5 ms·

Without time you’d be everything all at once, which isn’t capable of having an experience, that is to also say: a location. To have experience, requires positi

Without time you’d be everything all at once, which isn’t capable of having an experience, that is to also say: a location. To have experience, requires position relative to the all, the traversal of the all is time. More like a play head on a tape, you’re the play head traversing and animating your own projection.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> have experience, requires position relative to the all, the traversal of the all is time You’re describing timelike experience. Photons “experience” events as in they are part of causality. But they do so in a non-timelike manner.
- pyinstallwoes 2y ago
  Said a human. If it’s not time-like, then it’s everything, thus it can’t have experiences thus god. God splits (monad becomes many) to experience being (shards in multiplicity of the one through division: oooh spooky golden mystery).
  - CooCooCaCha 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
      Take your meds
    - phantompeace 2y ago
      I think he’s actually got a point. I have the same “feelings” but can’t articulate it in a scientific way compatible with physicists in general.
    - dang 2y ago
      Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please don't do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
hackinthebochs 2y ago
The universe doesn't need to evolve for us to have experience. We would experience evolution through the state space because its structure is oriented such as to experience evolution through time. Each point in experience-time (the relative time evolution experienced by the structure) is oriented towards the next point in experience-time. Even if all such points happen all at once, the experience of being a point in this structure oriented towards the next point is experienced subjectively as sequential. In other words, a block universe would contain sequences of Boltzman brains who all subjectively experience time as sequential. The real question is why would such a universe appear to evolve from a low entropy past following a small set of laws.
- lukasb 2y ago
  This makes a good argument that the block universe can't exist: https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einstein-debated-time https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einst... (search "block")
  - jstanley 2y ago
    That's not saying it can't exist, it's just saying you can't go outside the universe to look at it.
- raattgift 2y ago
  Boltzmann brains are extremely ephemeral. An analogy is that of stirring a vat of alphabet soup and noticing that there is a fair number of single-letter words popping into view ("A", "I"), a smaller number of two-letter words, an even smaller number of three-letter words ... a very very small chance of a twenty-letter word ... and a vanishingly small chance of the 189819-letter monster <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Protologisms/Long_words/Titin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Protologisms/Long_wo...> popping into view. The stirring doesn't stop just because a multiletter word appears, so multiletter words are quickly broken up and even valid single-letter words get hidden behind the "B"s and "Q"s and other letters in the soup. Boltzmann brains will fluctuate out of existence on the order of a small multiple of the light-crossing time of the brain-matter that fluctuated into existence. As the brains are human, they won't even have a chance to react. Although their false memories are encoded however true memories exist in our own brains, they'll have no time to have a reminiscence or notice their lack of sensory organs. (Which is probably good, since they would quickly suffer and die from lack of pressure and oxygen). A Boltzmann-brain with a full encoding of a life worth of false memories (from never-existing sensory input) is a much larger number of letters. Also, in a cold universe, the stirring is slower, and the letters sparser. Boltzmann brains are tremendously unlikely except in a verrrrrrrrry big volume of spacetime. But with a sufficiently big volume of spacetime, or one with an energetic false vacuum, one should expect a lot of Boltzmann brains. This view puts some limits on our own cosmos's vacuum, since we don't see lots of Boltzmann brains (or even much less complicated but RADAR-detectable and/or eclipsing strucures) fluctuating into brief existence in our solar system. Boltzmann brains are low-entropy. A persisting Boltzmann brain (fluctuating into existence and staying in existence for a long time) is much lower entropy still. This poses problems for hypotheses that the entire early universe fluctuated into existence and then evolved into the structures we see now. Here there are human brains attached to sensory