Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@strega – next “time” someone says that, you should reply that “A clock is not a time detector; it is a controlled physical process used to compare spacetime intervals”. That you get you a free lunch 🙂

[jakelafortParticipant]

Mother fucking Christ killing Zionist White colonial settler apartheid genociding guilt spreading emetic peripatetic homeless zioned clowned round mound lacking standing to be disbanding outperforming and chosen like Moses who opposes the Philistines and faerie queens & goddamn Lezbrews and zionist Jews guilt by association in a craven nation surrounded by nations whose oblations are pay for slay a Jew a day keeps the bill collector away glad i am a free thinker not a stinker or Dinker but an American today and each day and i like it this way.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon:

I used to know someone, a lowly speed freak from a council estate, who could tell people’s future. She could read a short distance into the future, and while we were all out that night, she told me about the drama that was unfolding at my home. When I got home, her story was true. She didn’t know where I lived, didn’t know any of the people, had no mobile phone, etc. So, my “wiggly curve” was diffused into “my environment”, even when I wasn’t physically in it.

In all fairness, any prediction could be considered true if the prognosticator talks nebulously enough, moves the goalposts, and, above all, talks a lot. Astrologers, psychics, and self-proclaimed “prophets” do it all the time. “Drama” could be anything from a clogged sink to an argument with a housemate or watching a drama on TV. So this really wouldn’t have anything to do with your “wiggly curve,” which is what it is regardless of professed prognostications.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake:

Mother fucking Christ killing Zionist White colonial settler apartheid genociding guilt spreading emetic peripatetic homeless zioned clowned round mound lacking standing to be disbanding outperforming and chosen like Moses who opposes the Philistines and faerie queens & goddamn Lezbrews and zionist Jews guilt by association in a craven nation surrounded by nations whose oblations are pay for slay a Jew a day keeps the bill collector away glad i am a free thinker not a stinker or Dinker but an American today and each day and i like it this way.

That would take Bob Dylan more flash cards than he could carry to express that. Well played!

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

“Now” is not a universal property spread across space. The universe doesn’t care where the time zone line is drawn. Only humans do. Our segmentation of our experience of time flow is just a convention. The feeling that clock time reflects a moving reality is mistaken.

OK, true, the clock isn’t evidence of anything much apart from that its little hands are going round.

But “now” doesn’t have to be universal to exist.  “Now” is local to me.  “Now” is where I am now, in my time-line.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

In all fairness, any prediction could be considered true if the prognosticator talks nebulously enough, moves the goalposts, and, above all, talks a lot. Astrologers, psychics, and self-proclaimed “prophets” do it all the time.

They could, and they do, but this was different.  She went around telling people their futures.  She told me about what happened in my home (loads of arguments, person moved out) while I was away, and it was all true when I got back.

My point is, that if this is correct, then my “time line” extends into “my environment”.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

“Now is where I am now, in my timeline.”

Great…that is compatible with relativity. There is a subtle distinction to be made. Do you think “now” is a physical feature of reality….or is it a local perspective feature made by an observer within reality?

Yes, “now” is always local to an observer. You are local to “here” in your “now”. That is how we express our observation of the “present”, of  “the here and now”. In relativity, you always occupy one region of your own worldline. Your experience is anchored there.

The key point is how you understand “Now is where I am now, in my timeline.”

Do you see “now” as a real moving present sweeping along the line or a a point of access within a fixed structure.

I understand it to mean “now” is local to you. But that doesn’t mean it moves. It just means your current brain state only has access to one region of your worldline. “Now” is real as perspective but it is not real as a process acting on the universe.

Back to the film reel. (Groundhog Day, of course). The whole reel (structure) exists, and the projector shows one frame at a time. The current frame being projected is “now” for the viewer. But…the frame is not being created, the reel is not advancing itself, the movie already has all frames. “Now” is just the frame being currently accessed, it exists as a local perspective, not as a global physical feature. “Now” is where you are located in spacetime, not a spotlight moving through it. You are an extended spacetime structure, not a moving dot! The perspective you call “now” is a local slice of that structure (or “loaf” as Unseen first referenced). “Now” is a local index within spacetime rather than a moving universal moment. It is a coordinate, not a cosmic event, an index, not a process.

If you stay in your seat and immediately replay the reel, the same frames appear in the same order. The structure is unchanged. But the “viewing event” occurs at a different spacetime location. Your memory hold records or earlier frames and experiences continuity. Your brain constructs a narrative. This is what we sense as “time flow”. But the person in the seat beside you suffers from memory loss. They lack the records of the first viewing. Each frame feels isolated and has no context. They have no sense of “passage” or of repetition. Nothing about the structure of the reel was changed. Only the record structure in the viewer brain changes. The sensation of “time flowing” depends on internal correlations (memory), not on the film itself moving.

