I know it’s one of the unsolved mysteries how “time’s arrow” flies in only one direction; that we remember the past, but not the future; that our connection with the stream of time is one-way.
But is this a function of the abstract, absolute nature of Time? I.e., is it math?
Or is it a limitation of our memory cells; the simple meat of our brains?
Does time, in fact, flow in two directions–or more–but due to the physical limitations of our brains, or their chemical building blocks, or something mundane like that, it’s only *we *who fail to perceive it?
Is there any proof that time does, in fact, jibe perfectly with our ability to perceive it? Or are we limited in our perceptions, and is time in fact less inflexible?
All we know is that our subjectivity moves in a specific direction. We remember the past, we don’t “remember” the future.
Some knowledgeable physicist may come along and contradict me, but I think if you ignore the subjectivity thing, all processes can be studied and rules & pattern-observation derived from them from a future-to-past perspective, without running into any logical contradictions. In fact, I think some theories of the universe involve trajectories in which the passage of time is inverted, with effect following cause in the order opposite of that to which we are accustomed, and no more than the sign in front of a variable denotes the difference.
It is definitely cool and possibly philosophically useful to conceptualize your “life” as a solid object in 4-dimensional space; it extends like a person-shaped tube through time, tunnelling through physical and social contexts, with definite and specific borders top and bottom left and right, and also birth and death. To “time travel” would be to reoccupy a position in the tunnel different from the one you occupy now, at other than the normal rate of subjective progress through the tunnel. The contents of your mind would be what they had been (or will be) at that location in the absence of time travel, meaning that you would not know that time travel had occurred and would not notice anything at all out of the ordinary. Which means it is an illusion of subjectivity to think it doesn’t occur perpetually. Or, to put it another way, there is no “now” — every moment of the trajectory of your life has its own sense of “now” and none of them is more valid than any other. You think you are subjectively experiencing the passage of time, but the tunnel is composed in large part of your subjectivity, and at any point that you pause n the tunnel and examine the subjectivity there, you find memory of the past but none of the future, and that’s what creates the illusion that a “now” actually exists.
Well, yeah, OK, bullshit. I mean yeah true enough for all that it’s worth, but it isn’t worth much, because we are subjective, and you can’t live your life from the conceptual vantage point provided by that insight. It’s an intellectual party favor and not much more.
There are 7 arrows of time, though I only remember three of them clearly.
Consciousness arrow - We only remember the past, not the future.
Entropy arrow - As time moves forward, entropy increases.
Universal expansion arrow - As time moves forward, the universe expands.
Partical decay arrow - I forget this one; something about K Bosons?
The fact that most of the arrows appear to be independent of us seems to indicate that time’s inexorable journey in one direction is part of the fabric of reality itself, and not an illusion constructed from our consciousness.
I just finished reading Slaughter House Five, so this post in particular is rather amusing to me. Tralfamadore exists only on the pages of Kurt Vonnegut as far as we know – beings that ‘knew’ the future would play havoc with our ideas of causality, so I would assume that it’s a physical rule of the universe that time flows in one way.
True, in Slaughter House Five Billy never used his knowledge to change events because “that’s the way it is,” but that seems like such a cop out to me.
And if the universe actually works that way but we can’t remember the future (which makes sense since the memories are only imprinted as the actions happen) then we’d never figure it out, would we?
The only biological component of time is the “consciousness arrow”, the fact that we (royal ‘we’, meaning all known life) function and act on the condition that cause precedes effect. For example, a plant will grow toward water or nutrients, expecting them to remain until it gets there. A child touching a hot stove realizes and remembers the effect of being burnt.
Aside from that… refer to the other posts… and choose.
I wanted to add a semi-rebuttal of CalMeacham’s blunt tunnelvision… Using the “entropy arrow”, time can be about chemistry, as well. A spontaneus reaction will always proceed in the direction that lowers the total energy of the system. Even in an exothermic reaction, like the iron rusting in those little handwarmer packets, the drop in energy state of the iron is a little more than the heat generated, because the internal energy of the system increases.
But… I have to laugh at this, because smartypants like us could keep this debate going forever, without even realizing why.
The fact that the question itself includes the word “IS” allows infinite interpretation of the answer. The mere fact that one can make a statements such as “one is two”, or “I am God” (false assumptions) opens the door to personal interpretation. In other words, time “is” whatever you want it to be.
All of these arrows make time asymmetrical, but which of them amount to anything more than the equivalent of “when moving from right to left, x decreases, when moving from left to right, x increases”?
Entropy: things wind down in a past-to-future direction, things wind up in a future-to-past direciton
Radiation: things radiate in a past-to-future direction, things converge in a future-to-past direction
etc.
Subjectivity is the only one that’s different. Not from the “outside” — you could with validityi say:
Memories form trailing behind events in a past-to-future direction, memories disappear in anticipation of events in a future-to-past direction
…but from the “inside”, by the very nature of what consciousness and what that statement about memory means to consciousness, our experience of time is strictly past-to-future.
