is really just the personally accessible memory, notably of the directly experience a subject can live, like looking in which city he is, for example.

The "third person discourse" is in the diary of some external observer, meaning, not being destroyed or created in that experiment.

Would you not need three third person diaries? One in Helsinki, one in Washington, and one in Moscow?

If you want. But the third person might also do the trip by plane. I don't think this is really relevant for the issue.

What do you expect to write, in the future about what you will lived in that experiment?

I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Washington.
I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Moscow.

In the same diary?  I guess you accept comp for the sake of the argument here, if not you should write in your diary: I will die soon.

Keep in mind, also, that you are asked to predict your future first person experience, and to write that prediction in your diary in Helsinki.

If by above you meant 

<<

I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Washington. 

      

             OR

              
I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Moscow.  >>

Then both the copies in W and the copy in M will verify that the prediction was correct.

But if you meant

<<

I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Washington. 

      

             AND

              
I walked into a box in Helsinki, and walked out of a box in Moscow.  >>

Then both the copies in W and in M will have to accept the prediction was wrong, as they both see/experience only one city, and the question was about their future experience (not about the possible localization of their body or brains in the third person sense).

Some training, and easy combinatory calculus show that, in the iteration of such self-duplication, almost all machines predict white noise.

Huh??????????????    Where does the white noise come from?

OK, I explain.

Well, I explain below.

You cannot predict 'I will feel nothing, or die', because that contradicts comp (which we *assume*).

I do not assume comp, especially since I  have no idea what it means.

It means that you brain (or body, with or without some part of the environment, it is a very weak hypothesis), can be replaced by some (physical) computer without you noticing any difference, as long as it copy you at some right level of description).

It is a variant of Descartes thesis that our material bodies are "machines" (not human made machine, but "natural machine).

I am assuming only everything I believe to be true.

I don't believe that. I think you have already mentioned an argument by absurdum. In such argument we typically assume something that we believe to be false, so as to derive its negation by deriving a falsity from it.

You can always look at UDA as an attempt to refute comp. We assume it, and if we get a falsity, or a contradiction, then you have refute comp. It just happens that nobody get a contradiction from it. We get up to now only "weirdness", but indeed a "weirdness" quite close to the quantum one.

You cannot predict "I will feel to be in W and in M". Because this will be contradicted in both reconstituted diaries, describing in which precise city they feel to be reconstituted, and that was what the question was about.

????

There would be two copies of me.  One would be in Washington, and one would be in Moscow.

That is correct. But here you talk about yourself in the third person way. You can say to your friend, in Helsinki, you will be able to join me in W and in M. But you know also that you can only *feel* to survive in only one place. You know (assuming comp and that you believe in comp) that you survive, and so you can't be sure if it will be W, or if it will be M.

More below, where i explain the origin of the white noise in the iteration of that experience.

Neither would be connected to the other.

We agree on this.

You cannot predict W, (resp. M) despite it will be "accidentally" verified by one reconstituted, but comp makes it pure luck, as the iteration of it can illustrate.

Please say this in a different way.

"Predict W" means writing in the diary, at Helsinki, "I will feel to be in W after pushing the button".

Then you push on the button, which trigs the copy+annihilation, and the sending of the scanned information to W and to M, where some machine reconstitutes you from that information. Let us call them the W-guy and the M-guy. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the W-guy. He can say "I was correct".

Put yourself in the shoes of the M-guy. He must say  "I was incorrect".

Do you know the truth table of the "and" and the "or (non exclusive or)?

Do you see that, if in Helsinki you write in the diary, I will feel to be in W or I will feel to be in W, abbreviated as

W or M,

then both copies will feel having written a correct prediction.

If in Helsinki the prediction is "W and M", then both will feel like the prediction was incorrect, has they feel certainly that it is only W and not M, or M and not W, from their first person perspective.

Where does the white noise arize? In the iteration of the self-duplications.

The M-Guy and the W-guy come back to Helsinki. And do the experience again. The copies grow like 2^n.

The diaries contains all sequences of W and M, and they outgrowth quickly the compressible one, leading to white noise, for the same reason we believe polarization can work in Everett QM.

This matters, as we are not in front of such random oracle, but we are on the border of the computable and the non computable. 

Please say this in a different way.

Hmm... You must proceed the steps 3 to the step seven. If we are machine, we belong to "web of dreams, or virtual (arithmetical) number relations. 

Dreams are not random oracle, even if the physical computations will have to stabilize on them in some ways (suggested already empirically with Everett applied on Feynman formulation of QM).

