Time is Irreversible

Metaphysics & Epistemology
1

Time-forward irreversible is essential to physics because it is the dimension that accumulates histories attached to existing things. Structure, which is symmetry breaking organized, makes existing things orderly and functional, and thus makes physics developmental and increasingly complex. It is organized history remembered and stabilized.

The essential ingredient in temporally-realized structure is the irreversibility of time. Abstract formalisms can run forward and backwards conceptually. Material things can only build towards life via remembrance of accumulating structure becoming more complex.

Life couldn’t exist if time could run backwards physically, as that would be de-construction of living organisms moving backwards towards the womb, a cataclysm.

If a time machine can reverse time, the scope of its impact will need to be severely restricted.

Identity is self-awareness persistent across irreversible time-forward under lawful transformation. If structure were reversible in time, no life and its sentience.

Mass-Energy curves spacetime, and this curving function of physics causes the symmetry breaking that platforms physics. So, mass-energy assumes symmetry breaking, and with time-irreversible, symmetry breaking builds structure which evolves into the complexity of life.

The (symmetry/asymmetry)asymmetry is a root fundamental with time stabilizing its forward direction towards the organized structures of material dynamism instantiating our environment.

We wouldn’t be here if time were reversible.

2

There are a lot of things in this universe that are not physical the way we understand it. It’s even been suggested that only 5% of the universe’s matter is made up of physical matter the way we identify it. With that unknown in mind, we might not be able to say with certainty, that retrocausality does or doesn’t exist in regards to the other invisible matter, that is not the kind that we can experience.

…I wonder about a “block universe”, where other things, outside our reach, occur.

1 Like
3

Retrocausality is not established as reverse causation in a practical sense. In QM it can influence how an earlier event is perceived, but that’s not necessarily different from the present view of history differing from the perception of the same events at the time of their occurance. Retroactive causal relevance is not identical to reverse causation. It may refer to abstract measurements being formally time-symmetric.

Do you also refer to dark matter and dark energy?

If time is a field that doesn’t flow, and events are nodes within a unified field, then there’s an argument for unitary physical dynamism, but undifferentiated dynamism might be undecipherable.

1 Like
4

Interesting! Thank you

5

Time can be reversed and run backwards because time is not physical. However, it doesn’t take you back to the past.

6

What tells you that time runs backward? Give an example of time running backwards.

7

Thanks for your time and attention.

8

Because time is your perception, when you are remembering or recalling something from your past, your time is running backwards, or your time is being reversed in your mind.

However, you cannot go back to the past physically. You are imprisoned in the present, going forward to future every moment and seconds in your life.

9

When you remember on Tuesday the delicious little piece of cake you shared with Madeleine at the tea party on Monday, you believe you cease moving forward in time on Tuesday?

10

You are confusing belief with memory. It doesn’t matter what you believe. It matters if you could remember if you shared a cake or beer with Madeleine on Monday. While you are remembering the event, your time has reverted back to Monday, even if you are in Tuesday.

Whether you remember it or not, your body is tied into the present, which is only available physical time for your access. Revereted time only exists in your mind, not in the world, therefore it is inaccessible to you physically. It is only available for your reflection.

If you cannot recall the past at all, then your time doesn’t exist to reverse. Meanwhile the present moment keeps pushing forward to the future.

11

Since the mind and its memories are not in the world, I ask you to tell me where they are. I also ask, in this location not in the world, does time run in both directions?

12

They are in your brain. There is no physical direction. It runs to the past to future, or future to the past, which is mental. If you are asleep, there is no past and no future.

You are either unconscious or in the dreams. When you wake up, you are back to the present, where you could control your mind for reminiscing the past, perceiving present or imagining the future.

13

What of so-called ‘four-dimensional’ (physical) reality, length, breadth, height … and time? Spacetime. Einstein, and all that. From that perspective, even the flow of time is perhaps a misperception…

14

I understand you to be talking about Einstein’s 4-dimensional manifold. Perhaps you’re also referring to his block universe, which preserves all instants of time forever, although our position in the present doesn’t allow us to reach positions in the past.

