Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 30 April 2015 at 17:19, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
Julian Barbour, in his book 'The End of Time' tried to abolish time
altogether because of the difficulties of defining time in general
relativity. He replaced time as a parameter with the notion of 'time
capsules' present in every point of phase space.
It is not really clear whether this idea was successful or not. It has not
attracted a great following.
But if any such idea is to make sense, the observer moments do have to be
connected by quite strong causal laws so that the sequence of moments tells
a coherent story. Or else each moment tells a different story, and we are
back with 'Last Tuesdayism' or solipsism.
I don't think Fred Hoyle's account works either. It feels like a 'many
minds' collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The time capsule idea and "Last Tuesdayism" may not be how the world
actually is, but they do demonstrate that it is possible to have "the
hallucination that stuff is happening" in the absence of a separate
time dimension, which was your question.
I don't think the time capsule idea would work with comp. It works for
Barbour because he can use known physical laws to ensure that the time
capsules are consistent from point to point along the trajectory in
configuration space. You do not have that luxury in the dovetailer
because you do not have independent physical laws. You can say that the
sequence of conscious moments that we experience can only be those that
are consistent. But that is just assuming what you need to prove, and is
no explanation at all.
Bruce
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