apparatus, whose memories correlate fairly well with their history of input (and recordings by ancestors, and fossil records, and so on): a system with much much lower entropy than Boltzmann brains, so what suppresses relatively high-entropy structures (including Boltzmann brains) from dominating (by count) our neighbourhood? Also, if the universe supports large low-entropy fluctuations, galaxies that briefly (~ hundred thousand years) fluctuated in and out of existence should be much more common than galaxies with a history consistent with billions of years of galactic evolution, and you'd expect random variations in morphology, chemistry, and so forth; that's not what we see. This is a bit annoying, as it would be handy to point to Boltzmannian fluctuation theory as the source of the tremendously low entropy in the very early universe, i.e., it could have arisen spontaneously in a less precisely ordered space. Oh well. > why would ... a universe appear to evolve from a low entropy past following a small set of laws Thermodynamics. The issue is: where did the low entropy past come from? Once you have that, evolving into a higher entropy structure-filled present is not too hard -- that's essentially what we have with the standard cosmology from about the electroweak epoch onwards. So in summary: > sequences of Boltzman brains who all subjectively experience time as sequential whatever these might be, they aren't Boltzmann brains, since the latter don't subjectively experience anything as objectively they fluctuate out of existence in something like a nanosecond. Very briefly, the short existence is driven by interacting fields and the need to keep entropy (relatively) high: if your starting point just before the appearance of the brain is a region that is high quality vacuum, you have to come up with protons, calcium nuclei, ... and all that requires very careful aim to have one split-second "movie frame" of brain. You need much better "aim" which really drives down the entropy (which corresponds a much larger fluctuation) to go from vacuum to a Boltzmann brain that doesn't disintegrate starting in the very next frame thanks to overshoots of momentum. The higher the entropy of the Boltzmann brain, the clearer the stat mech argument. (If one gets stuck thinking about human brains, C. elegans apparently develop memories and store them in their nerve ring. Why isn't the outer space of our solar system full of those Boltzmann-C.-elegans brains fluctuating in and out of existence with each possessing false memories of sensory stimuli? Smaller fluctuations, so there should be many more of those than human Boltzmann brains).
marcus_holmes 2y ago
Maybe we do experience everything at once, but then have to process it in a time-like manner to make any sense of it. Like everything else that we "experience", maybe the perception that reaches our consciousness has nothing to do with what's actually out there. There are no purple photons.
- pyinstallwoes 2y ago
  Yeah, god is everything, which can’t have experience, as it’s experiencing everything at once - thus the monad splits itself, allowing perception as a fraction of the whole which is experienced as time and direction.
  - phantompeace 2y ago
    Do you think god is in control?
    - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
      God is everything. Perhaps the limit of that curiosity is akin to control but anything that can be imagined will be imagined and explored and rendered in some sense to experience. Imo.
idiotsecant 2y ago
I'm not sure why experience requires the arrow of time or location. Your experience does, and it might seem that is a universal rule, but only because you can't possibly intuit a world in which time doesn't flow. I think Dr. Manhattan is a good fictional reference. He existed in a timeless form. Everything was happening simultaneously for him. For everyone else they experienced him in a time like way, but only as a matter of perspective.
- pyinstallwoes 2y ago
  How can you imagine any world without experience (observation?) thus any observer is dependent on position thus time simply because it is the partial history that allows the state itself to exist. And your second point is essentially the metaphysical argument for god and early spirituality. Hebrew mystiscm for example describes god pouring itself into lower forms of being to experience itself
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    The universe is absolutely full of things you can't imagine but are nonetheless true. Our intuition is only good for a certain regime of space, speed, temperature, pressure, etc. That is why we have tools like mathematics, to expand our minds past our intuition through abstraction.
    - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
      > I'm not sure why experience requires the arrow of time or location. Because experience _is_ the arrow of time

