
Relation between the psychological and thermodynamic arrows of time - alphanumeric0
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1095
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wyager
I read the whole paper, but I still don't get exactly why this relation
exists. They described some properties of "memory systems", and then said that
a memory system must "remember more than one thing", and for some reason
knowing the future as well as the past corresponds to "only knowing one
thing", which means that anything that knows the future isn't a memory,
because it only knows one thing.

Can someone please explain the whole thing with "knowing multiple things" and
robustness to perturbations in the system?

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piratebroadcast
10 upvotes because it has an interesting title. Anyone that attempted to
actually read it could see theres no damn paper. Sorry I seem frustrated with
this- I really wanted to read it. Time for bed.

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SilasX
Looks to be a rigorous exposition of an argument I saw to resolve Loschmidt's
paradox (why there can be an arrow I time in a time symmetric universe). The
argument is that formation of memories (whether in a brain or tape recorder or
whatever) is necessarily an increasing entropy process, so all memories will
be of lower entropy states.

IOW, it's not that "entropy increases futureward, we remember pastward, what a
coincidence!" Rather, "if this were not an increasing entropy direction, we
could not have memories of it."

First saw the point in Drescher's _Good and Real_.

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jessriedel
Todd Brun is notable for being a collaborator (student?) of Jim Hartle for a
number years when they worked on the decoherent histories formalism of quantum
mechanics. Jim was one of the original developers of the formalism.