If the 4D manifold is a unified field, with all events nodes within the field, then perhaps there’s no flow of time. Instead, there’s only a totalized map of all events, like a movie reel containing all events in one unity, except in four dimensions with the 4D manifold.

Under this construction, I don’t see how evolving states of systems work, unless the map is eternally totalized, and past, present and future are the illusions.

So why does time seem to move forward for humans? Is the totalized map unified at a higher spatial dimension?

Is there an ongoing hierarchy of ever-higher spatial dimensions corresponding to ever-higher dimensions of time?

At the next up manifold, do sentient beings therein seem to experience sequential time, but with each unit of time, no matter how small, equal to an eternity for us?

This would tell us something about dimensional extension in relation to time. When I enter the cubic space of my bedroom at night and flop onto my bed, for a conjectural two-dimensional sentient, I’m instantly immersed in a cubic space that’s an endless sequence of aerial spaces for the two-dimensional sentient?

Does this tell us that each of our four dimensions lack unification at a lower dimensional matrix? Conversely, an infinite time sequence for us is not even an instant for a higher-dimensional-matrix being?

15

My understanding of a 4D ‘reality’ is that our time-related words, “present”, “past” and “future”, no longer have meaning. And therefore we humans have no “position in the present”, as there is no longer any such thing.

Have I misunderstood this? I’m definitely not an expert on such matters.

16

Sounds like growing block interpretation, one of the forms of presentism.

It is unclear why that would be a cataclysm or why life cannot exist with time running backwards, since life would form from corpses and such. The subjective experience of this (presuming a form of physicalism) would be indistinguishable from time running forard (in the direction of the arrow of time). All this presumes presentism where time is something that ‘runs’ in the first place, and reversing it makes any syntactic sense.

Time machines are typically posited to place the occupant at another location in time, not alter which moment is the universal present, which might revert you to a child, or even kill you if the machine rewound over your birth. For a growing block model, the machine would somehow destroy X amount of the block, a funny way to exert your free will and ‘have done otherwise’.

It’s pretty hard to attempt to quote relativity theory and then talk about rewinding time, all in the same post.

Actually, about 15.5% of matter is baryonic matter, and all of matter is physical, even the dark stuff. The 5% quote is approximately the percentage that baryonic matter contributes to the current energy density of the universe. Note that I say ‘current’ since if the entire universe is considered (and not just the current slice), the figure is meaningless at best, and under 1% if you attempt some kind of average.

It can be under something like moving spotlight view, with none of the problems that you point out. But you don’t seem to be presuming such a view, favoring something like growing block instead, which makes it harder to rewind.

Correct. Under that view (often referred to as a block view), time is a mere dimension exactly like space, and is not something one can rewind any more than one can rewind space.
There is indeed no ontological past/present/future in such a view. The words only refer to relations between events. X occurs before Y and such.

There is no ‘position in the present’ in such a view.

Maybe not, but you’re representing it better than does ucarr, given the quote just above.

1 Like
17

I’m doubting the ordering of events in time is totally illusory. Who I am today is clearly not who I was thirty years ago. The language I know says, “Events don’t disappear;” that’s not saying events across time aren’t distinct.

18

I don’t believe humans can live without a functional present, it not being precisely measurable notwithstanding. The labels for distinct time intervals are markers for differences. How are differences structured in the absence of distinct time intervals?

19

During sleep, when the mind is neither in the past nor in the future, suppose you are dreaming of flying from Alaska to Russia. This dream has a duration of 132 seconds. At the start of this duration, you look down and see the Alaskan landscape. Near the end of the duration, you look down and see the Russian landscape. Describe what time does, if anything, to make your vision of the landscape change from Alaska to Russia.

20

Regarding humans, who on Monday, the first of the month, start experiencing their personal history changing, would these changes be experienced as personal identity change and growth toward cessation of existence relatively opposite to their previous direction, and thus deconstruction and yet structurally indistinguishable from their previous directional experience of time?