Hi all,
Thanks for the great discussion. The idea that time might operate in two modes one reversible within isolated systems (like quantum gates), and another irreversible upon interaction or measurement resonates strongly with a line of thought I've been working on. I’d like to share it here, because it might offer a simple way to test whether time behaves differently depending on context.
The core idea is this: what if the global consistency conditions often invoked in block universe models could leave informational traces not in physical dynamics, but in the structure of data itself?
I’ve been developing a minimal protocol that runs entirely on a personal computer. It tests whether a structure defined after a random dataset can reveal unexpected compressive order within that dataset beyond what you'd expect by chance. It doesn’t aim to prove the block universe in any ontological sense, but rather to test whether future-generated structure can retroactively expose patterns in prior data, in a way that strictly forward-causal models would rule out.
Basic protocol:
- Generate a random bitstring x₀
- Generate a binary vector g of the same length (using either a PRNG or QRNG)
- Partition x₀ into two subsequences: A (where g=0), and B (where g=1)
- Compress A and B separately using a lossless algorithm (e.g., LZMA, PPMd)
- Compute the Information Structure Compression Residual:
ISCR₍g₎ = len(x₀) - [len(A_compressed) + len(B_compressed)]
To evaluate whether g is revealing real structure in x₀, just permute g (e.g., 1000 times), recalculate ISCR for each permutation, and compute a p-value: the fraction of permutations that produce a score equal to or higher than the original. If the original g yields a significantly higher ISCR than 99% of permutations (p < 0.01), it suggests a structural dependency between g and x₀ despite g having been generated after x₀.
Such a result would not indicate a violation of dynamical causality or signaling but rather a possible signature of retroactive structure. That is, consistency not enforced via dynamics or signals, but via information-theoretic coherence between elements defined across time. This connects to models by Stoica, Wharton, and Costa de Beauregard, where global consistency constrains allowable local histories.
Interestingly, this also aligns with Robert McEachern’s interpretation of Claude Shannon’s work. McEachern argues that deterministic "cause and effect" can emerge from chaos via mechanisms akin to matched filtering—where “noise” can detect or resonate with itself to reveal structure. In this view, what appears as retrocausality may actually be a form of self-consistency filtering, where information structures are constrained to match across time, without invoking any dynamical influence from future to past.
This protocol:
- requires no physical system or measurement interaction (fully passive)
- is statistically falsifiable (permutation test)
- is simple to reproduce (using open-source tools)
- and may be the first PC-level test of post-determined or time-symmetric structure
Curious to hear your thoughts especially from those working on time symmetry, retrocausality, and global consistency principles.
Best regards,
(And apologies in advance for any awkward English I'm French)