The reel does not change when watched repeatedly; only the viewer’s informational state changes. The sense of progression comes from memory, not from the reel moving. In Groundhog Day, the sequence of events is fixed. Phil remembers previous loops and records of earlier local states of his worldline. His memory is not literally a past moment being re-experienced but rather a present physical state (in his brain) that is correlated with another region of his worldline. The memory exists “now” as a brain state, but it refers to a previous configuration. Memories are present records that encode correlations with earlier local “nows”. Memory is the present carrying information about other parts of his worldline.

So…..”Now” is your local experiential access. Memory is correlation to other nearby regions (previous “nows”). Our brain interprets these correlations as “time flow”.  If memories were the actual past itself, it would be impossible to alter them or to not recall them. This is why they are current subjective records that point to earlier structure.

• This reply was modified 1 day, 5 hours ago by  Reg the Fronkey Farmer.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

I’m still waiting for the killer app that comes from the notion that time is not fundamental. If there isn’t one, then this is all just parlor entertainment, not science.

And there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Do you see “now” as a real moving present sweeping along the line or a a point of access within a fixed structure.

I understand it to mean “now” is local to you. But that doesn’t mean it moves. It just means your current brain state only has access to one region of your worldline. “Now” is real as perspective but it is not real as a process acting on the universe.

Yes, I see it this way.  But what connects my subjective experience to my “now”?  Why am I tied to a continuously moving point of access to my time-line?  My subjective perspective is my experience of living in the now.  It’s a real thing, even if it’s only experienced by me.  It’s a real experience.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I’m still waiting for the killer app that comes from the notion that time is not fundamental. If there isn’t one, then this is all just parlor entertainment, not science.

That’s a fair challenge.  Physics doesn’t need a “killer app” before a concept is scientific. It needs explanatory power, consistency, and testable consequences. Back in 1905 there were no obvious practical use from knowing that space and time are relative.

Much of science’s biggest progress begins as uncomfortable ideas about how we describe reality. Evolution was a paradigm shift but did not have any practical use until later. The same is true of germ theory before antibiotics.

The most well-known application derived from relativity is GPS.  It does require clocks but not because the universe has a 24-hour cycle or because time “flows.” To work GPS needs extremely stable physical processes that measure spacetime intervals. GPS satellites continuously broadcast their position in spacetime using signal in their onboard atomic clock. Your cell phone compares signals from several satellites and calculates how far they have traveled. This works very well because light has a constant spacetime relationship (c) and spacetime geometry behaves exactly as relativity predicts.

GPS does not depend on time zones, 24-hour clock conventions or human notions of “now”.  Without relativity, satellite clocks would drift relative to Earth clocks and positional errors would accumulate rapidly. GPS proves that different worldlines accumulate different spacetime intervals. Otherwise, it just would not work. GPS doesn’t care what day it is. It cares only about spacetime intervals.

We need to distinguish human timekeeping conventions of days, hours, time zones and calendars, which are man-made and do not exist in reality from the relativistic nature of interval measurement in physics.

I guess the point isn’t to invent a new gadget tomorrow. The question is whether our theories are internally consistent. If time turns out to be emergent rather than fundamental, it could be the key to unifying gravity and quantum physics  which is one of the biggest unsolved problems in science.

I have a tattoo representing the collapse of the wave function on my back (nearly finished). Wave-function collapse is not defined by clock time but by the establishment of definite correlations between interacting systems. ‘t’ is a coordinate used for calculation only and not as evidence of time flowing. Spacetime coordinates do not imply a moving present. Collapse is not something that happens at a time; it is something that happens between systems. It is the relational event that is fundamental. Structure emerges though interaction rather than event occurring in time.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Yes, I see it this way.  But what connects my subjective experience to my “now”?

Yes Simon, your subjective experience of “now” is real. I am not denying that. But the mistake is when interpret that experience as a objective property of the Universe. The experience of “time flow” and therefore the experience of a “now” is real but the interpretation may be wrong.

Why am I tied to a continuously moving point of access to my time-line?

In the Block Universe, you are not tethered to a moving point. Instead, each local brain state along your worldline contains a perspective that experiences itself as “present”. Nothing is travelling. Each state as presented is the current state. None experiences being the past or the future. It feels like motion because each state holds records (memories) of nearby states. This creates the impression of a single self (or dot) moving forwards. But this subject experience is only informational. It is not ontological.

Back to Groundhog Day….It is not one viewer moving through frames. It’s that every frame contains a viewer who feels present.  Each local brain state along your worldline contains a perspective that experiences itself as its own “now”.

Evolution has shaped our brain to model agency and continuity so “ a moving self” is an extremely useful survival interface. But being useful does not make it fundamental. It is our consciousness that keeps the institution of time flow alive. The present is real as experience but not as a process acting on spacetime.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

What does non-fundanental non-divisible time explain that is not explained by time as a fundamental and divisible?

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