But if comp is correct we have to pursue Everett's embedding of the physicist in the wave, we have to embed the (classical) mathematician in arithmetic, which is no problem, as it is already there, under the form of (Löbian) theories, like PA, ZF, etc.).

What is a self-duplication frame?

It means when taking seriously the distinction between the first person and the third person discourses when discussing about relative duplication, or superposition, of people or people's state.

Is this the same as making the distinction between objective and subjective?

It is a good idea. Perhaps it is not the same, but the 1p/3p is a good approximation relevant for the purpose of the reasoning.

Bruno

Kermit

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/28/2013 10:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

>
> On 28 Jun 2013, at 13:10, LizR wrote:
>
>
> Here are two infinities of logical axioms. For all formula or
> sentences A, B, C, that we will allow, we accept the following as axioms:
>
> axioms 1: A -> (B -> A)

If A is a true statement, then every statement implies A.
This is a consequence of logic based on the truth of falsity of
statements, without regard to their meaning.

> axioms 2: (A -> (B -> C)) -> ((A -> B) -> (A -> C))
>

Diagram this axiom by truth table analysis.

based on T --> T, F --> T, and F--> F.

A B C (B-->C) (A -> (B -> C)) (A -> C) (A -> B) ((A -> B) ->
(A -> C)) (A -> (B -> C)) -> ((A -> B) -> (A -> C))
T T T T T T T
T T
T T F F F F T
F T
T F T T T T F
T T
T F F T T F F
T T
F T T T T T T
T T
F T F F T T T
T T
F F T T T T T
T T
F F F T T T T
T T




B --> C means that either B is false or C is true.
A --> (B --> C) means either A is false or (B --> C) is true.
A --> (B --> C) means either A is false or ( Either B is false or C is true)
A --> (B --> C) means A is false or B is false or C is true.

(A --> C) means A is false or C is true.
(A --> B) means A is false or B is true.

((A--> B) --> (A --> C)) means (A --> B) is false or (A --> C) is true.

((A --> B) --> (A --C)) means ((A is true) and (B is false) ) or (A is
false or C is true))

(A -> (B -> C)) -> ((A -> B) -> (A -> C))

means


A is true and B is true and C is false
or
A is true and B is true and C is True
or
A is true and B is false and C is true
or
A is true and B is false and C is false
or
A is false and B is true and C is true
or
A is false and B is true and C is false
or
A is false and B is false and C is true
or
A is false and B is false and C is false

> The only inference rule will be that if you can prove or assume some
> formula A and some formula A -> B, then you can derive B from them.
> This is the MODUS PONENS inference rule.
>

If the square root of any positive prime number is irrational,
then
if 5 is a prime number then
the square root of 5 is a irrational number

Since we know 5 is a prime number, we conclude that the square root of 5
is an irrational number.

> Not so easy exercise: try to prove the (infinitely many) formula
>
> A -> A
>

:)

axioms 1: A -> (B -> A)
axioms 2: (A -> (B -> C)) -> ((A -> B) -> (A -> C))

Substitute A = False into axiom 1.

[1] F --> (B --> F)

Substitute A = true into axiom 1.

[2] T --> (B --> T)

Substitute
B = False into [1]

[3] F --> (F --> F)

Substitute
B = True into [1]

[4] F --> (T --> F)



Substitute
B = False into [2]

[5] T --> (F --> T)

Substitute
B = true into [2]

[6] T --> (T --> T)

Summarize:

We have

[3] F --> (F --> F)
[4] F --> (T --> F)
[5] T --> (F --> T)
[6] T --> (T --> T)


By axiom 1,

axioms 1: A -> (B -> A)

from [5] and [6]

we infer that

[7] F --> T
and
[8] T --> T.

Since [7] is true,

[9] (F --> F) must be false.

Hence,

[10] F = (F --> F).

since

[3] F --> (F --> F) is true and [10] F = (F --> F),

it must be that

[11] F --> F.

We have now shown that


[8] T --> T.

and shown that

[11] F --> F.

Thus for all A, we have shown that

[12] A --> A.

>
> It is not simple, and what is important here does not consist in
> solving the problem, but in understanding that it is not simple.

It is simple, but also complicated.

>
> Of course you can derive things like (A -> A) -> ((A -> A) -> (A ->
> A)) from axioms 1. Just substitute A and B by (A -> A). OK?

Yes. I saw that I could derive those more complicated formulas easily.
It took extra work to derive the
too simple statement (A --A).

> We accept A -> (B -> A) for *all* formula A and B. So you have to find
> the "right substitution" so that wit the modus ponens rule you get (A
> -> A).
>


> Solution soon,
>
> Bruno
>
>

Wonder how your solution compares to mine.

