Saturday, 14 August 2010

The Direction of Time

Watching the "What If" video by Jason Derulo makes it clear that in a universe with time flowing forward or backwards makes no difference to the people in that universe.


This has two meanings.

1) When they reverse the scenario in the video it reverses everything so the protagonists also forget that she dies. It means that the mental state of everyone is the same irrespective of the flow of time. One cannot even speak about causation having a direction because if asked at any point in the video why they are together they would recall the meeting at the park bench even though in the "reverse" time this hadn't happened yet.

In this view the direction of time is actually a narrative construct and time itself does not exist. It also makes the notion of time a relative concept since it is us in our own frame of reference watching these individuals on TV and having their lives played forward and backward relative to our own, and watching it with an irony that is necessarily external to their narrative that is the source of the sense of time and even "what if".

2) If they were allowed to be free thinking as the tape is played backwards then he would know that "she" dies before he has it revealed who she is. But again this is relative because in such a world it would be normative to have the ends of stories revealed before what the ending meant. That would simply be the way time worked in such a world and there would be no sense of "backwards".

It has been commented on before that physics still can't nail time into a direction. The typical answer that entropy must increase isn't an answer because reverse the tape in mode 2 above and entropy must decrease, and worse reverse the tape in mode 1 and it still increases!

I've always thought that time didn't exist - seems here the definitive illustration of 1 is that it is just a concept rather than a reality. This is deep shall consider more.

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US displaying its Imperialist credentials... yet again

Wanted to know the pattern of UN votes over Venezuela and then got into seeing if ChatGPT could see the obvious pattern of Imperialism here....