

The Grand Illusion: Does time have a future? - benbreen
http://laphamsquarterly.org/time/grand-illusion

======
drostie
The philosophy of time is one of the remaining bulwarks of a philosophical
position called 'dualism', which holds that minds are completely separate from
our bodies: if you view us as being big ropes of particle-worldlines in a
4-dimensional fixed universe, you are basically stuck with describing us as
"souls" who have latched onto this rope and are traveling along it, living the
experience even though the future is as set in stone as the past. It makes
relativity really easy to understand, but it makes entropy comparably harder
(since the premise of entropy is that our uncertainties multiply due to
particle collisions until things end up in more and more uncertain states). It
_almost_ sounds like there's no free will in this perspective, but that's not
quite true. Instead you get a model of free will which is a lot like you see
in the movie The Matrix: "Because you didn't come here to make the choice,
you've already made it. You're here to try to understand _why_ you made it."

Relativity does not necessarily _compel_ this. It is true, the relativistic
"present" is a space between two light cones, and not just one plane. But
that's not necessarily a huge obstacle: we can just pretend that there is one
plane which is the "true present" and accept that the laws of physics make it
impossible to know if we're truly right about which it is. As long as _one_ of
the planes is the true present you can lift up the Newtonian way of looking at
time to the special-relativistic whole.

It turns out that black holes aren't really so interesting as this article
claims, because there is a 'co-moving' metric which falls into the black
hole's event horizon in a finite time. What happens with a black hole is, you
see someone slow down more and more to a standstill as they approach the event
horizon, appearing to "merge in" with that surface, redshifting into the
quantum noise of the Hawking radiation there. But from their perspective,
you're just seeing their "last moment in this universe"; they'll keep going on
past that horizon.

But general relativity _is_ still a problem. It describes the causal fabric of
the universe as warped by the energies that inhabit each part of that fabric,
and that makes it really hard to deal with time. Some of the interesting stuff
here comes either from (a) alternative descriptions of relativity (like
spinors/twistors, where you describe the entire world-line of a particle as a
point), or (b) quantum mechanics (where you can do multiple-universe-
splitting). The combination of relativity and quantum mechanics, for example,
seems to give us the Wheeler-de Witt equation, which time famously "falls out"
of (it plays no final role in the equation). Some physicists, notably Julian
Barbour, think that this means we've got to fixate on a static universe. I'm
totally undecided on this but I find it fascinating.

~~~
trhway
>The philosophy of time is one of the remaining bulwarks of a philosophical
position called 'dualism', which holds that minds are completely separate from
our bodies

Whose mind? Would you say that the mind of a worm is separate from its body?
Suppose - no. Then where does mind gets separates from the body - at ant
level? at fish level? at lizard? at mammal? at ape? at Neanderthal? at Cro-
Magnon 20K years ago?

Mind is just an emergent behavior of a pretty complex organized matter. The
more complex the matter the more its ability to increase entropy beyond simple
local gradient and that ability is what we call mind.

"Free will" is just a part of that "mind". The obvious question here again -
does a worm has free will?

In general these notions of separate mind or especially soul are
misconceptions coming from religion where world was created 6 thousands years
ago with God giving soul to humans only and with no continuous biological
connection between first living cells couple billion years ago and humans
today.

~~~
gottebp
At the full blown materialist end there's another big problem though: Are you
just a cloud of ever changing atoms mistaken for a person? Since almost none
of the atoms from your childhood remain in you now, are you actually the same
individual? If yes, by what measure and means? If no, then how can a cloud of
atoms have things like "rights", personhood, etc?

