[Meatloaf] Stephan Wolfram essay on time & space

[Jeff Hayas]

Folks --

Most of us Sci-Fi fans have little trouble with time-travel stories in
which the past is changed, and consequently "the present".
In these scenarios, when the time-travelers return to "the present", they
find that no one is aware of any change, even if it is radical.

I theorize that the inverse might also be true.  I find that most folks
presume that the Past is "Real", that since it has a recorded historical
record, if only in our memory, then it somehow still exists. Likewise we
define the Future as "hasn't happened yet", and so it has no
existence, save in "Works of Fiction".
And yet we can imagine with certainty future consequences of current
actions (like jumping off a cliff), even though they have not yet happened.

WHAT IF like Einstein we play a thought-experiment and discard the notion
of linear-time, at least in the sense of Past-vs-Future being different,
and instead define them both as projections from the Not-Now.  In this
theory, the only reality is the Here-Now, and both past and future are
cause-effect or effect-cause projections. Thus when we take action in the
Here-Now, both Past and Future are altered.? Nearly all of us readily
accept the idea that the Future can be changed by current actions, and by
the common concept of linear time find it absurd that the Past can be
altered.  But suppose it could happen that way. How would this change our
concept of time, of history, of fate?

The physicists reading this would scream about cause-effect, relativistic
light-cones, conservation of energy, entropy, etc.

But no one raises these same complaints when radical quantum-theory talks
about "The Multiverse" (which I find absurd).

Ah, vot-der-hell, maybe several beers will clear my mind of these crazed
ideas.

-- Uncle Ersatz

















On Wed, 16 Oct 2024 at 20:57, pt <mnemotronic at gmail.com> wrote:

> Official Joe's Spoon Reflector.
>
> All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction.
> You have no chance to survive make your time. HA HA HA HA...
> For great justice.
>
> In essence, therefore, we experience time because of the interplay between
> our computational boundedness as observers, and the computational
> irreducibility of underlying processes in the universe. If we were not
> computationally bounded, we could “perceive the whole of the future in one
> gulp” and we wouldn’t need a notion of time at all. And if there wasn’t
> underlying computational irreducibility there wouldn’t be the kind of
> “progressive revealing of the future” that we associate with our experience
> of time.
>
>
> https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/10/on-the-nature-of-time/
>
>
> Please wash your hands after handling this mail. Thanks!
> --
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