On Jan 4, 2014, at 9:16 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

On 1/4/2014 6:37 PM, LizR wrote:
On 5 January 2014 15:01, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
What is moving if it's not time?

Our minds are, from one slice in spacetime to the next.

Jason,

I agree completely with all your other replied to Edgar, but I think the above one could be misleading. I know what you mean (it's similar to the famous phrase about our minds "crawling up our worldlines") but it creates just the sort of mental picture that presentists will leap on with cries of "AHA! So it does move after all!!!"

So, let me just put the record straight. Our minds are NOT moving from one slice of space-time to the next. Nothing is. However, the slices are connected in a manner determined by the laws of physics (which could, for example, be demonstrated by viewing the whole schmeer as a Feynman diagram, as you mentioned)

Not really as a Feynman diagram. Those are always drawn in momentum space (because energy/momentum is what's conserved) and are assumed to occupy only a negligible space.

and this is sufficient to give us the illusion that there is a "moving present moment". In practice (if we leave aside a comp type explanation and assume our minds are generated by the activity of our brains) then that brain activity is sufficient to give a powerful illusion that we are "moving through time". But, as the guy in "Memento" demonstrates, this is an merely illusion, caused by the persistence of memory, which effectively gives us a physical connection to the past via the arrangement of the worldlines of the molecules making up our physical structure.

You don't really have to say it's an illusion. It's a description of the world and the fact that you put different t-labels on events at the same (x y z) doesn't undo the fact that there are different events at those different t-values. Memory provides an arrow of psychological time - but it doesn't always follow the arrow of physics (entropy increase).

Doesn't the von neumann-landauer limit imply information can only be stored in the direction of time in which entropy increases?

Jason




Brent
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