Kermit

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> From his post, there are few doubt that John accepts comp

If you say so, you invented the term so I guess you know what it means even if you are unable to give a consistent idea to others as to its meaning. You say that a believer in "comp" must also believe all sorts of wacky pee pee stuff that doesn't make a particle of sense, so for me "comp" like "free will" is a sound made by the mouth and nothing more.

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Gary Oberbrunner <ga...@oberbrunner.com> wrote:
 

> I thought I remembered John saying at one point that the idea that we could be substituted (at any level) by a digital computer was a wild-eyed, essentially meaningless thought experiment, would never be practical, and thus was pointless to even consider.  Isn't that right, John?

No it is NOT right, in fact I don't think you could find a view that was further from mine.

  John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 3:12 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> If you know a bit of propositional logic, modal logic is the same with the adjunction of one unary symbol, the box, which I write often as "B", or as "[]". Then, syntactically, we can have axiom (like [] p -> [] [] p), and rules, like everywhere in logic. There is also different possible semantics, including Kripe semantics, where a modal frame is a set of so called world (which are just elements of some non empty set), and a binary relation on that set (called accessibility relation). The main close of the semantics is that []p is true in a "world" alpha if p is true in all worlds beta such that beta is accessible from alpha. Then many modal logic (including the one  axiomatizing provability) admits a sound and complete characterization in term of their accessibility Kripe structure. Modal logic is something considered very simple. provability logic is not, so it comes quite handy that provability logic is characterized by a modal logic, the one I call G:

G is

AXIOMS:

B(p->q) -> (Bp -> Bq)

B(Bp -> p) -> Bp

RULES:

Modus Ponens:  A, A->E / E

Necessitation:  A / BA

All others logic are derived from G.

G os related to provability in arithmetic (or any Löbian theory/machine) by

1) interpret the propositional variable p by arithmetical sentences p'

2) translate modal formula in the following recursive way: A ===> T(A)

   If A is a propositional variable: T(A) = A'

   If A is ~B, T(A) is ~T(B)

  If A is (B & C), T(A) is (T(B) & T(C))

 the same for the other binary connectors,

And the main clause:

If A is BC, or []C, beweisbar('S') Beweisbar('T(C)')

In english, you just translate the modal box into the Gödel's beweisbar predicate, with the propositional letter interpreted by arithmetical sentence. 

Then you can study the modal variant like Kp (= Bp & p), which gives rise to a modal logic describing a time arrow, although a bifurcating one, which is not a problem in our context.

 Any problem?

Just one, what cause the arrow of time?

  John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 7:13 AM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>> I stand by what I said, there is not a person alive who thinks the above clearly states why time has a preferred direction.

> Well, Bruno appears to think so. His explanation doesn't mean much to me at the moment, but I am hoping to understand more.

Good luck, you'll need it. I can categorically say without fear of contradiction that not one person on this list has read Bruno's explanation and now has a clear and correct understanding of why time has a preferred direction, and that includes Bruno himself.
 

> your remarks were derisory, regardless of how many things you have or have not written or read in the last 2 years.

After 2 years of trying and still finding nothing there I think I am entitled to be a little derisory, especially when he starts  producing yet another smokescreen of unnecessary homemade jargon like "comp" and "FPI" and "AUDA" and the entire pee pee business.

  John K Clark

[Gary Oberbrunner]

Ah, I'm sorry.  As Bruno said, I must have been confusing your view with someone else's.  My apologies.  The above *is* what we call comp.  I think that is a pretty consistently presented idea, and you seem to accept it.  So I'm unsure about what your first paragraph means.  I take it then that you accept comp (as defined here) as a valid starting point for an argument, but later steps in the argument (about the logical consequences of comp) cease to make sense to you.  That's what Bruno was saying anyway.  But I don't understand then why you say "comp" is a sound made by the mouth and nothing more.  Is "the idea that we could be substituted (at any level) by a digital computer" in the same mouth-noise-only category?

--
Gary

[Bruno Marchal]

OK. But you have not done the exercise. Deducing "A -> A" from the two
axioms given. (And thus by using the modus ponens, not the truth table).

Hmm....

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> It is not simple, and what is important here does not consist in
>> solving the problem, but in understanding that it is not simple.
>
> It is simple, but also complicated.
>
>
>>
>> Of course you can derive things like (A -> A) -> ((A -> A) -> (A ->
>> A)) from axioms 1. Just substitute A and B by (A -> A). OK?
>
>
> Yes. I saw that I could derive those more complicated formulas
> easily. It took extra work to derive the
> too simple statement (A --A).
>
>
>
>
>
>> We accept A -> (B -> A) for *all* formula A and B. So you have to
>> find the "right substitution" so that wit the modus ponens rule you
>> get (A -> A).
>>
>
>
>> Solution soon,
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>>
>
> Wonder how your solution compares to mine.

