Peter,
To respond to some of your comments on my thread, if you don't mind, I thought I'd post the following as how my point about time fits into a broader physical description of the human condition, if not the more elemental physical issues. The nature of FQXI tends toward conceptual physics and this can be a narrow subject in its own right, so I do tend to seem obsessed with the point about time, yet as my entry shows, I am trying to construct a more wholistic vision that is necessarily centered on the current human condition, so speculation which projects a little too far in any one direction, from physical abstractions, to futuristic projections, tends to raise too many issues and questions for me and so I seem to follow them less and less, as the current world situation becomes more and more precarious.
I wrote it last night on Michael Allen's thread and slightly edited it;
"That is a very interesting and well thought out plan. I think though that you really need to step back even further to get a more complete picture and some of these issues might fall into place of their own accord.
For one thing, humanity shouldn't be an end in itself, but one more tool, one more bridge between what came before and what will come after.
One of the essential fallacies running through western thought is that the ideal constitutes an absolute, but in fact it is a simple collection of preferred characteristics. The absolute is a ground state. The universal state of oneness is not a singular entity, one, but the median in which all positive and negative cancel out. The flat line on the heart monitor. As such, it is the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. In order to project ourselves upward, we necessarily have to push downward. And we do that as best as possible and it is a process of expansion and contraction. This dichotomy manifests both aspects of how we progress, as expansion is forward, but unfocused, while the contraction stage draws inward and back, but consolidates down to that which is most stable and focused. This is the political dichotomy of liberal and conservative, in that liberalization is an encompassing expansion of energy outward, while conservatism is a distillation of the lessons learned and the rewards gained. In nature it's the dichotomy of spring and fall. Since this manifests on the personal level as birth and death, we need to put it in a broader context of the full cycle. We exist as manifestations of the energy propelling us forward and the structural integrity holding us together. As the energy continues to push and thus stress the form, eventually it breaks down and is replaced by a newer form that often grew up as a patch over the weaknesses of the prior form, since that is where the energy was most expansive. So it is not a straight line, but a lot of bouncing around on the level of the particulars, with the larger manifestations best expressed thermodynamically, like waves across a medium of parts jostling each other.
Our awareness is like that energy constantly pushing forward, while the thoughts it generates are the forms which coalesce and then recede in its wake. Memory is our ability to be able to construct coherent streams of these thoughts, collectively known as history and as you point out, myths.
One of the themes I keep pushing, to the frustration of some, is that we look at time backwards. As one of those individual points of reference, we experience change as a sequence of encounters and events and so we model time as the point of the present moving along a vector from past to future, which physics further distills intellectually as measures of particular durations to use in its math models. The basic larger reality is that it's the changing configuration of what is, that turns future into past. Probability into actuality. Tomorrow into yesterday. This makes it much more like temperature than space.
Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. With temperature we think of the collective effect, yet it consists of a multitude of individual velocities/amplitudes, but with time we think of those individual changes and measure their frequency, but cannot decern the measure of the universal rate of change. That is because, just like with temperature, it is a cumulative effect of those many actions.
Now our minds are composed of two sides, with the left described as a linear processor, responsible for rational, linear, causal logic, while the right is considered a parallel processor, responsible for emotion and intuition. Essentially they function as a clock and a thermostat. Like time, the serial function takes one step at a time and derives a causal route. The right side functions much more as a scalar process, with all the information available pushed into it and the response as what rises to the surface, like that wave through the medium, or the whistle of a boiling pot. Sometimes it results in insights and connections and other times it will boil over with frustration and anger as a response to too much input, or boredom from too little. More complex emotions, such as attraction can be thought of as magnetic and radiant and various such elements.
Now this relation is fundamental to our existence as mobile organisms, since we must first process a larger context and then proceed to navigate a path through it. Plants, on the other hand, don't move, so they function primarily as thermostats, with a very residual need for any serial processing.
This then goes back to that relation between expansion and contraction, as the expansion is much more a thermodynamic, non-linear process, while the contraction, on the intellectual level, is to consolidate that narrative sequence of connections necessary to derive a sense of order for our linear selves and thus project a subsequent course. Awareness coalescing as thought.
The problem is that sequence is not necessarily causal. Each event is composed of input coming from all directions, while we only approach it from one direction. One rung on a ladder isn't the cause of the next, nor, in a wholistic sense, is one footstep on the ladder cause of the next. Causality is energy transfer. So one day doesn't cause the next, rather the sun shining on a rotating planet causes this sequence of events called days. Which come into being and dissolve, ie. go future to past. Yet because our rational function is necessarily linear, we try to impose this sequencing onto the larger reality and so our sense of order grows from prior, less informed states, as the basis for future input and observations and so we keep imposing models onto reality which she only partially considers. Then to compensate, we make them more complex, because one doesn't question the myth.
Eventually though, the pot boils over and all our stories melt into on big origin myth for the next leg of the big expansion cycle. So it ultimately is only the energy which is conserved and yet it must continually manifest form, but keep changing it, so energy goes past to future forms, as these forms go from being in the future to being in the past.
Without action, nothing exists, but with action, nothing exists forever."
Peter,
I'm not trying to question your model, but it doesn't ring my bells sufficiently and I realize mine don't much interest you, but I do feel the situation on this planet is heading in a dangerous direction and so I like to think I will promote any ideas that might help and even work to quell those which don't. To find the needle in the haystack we have to sort through a lot of otherwise perfectly good hay. It just seems to me that you have not addressed the question very effectively and while you might see resolving the current conflicts in physics as fundamentally important, their solution will do little to cure humanity's rapacious treatment of its only viable habitat. If anything, the technologies arising from some such a discovery would likely be used to further the process. As people have understood from the time of Adam and Eve, knowledge is a double edged sword.
Regards,
John
