Dr. Wharton,
Some very interesting ideas, though I would have a few quibbles.
For one thing, the essay question is: Is reality digital, or analog. Not is the foundation of reality digital or analog. If it were the latter then the premise of your argument would be correct, the foundation of reality is analog, but it is this emergent digitalization which forms reality as we perceive it. It is a bit of a dualism between top down digitalization and bottom up analog.
The next point is that you use the constraints of the Big Bang to frame your theory of emergent digitalization, but isn't the primary assumption of an expanding universe that the only way purely digital quanta of light can be redshifted is by the actual recession of the source? If light is actually analog, there are quite a few ways it could be redshifted.
Here are some methods:
this that
Not to mention that the premise of "tired light" was dismissed, based on the assumption of a discrete model of the photon, since there was no observed scattering.
As for the premise that there are only two models of time, block time versus instantaneous points, what if time is fundamentally fuzzy?
It's not that the present flows(Newton)/exists along some dimension(Einstein) from past to future, but that the changing configuration of what is that turns the future into the past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.
We do proceed from past events to future ones, but the physical reality is what is present, so it is the present that is the constant, while the events coalesce out of future potential, into present circumstance and are then replaced, to recede into the past.
Consider that there is no way to calculate all possible input into any event, as it could be arriving from opposite directions at the speed of light. So prior to the actual occurrence of an event, its total cause is still in the future. Once it has occurred, the event recedes into the past. So in this sense, the future is cause and the past is effect.
Time then, is an effect of motion, rather than the basis for it. Therefore there cannot be a dimensionless point in time without freezing the very motion creating it. It would be like trying to take a picture with the camera speed set at zero. This means that a particle cannot be isolated from its motion. It has no fixed position. Frozen/motionless and it would cease to exist.
Same with Schrodinger's cat. Death is not an instantaneous point. It is that collapse of future probabilities into past effects which creates the process of time. Not a progression from a determined past into a probabilistic future that only seems to yield multiworlds.
Nor would we need the potential conceptual problems caused by block time, whether conservation of energy issues, determinism, or time travel.
Welcome back to the netherworld of FQXi discussions.