You did not prove that (A -> A), only particular case. You have to
start from the axioms, that is some special instantiations of them,
and only use the modus ponens rule.

I let you think more. Each line of the proof must be an axiom (or a
scheme of axioms) or derived by application of modus ponens from the
previous lines.
The proof does not use any semantics, not truth, no false.

Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 Jun 2013, at 19:05, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> From his post, there are few doubt that John accepts comp

If you say so, you invented the term so I guess you know what it means even if you are unable to give a consistent idea to others as to its meaning.

?

I just give a more precise and more weak definition of a standard belief among many scientist. 

Church thesis, and the "yes doctor" bet (to sum up a long description).

You say that a believer in "comp" must also believe all sorts of wacky pee pee stuff that doesn't make a particle of sense,

I will let you try to convince the others that there is no FPI, but you failed on some other list to provide any algorithm for the task.

so for me "comp" like "free will" is a sound made by the mouth and nothing more.

No, to say that comp is false, is saying that you are more than a machine, and that you have direct access to non computable ability, different than those retrievable from the FPI. 

If you have such a theory, present it. Paranormal? magical ether?

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Gary Oberbrunner <ga...@oberbrunner.com> wrote:
 

> I thought I remembered John saying at one point that the idea that we could be substituted (at any level) by a digital computer was a wild-eyed, essentially meaningless thought experiment, would never be practical, and thus was pointless to even consider.  Isn't that right, John?

No it is NOT right, in fact I don't think you could find a view that was further from mine.

As I said, Bill stops at step zero, but Clark stops at step 3. 

Bruno

  John K Clark

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

The fact that machine knowledge states might be assymetrical in some canonical semantics of the knowledge logic that we extract from the arithmetical points of view.

The knower go from world to world without having the ability to come back (unless through amnesia, believe revision, etc). 

Technically, it comes from the grz formula. Wait I explain a bit of Kripke semantics to understand better. Or read the Chellas book, or boolos 1979, to grasp the language and the notion of self-reference.

Bruno

  John K Clark

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fabric of Alternate Reality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foar+uns...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fo...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/foar.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[glen e. p. ropella]

I apologize in advance for jumping in like this. It's difficult for me
to keep up with the high traffic on this list. But I'm trying.

Bruno Marchal wrote at 06/28/2013 11:25 AM:
> I will let you try to convince the others that there is no FPI, but you
> failed on some other list to provide any algorithm for the task.

It seems reasonable to accept (what I infer about) "comp" without
accepting (what I infer about) FPI. For example, why does there have to
be a singular continuation of the original identity? Why can't all
copies (plus the original) begin with the same identity and gradually
evolve into separate identities? If that were the case, then there is
no FPI, even if you accept comp, right?

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the
distinction of a free man from a slave. -- Andrew Fletcher

[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 Jun 2013, at 19:31, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 7:13 AM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>> I stand by what I said, there is not a person alive who thinks the above clearly states why time has a preferred direction.

> Well, Bruno appears to think so. His explanation doesn't mean much to me at the moment, but I am hoping to understand more.

Good luck, you'll need it. I can categorically say without fear of contradiction that not one person on this list has read Bruno's explanation and now has a clear and correct understanding of why time has a preferred direction, and that includes Bruno himself.

This is not the main problem. You must understand the problem I give. 

And the explanation is technical, of course, but I gave it to you. The intuitive one is provided by the iterated self-duplication, a determinist process leading to relative information creation.

I don't believe in time, and 0, 1, 2, 3 .. is already enough "time arrow".

I suspect both comp and QM predicts a core symmetrical physics governed by universal group.

 

> your remarks were derisory, regardless of how many things you have or have not written or read in the last 2 years.

After 2 years of trying and still finding nothing there I think I am entitled to be a little derisory, especially when he starts  producing yet another smokescreen of unnecessary homemade jargon like "comp" and "FPI" and "AUDA" and the entire pee pee business.

Adding vulgarity will not make your point clearer. We are the one who do not understand your point or your alternative theory of mind and matter.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 Jun 2013, at 16:20, Bill Taylor wrote:

 

>Just deriding something because you don't personally understand it is not a scientific (or logical) approach.

But deriding it because it is utter BS is OK.   (I assume?)

You can, but you make yourself ridiculous for those who grasp better, or have thought on this by themselves.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Gary Oberbrunner <ga...@oberbrunner.com> wrote:

> It is a copy of me that survives.  Not the original me, which had been destroyed.

