The future is the past by Roger Schlafly

Roger,

Thank you for a fascinating and entertaining essay! You are the Stephen Colbert of FQXi: even though you are really a logical positivist, you pretend to believe all the most counter-intuitive abstract ideas of modern physics, and by quoting the believers, you highlight the delicious weirdness of their ideas. Of course, in an infinite multiverse, EVERYTHING happens, so it makes no sense to steer THE future, and the very existence of this essay contest makes no sense. OR DOES IT? :)

You are being a little unfair to multiverse believers when you propose, at the end of your essay, that we reduce suffering in OTHER universes by making the WORST decisions possible in THIS one... but it is part of the fun of your essay!

Your really deserve to make it to the finals, and I have rated your essay accordingly. Good luck!

Marc

Roger,

I thought I make a final effort to get your thoughts on my initial comment on your thread; That the reason we misinterpret time is due to our singular experience of a sequence of events being interpreted as the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics further distills to measures of particular duration, when the logical physical mechanism is the changing configuration of what exists, thus creating and dissolving these events, effectively turning future into past.

Which makes time much more like temperature, than space. Essentially time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude, which I covered in the prior post.

To clarify, determinism is based on the assumption that since one causal outcome occurs for every event, this must mean all subsequent events must be effectively pre-determined. While multiworlds argues that since all quantum events are in fact effectively probabilistic, then the past must remain so, resulting in multiworlds occurring with every possibility.

Now if we look at it as future becoming past, then probability precedes actuality. The input into any event only happens with its occurrence.

In my own entry I observe the dichotomy of energy and information and how energy manifests information, while information defines energy. With the quantum, we keep trying to extract ever more precise information from the energy, yet still can't erase its essential fuzziness. The fact is that even a moving car doesn't have a precise location, or it wouldn't be moving. As for those subatomic particles; If they weren't moving, there would be no car. Energy is inherently dynamic, while information is inherently static. We extract information by stopping the energy, usually with an opposing force, such as a mass object consisting of balanced forces, which then absorbs this energy according to its own structure, effectively contracting it to a point, creating the effect of this quantum of energy being thought of as a particle.

I could keep jabbering on, but you may have wished to avoid my previous post and not just missed it, so...

Regards,

John Merryman

This is an excellent, fascinating survey of the arguments that we live in a deterministic universe, Roger. I think you right that we do live a deterministic universe. I would add that there is a sense in which Tegmark's clones are not identical: they have made different decisions. They are distinguished by the exercise of precisely that agency that they're not supposed to have.

But I don't think that a deterministic universe precludes meaningful free will. Human beings may not have free will in the radical sense that we somehow make our decisions from outside the physical world. But even if it had to happen that John would decide to eat French fries, it is still John who decides to have them. Saying "John decided to have French fries" is a perfectly valid description of what happened, even if his decision can be reduced to the workings of the physical laws that govern the components of his body. The future and the past may be unchanging, but our choices are the path that connects past and future states.

So while our sense of moving through time may be a cognitive illusion, I would argue there's a good reason why we believe our choices matter. We have to make decisions every second we're awake. Even not making a decision is a kind of a decision. The universe in which we think our choices don't matter is the universe in which we make terrible choices. Consider the character in Lermontov's story "The Fatalist" who believes it doesn't matter whether or not he puts a loaded gun to his head and pulls the trigger because whether or not he is going to die is already predetermined. But of course it does matter. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, "We must believe in free will--we have no choice."

In any case, I really enjoyed your essay. Good luck in the contest!

Best,

Robert de Neufville

My view--I am a reformed philosopher--is that many of these controversies are arguments about ways of talking rather than about things themselves. As Wittgenstein put it,

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?"--It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks and asks: what's this then?

The hard-core concept of determinism seems to me like the child's marks. I can't make sense of it. But I also don't think it has much to do with the folk language we use for agency.

Thanks again for the stimulating discussion!

Roger Schlafly,

A great essay!!! Ten points easily!!! It is a highly competent damage report! The needle went off the scale! However you intended it to be, I read it as the prelude to greater essay explaining how to return sensibility to science, to theoretical physics in particular. For me to go further, would be me just repeating what I have written in six essay contests and elsewhere. However, your essay is what exists here and now and I loved it for my own reasons.

James Putnam

Dear Roger,

Yes this is a delicious essay, I am chewing it now and it tastes deliciously crunchy. However, my clones in other universes taste your essay softy and smelly. Wonderful! It is fun.

In KQID, I incorporate both Einstein's block Multiverse as also previously articulated by Parmenides and his student and his lover Zeno who gave us a wonderful Zeno's paradoxes and at the same time flow of time from moving one way from past yo the future. Please give me your comments.

I rated yours a full ten (10) as it deserves.

Best wishes,

Leo KoGuan

Thanks. I especially enjoyed your discussion of consciousness and free will. You obviously disagree with some of the experts I quote. And yes, we need a greater essay on returning sensibility to science. It takes several essays just to explain how far from common sense we have gotten.

Roger,

I responded in my own forum.

James

Roger Schlafly,

"One trouble with the rating system is that you can get a low rating, but have no idea whether someone thinks that you are technically incorrect, or if someone just disagrees with some of your opinions. Ideally the critics wpould explain themselves in the comments."

Your essay did not overtly challenge physics theories. It did not offer alternatives. It did not resist theoretical physics. It accepted physics theory. I loved you essay. I say it is a literary masterpiece. One can choose to accept its heralding of theoretical physics as a responsible position. I chose to understand it as a satire. My opinion does not affect the value of your essay. Your essay stands on its own. Your essay lives in the mind of the reader for what they believe. I state again that among all of the essays, it is a literary masterpiece. Whatever the contest outcome is, it cannot add to or detract from your literary accomplishment.

James Putnam

Roger,

You were recommended by James Putnam, and for some reason, I hadn't read your essay yet.Though subjected to head-jerking shifts in philosophies of time, I was pleased with an essay rich in relevant quotes that skillfully and substantially guides us through philosophies and scholarly discussions of time.

I'm not sure where I am in time now, but I will never consciously feed a "naive view of time," considering that "the past is definite, the present is now, and the future is uncertain."

We all want answers on how to steer the future, but it is presumptuous to think we can come up with a plan when climate change deniers now say it's too late, damage done.

Your essay puts more doubt in our established minds.

High marks.

I would like to see your thoughts on mine: http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2008

Jim

Hi Roger,

What an awesome essay. I'm sorry I didn't get to it sooner, as I think my essay and yours intersect some of the same territory. I explore the concept of a future-viewing machine. I am not referring to a mere prediction machine, as some have mistakenly thought, but a machine that could literally see the future. Many juicy logical problems arise when one conceives of such a machine.

I would like for us to be able to communicate after the contest, as we have very little time left to communicate in this forum. If you choose to contact me, my email address is foreknowledge.machines{AT}{g.m.a.i.l}.{c.o.m}.

I enjoyed your essay immensely and have rated it highly. All the best!

Warmly,

Aaron

In many cases a revolution of physical perspective leads to unchanged short-term practical implications. For example, discovering that spacetime is curved doesn't affect terrestrial navigation. In the same way, we feel at least that a many-worlds perspective doesn't automatically negate what we know about probability; if you make a choice that helps someone 90% of the time and hurts them 10% of the time, that still seems better than the opposite even if you live in a MWI multiverse.

Steven Kaas & Steve Rayhawk