In addition to both dualism and materialism there is a third way called
Hylomorphism:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism)

~~~
trhway
>Since almost none of the atoms from your childhood remain in you now, are you
actually the same individual?

i hoped that not, i hope that i did mature at least a bit :)

But you question i suppose was about a little bit different aspect of "the
same" and to that aspect i'll ask you - this river, the set of ever changing
atoms of water, is it the same river that it was a second ago, an hour, an
year...?

>If no, then how can a cloud of atoms have things like "rights", personhood,
etc?

In physics where is no "rights". The "rights" is just a "mind" construct
reflecting current balance of violent interactions between different "clouds
of ever changing atoms".

------
wuliwong
I take umbrage with this part: "A past that can be revisited has not really
passed. So, Gödel concluded, time does not exist." This is a very silly
conclusion. My assumption is that the silliness is attributed more to the
author of this article than to Gödel himself.

Our intuitive concept of time from our existence at speeds very slow compared
with the speed of light and at masses which are very small when compared to
those necessary to bend space-time is not necessarily applicable to time in
all regions of this speed-mass phase space. Particularly the regions where the
speed is close to the speed of light and the mass is very large. There's just
no logical path from the initial observation to the conclusion that time
doesn't exist.

~~~
scobar
I admit I'm well below the mental capacity to confidently state something as
bold as "time does not exist", but I'd like to offer my thoughts. When
thinking about Schrödinger's cat, [1] I imagined that the cat remained dead
(and in every other possible state) even after the observer had confirmed the
cat was alive. Every unobserved state did not collapse, but became
inaccessible by means currently understood. Those states could still be
observed by the same or another observer from a different perspective (i.e.
revisiting the event). We just have to figure out how.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat)

------
Thiz
I just came up with this stupid theory for the fun of it.

Say time is self contained in the universe, just like all frames in a DVD. The
process of going back and forth thru frames is what we call time, you need an
observer capable of processing frames as input to produce information from
them. Without the information processor, you still could see the universe as a
whole (like the DVD) but not be able to see the frames stored in it in a
sequencial manner.

The only big difference between a DVD and the universe is that the latter is
infinite.

Well forget about it. If everything is self-contained then it gives
determinism an upper hand against free will, and I hate determinism.

Perhaps the universe is like a DVD being burned as we speak and free will
still reigns?

I said it was all for fun, don't be too hard on me. I always thought time was
absolute, and perception was relative. Well, tell that to a god's particle
before being created. There is no time in the void.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I kind of enjoy to intellectually "know" (or think I know) that there is no
free will -- certainly not to the degree our consciousness often thinks there
is -- and still to appreciate and say yes to the illusion. I don't know why,
but I still do :) Such is the power of the mind. You can know there is no free
will and still believe there is, and you can know that belief to be false and
still allow it in, like a dirty old dog you let sleep on the couch because its
your favourite dog and you love it deeply. We can do that, and I find that
beautiful.

Also, from [http://www.einstein-
website.de/z_biography/credo.html](http://www.einstein-
website.de/z_biography/credo.html) :

> I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he
> wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations
> throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they
> are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me
> from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding
> individuals, and from losing my temper.

But I don't like that translation too much, so here is my own very slight
variation on it:

> I do not believe in the freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's word: "Man may
> be able to do, what he wants, but he can't will, what he wants", accompanies
> me in all situations of life and reconciles me with the deeds of mankind,
> even though they are quite painful to me. This realization of the unfreedom
> of the will protects me from taking myself and my fellow human beings all
> too seriously as acting and judging individuals, and from loosing my good
> humour.

~~~
aninhumer
I feel like the idea that free will is an "illusion" kind of misses the more
fundamental realisation of Compatiblism: Will doesn't need to exist as
something external to the rules of the universe for it to have meaning.

We might not have "free will" (whatever that means), but we definitely have
"will", and that's all that ever mattered.

------
gtrubetskoy
There is a pretty fascinating Google Talk on this subject by Sean Carroll:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMfW1jY1xE)

------
snarfy
Here's my layman hypothesis:

Time has a wave-like nature, not the particles. Since space and time are
related through the Lorentz transformations, you could substitute a wave-like
property of time and make the time dependent wave equation into a space
dependent equation. The results would be the same, but it's a different
interpretation. This is why you cannot measure a particles momentum and
position at the same moment - they do not both exist at the same moment and
depend on the current phase of the wave.

------
lisper
[http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-
ar...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of-
time.html)