So Gary exactly what is it that has been destroyed? It can't be atoms because they were not destroyed and it wouldn't matter if they were because one hydrogen atom is as good as another and with or without duplicating chambers you're not going to keep the atoms you have now for long. Atoms come into your bodie, they dance a dance for a short time and then leave and only the pattern called " Gary Oberbrunner" endures; and so you are quite literally last years mashed potatoes. So I repeat, what has been destroyed?

And Gary I'd also like to know just what is so original about the original?

 > So, a third person observer would say I had survived.  Subjectively, the story is differe the world can you know that?

There is no way in the world you can know that to be correct, and if it is correct then Darwin was incorrect, it's as simple as that. And I don't think Darwin was incorrect. We're in the 21'th century now and it's time to follow science to its ultimate conclusions and not get sidetracked by nitwit religious superstitions like the soul ( although information is as close as you can get to the traditional idea of the soul and still remain within the scientific method).

 

> One subjectivity has been destroyed, and another created in its place.

I will now type the word original in capital letters, OK here goes, ORIGINAL. I will now tell you a secret, the last word of the previous sentence was not the original original, actually I typed the word original in capital letters but then I deleted it and then retyped original again also in capital letters exactly as it was before. Do you believe that the statement I just made in the previous sentience was of profound importance?

  John K Clark

[Kermit Rose]

On 6/28/2013 11:55 AM, Gary Oberbrunner wrote:

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Kermit Rose <ker...@polaris.net> wrote:

Would you not need three third person diaries? One in Helsinki, one in Washington, and one in Moscow?

Sure, but one would do if s/he has remote sensors.  Sometimes the 3p observer is assumed to be all-seeing.  As long as you don't get into relativistic effects that works.

OK

Huh??????????????    Where does the white noise come from?

Each iteration produces another random letter at the end.  You start H,W, then next W, then M, then M, then W, then M, ... those WMWWMWW strings are "incompressible" (i.e. random) which is equivalent to binary white noise. By "Almost all" he means that a few will go WWWWWWW or MMMMMM or some other regular pattern, but those are in the tiny minority.

:)  A very strong indication that I should NOT think of the copy as me.

I am assuming only everything I believe to be true.

The whole FPI presumes comp (which means you would willingly get into the machine, i.e. you believe a digital substitute will really "be" you in some sense.)  If you don't buy that premise, or at least think it's worth thinking through the consequences of, then the rest of Bruno's arguments are of ZERO interest to you.  They ALL depend on comp, and tease out several very interesting consequences of it.  (The hope is to find a reductio ad absurdum which would make us reject comp, or else fail to do so.)  But be clear he means to assume it *for the purpose of this investigation*.  You don't actually have to be ready to do it yourself to consider the consequences.

I thought it was the other way around. I thougt FPI was one of the necessary premises that led to comp.

In any case, I think the idea that some one else, identical to me in every way, would be me,
is an absurd idea.

You cannot predict "I will feel to be in W and in M" contradicted in both reconstituted diaries, describing in which precise city they feel to be reconstituted, and that was what the question was about.

????

There would be two copies of me.  One would be in Washington, and one would be in Moscow.
Neither would be connected to the other.

He's saying you cannot sensibly write in the diary *before the experiment* that "I expect to feel myself both in W and M". 

Ok.   I agree to that.

After the experiment each copy will, as you say, feel itself in only one place.  So if you did write that you'd expect to feel yourself in both places, both copies would look around them and say that prediction turned out to be false.

:)  I would think it silly that either copy expected to be in two places at once.

You cannot predict W, (resp. M) despite it will be "accidentally" verified by one reconstituted, but comp makes it pure luck, as the iteration of it can illustrate.

Please say this in a different way.

If you write in the diary beforehand "I predict I'll end up in W" you'll only be right by chance half the time.

Right. But it will not be a matter of chance.  There will be two diaries.  The one in Washington will be correct.
The one in Moscow will not be correct.

So it was silly to write "I expect to be in Washington", when it was clear that copies would be sent to both places.

 If you iterated the experiment and predicted the string WWWMW, for instance, you'd only have a 1/32 chance of being right.

5 copies of me in Washington, and 5 copies of me in Moscow.

4 of the 5 copies in Washington are correct.
1 of the 5 copies in Moscow are correct.

Kermit

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> I don't believe in time

You are free to believe anything you like, and I am free not to believe that you don't believe in time.

> and 0, 1, 2, 3 .. is already enough "time arrow".

3, 2 ,1 ,0 ... is just as logical as 0, 1 ,2 , 3...., so where does the arrow of time come from?

  John K Clark