You don't need determinism…

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Question for block universe supporters.  That is definitely me 🙂

We don’t experience “motion through time.”  We accumulate records and memories and have stable correlations between them. My brain at one spacetime location contains records of other locations. (The “block” is the four-dimensional spacetime structure). Nothing in block universe says “You move forward through time.” What it says is that your worldline contains states with different memory content (your points in spacetime). We are not traveling. We are a sequence of distinct brain-states, some of which contain records. The ones that contains records are experienced as “later”. We don’t feel like we are moving forward because “time flows”.  Rather we feel forward motion because memory one works in one direction. We experience having memories, not motion through time. But we have no memories of the future so there is no “ledger record” embedded in structure. We have memories of some regions of spacetime and not others. We label those with records of other brain states as “the Past” and those with no records as “the Future”.

What we think of as “the past” are just regions encoded in present structure and the future are regions not yet encoded.  Our latest experience of past records is a new local state. The future is not unknown because it hasn’t happened yet. It is unknown because its state is not recorded “here”, in this local state.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by Reg the Fronkey Farmer. Reason: fixed some typos

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I am not “me”,  an unchanging physical entity. I am a sequence of highly similar spacetime regions whose internal structure overlaps. I once described myself as a “constantly merging shadow copy”. That is I am the person I was yesterday plus some incremental changes. Keep that idea going and each day (or minute, hour) I am a different person. Each day is a new local state of me in spacetime. There is no exact moment where “yesterday’s me” becomes “today’s me”. There is no boundary line between my selves. Once I get rid of seeing change through a temporal lens (which is not easy to do) I just see that I am a set of relations between static regions of the block that are structurally similar.

But it is not the same as a “river never being the same twice”. Heraclitus’ river says the river changes because new water flows through it. I am not like a river that remains while its water changes. I do not persist. I am repeatedly instantiated. Or maybe this is better; Heraclitus says “everything flows”. That is poetic but not ontology. But I say “Nothing flows. Structures differ”.

 

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