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> have experience, requires position relative to the all, the traversal of the all is time You’re describing timelike experience. Photons “experience” events as in they are part of causality. But they do so in a non-timelike manner.

pyinstallwoes 2y ago
Said a human. If it’s not time-like, then it’s everything, thus it can’t have experiences thus god. God splits (monad becomes many) to experience being (shards in multiplicity of the one through division: oooh spooky golden mystery).
- CooCooCaCha 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
    Take your meds
  - phantompeace 2y ago
    I think he’s actually got a point. I have the same “feelings” but can’t articulate it in a scientific way compatible with physicists in general.
  - dang 2y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please don't do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hackinthebochs 2y ago

The universe doesn't need to evolve for us to have experience. We would experience evolution through the state space because its structure is oriented such as to experience evolution through time. Each point in experience-time (the relative time evolution experienced by the structure) is oriented towards the next point in experience-time. Even if all such points happen all at once, the experience of being a point in this structure oriented towards the next point is experienced subjectively as sequential. In other words, a block universe would contain sequences of Boltzman brains who all subjectively experience time as sequential. The real question is why would such a universe appear to evolve from a low entropy past following a small set of laws.

lukasb 2y ago
This makes a good argument that the block universe can't exist: https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einstein-debated-time https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einst... (search "block")
- jstanley 2y ago
  That's not saying it can't exist, it's just saying you can't go outside the universe to look at it.
raattgift 2y ago
Boltzmann brains are extremely ephemeral. An analogy is that of stirring a vat of alphabet soup and noticing that there is a fair number of single-letter words popping into view ("A", "I"), a smaller number of two-letter words, an even smaller number of three-letter words ... a very very small chance of a twenty-letter word ... and a vanishingly small chance of the 189819-letter monster <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Protologisms/Long_words/Titin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Protologisms/Long_wo...> popping into view. The stirring doesn't stop just because a multiletter word appears, so multiletter words are quickly broken up and even valid single-letter words get hidden behind the "B"s and "Q"s and other letters in the soup. Boltzmann brains will fluctuate out of existence on the order of a small multiple of the light-crossing time of the brain-matter that fluctuated into existence. As the brains are human, they won't even have a chance to react. Although their false memories are encoded however true memories exist in our own brains, they'll have no time to have a reminiscence or notice their lack of sensory organs. (Which is probably good, since they would quickly suffer and die from lack of pressure and oxygen). A Boltzmann-brain with a full encoding of a life worth of false memories (from never-existing sensory input) is a much larger number of letters. Also, in a cold universe, the stirring is slower, and the letters sparser. Boltzmann brains are tremendously unlikely except in a verrrrrrrrry big volume of spacetime. But with a sufficiently big volume of spacetime, or one with an energetic false vacuum, one should expect a lot of Boltzmann brains. This view puts some limits on our own cosmos's vacuum, since we don't see lots of Boltzmann brains (or even much less complicated but RADAR-detectable and/or eclipsing strucures) fluctuating into brief existence in our solar system. Boltzmann brains are low-entropy. A persisting Boltzmann brain (fluctuating into existence and staying in existence for a long time) is much lower entropy still. This poses problems for hypotheses that the entire early universe fluctuated into existence and then evolved into the structures we see now. Here there are human brains attached to sensory apparatus, whose memories correlate fairly well with their history of input (and recordings by ancestors, and fossil records, and so on): a system with much much lower entropy than Boltzmann brains, so what suppresses relatively high-entropy structures (including Boltzmann brains) from dominating (by count) our neighbourhood? Also, if the universe supports large low-entropy fluctuations, galaxies that briefly (~ hundred thousand years) fluctuated in and out of existence should be much more common than galaxies with a history consistent with billions of years of galactic evolution, and you'd expect random variations in morphology, chemistry, and so forth; that's not what we see. This is a bit annoying, as it would be handy to point to Boltzmannian fluctuation theory as the source of the tremendously low entropy in the very early universe, i.e., it could have arisen spontaneously in a less precisely ordered space. Oh well. > why would ... a universe appear to evolve from a low entropy past following a small set of laws Thermodynamics. The issue is: where did the low entropy past come from? Once you have that, evolving into a higher entropy structure-filled present is not too hard -- that's essentially what we have with the standard cosmology from about the electroweak epoch onwards. So in summary: > sequences of Boltzman brains who all subjectively experience time as sequential whatever these might be, they aren't Boltzmann brains, since the latter don't subjectively experience anything as objectively they fluctuate out of existence in something like a nanosecond. Very briefly, the short existence is driven by interacting fields and the need to keep entropy (relatively) high: if your starting point just before the appearance of the brain is a region that is high quality vacuum, you have to come up with protons, calcium nuclei, ... and all that requires very careful aim to have one split-second "movie frame" of brain. You need much better "aim" which really drives down the entropy (which corresponds a much larger fluctuation) to go from vacuum to a Boltzmann brain that doesn't disintegrate starting in the very next frame thanks to overshoots of momentum. The higher the entropy of the Boltzmann brain, the clearer the stat mech argument. (If one gets stuck thinking about human brains, C. elegans apparently develop memories and store them in their nerve ring. Why isn't the outer space of our solar system full of those Boltzmann-C.-elegans brains fluctuating in and out of existence with each possessing false memories of sensory stimuli? Smaller fluctuations, so there should be many more of those than human Boltzmann brains).

marcus_holmes 2y ago

Maybe we do experience everything at once, but then have to process it in a time-like manner to make any sense of it. Like everything else that we "experience", maybe the perception that reaches our consciousness has nothing to do with what's actually out there. There are no purple photons.

pyinstallwoes 2y ago
Yeah, god is everything, which can’t have experience, as it’s experiencing everything at once - thus the monad splits itself, allowing perception as a fraction of the whole which is experienced as time and direction.
- phantompeace 2y ago
  Do you think god is in control?
  - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
    God is everything. Perhaps the limit of that curiosity is akin to control but anything that can be imagined will be imagined and explored and rendered in some sense to experience. Imo.

idiotsecant 2y ago

I'm not sure why experience requires the arrow of time or location. Your experience does, and it might seem that is a universal rule, but only because you can't possibly intuit a world in which time doesn't flow. I think Dr. Manhattan is a good fictional reference. He existed in a timeless form. Everything was happening simultaneously for him. For everyone else they experienced him in a time like way, but only as a matter of perspective.

pyinstallwoes 2y ago
How can you imagine any world without experience (observation?) thus any observer is dependent on position thus time simply because it is the partial history that allows the state itself to exist. And your second point is essentially the metaphysical argument for god and early spirituality. Hebrew mystiscm for example describes god pouring itself into lower forms of being to experience itself
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  The universe is absolutely full of things you can't imagine but are nonetheless true. Our intuition is only good for a certain regime of space, speed, temperature, pressure, etc. That is why we have tools like mathematics, to expand our minds past our intuition through abstraction.
  - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
    > I'm not sure why experience requires the arrow of time or location. Because experience _is_ the arrow of time