Thoughts about what Mike wrote below: 1. I don't know about this arrow of time. I haven't kept up to date, but isn't there a theorem that if you reverse charge, parity, and time, any movie of something physically possible would still be possible if run backward? (And if charge and parity are not involved, then you can just run the same movie backward without change.) Of course, in our neighborhood of spacetime, we are living in a part of the universe where stars radiate energy in the positive direction of time (t+). Given that fact, things like eggs breaking in t+ but seemingly never reassembling follow from the existence of evolution. But in principle if we could imagine where the recent past of [all spacetime that could affect our present] is being copied — in a CPT-reversed way, at least T — presumably the same past would unfold just like our own future. But Mike himself pointed out that "entropy increases" isn't by itself a fully adequate explanation. 2. Mike asks "More carefully, how could you distinguish the experience of living the events out of order from living them in order, or from living them simultaneously?" My first answer is, It sure *feels* as if the recent past is something that I lived very recently. And the recenter the past, the recenter it feels. It's enough to make one want to locate one's focus in a new place, to recenter oneself. *Maybe* it's just a coincidence that all these moments fit together into a continuous narrative. It feels much more likely that something crucial about how the moments came into being is real-numbery, i.e., somehow 1-dimensional. I think the real numbers R can be characterized as the only connected topological space such that the removal of any point leaves just two connected components. But there may be another condition like, y'know, Hausdorffness or local compactness or homogeneity, that I'd rather not mention, necessary for this uniqueness. But: Would we indeed feel as we in fact do, if all phases of our lives were being lived, kind of, "at the same time" ? Who is feeling all those other moments that we lived or will live? (Not 100% serious, but still.) —Dan "All you have is the state of your brain at that given point in time." I think. —Dan ----- On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 1:47 PM Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
That's probably my preferred view, but there are problems reconciling it with everyday experience. It would mean that all ages t of (say) me are living their lives equally, in some sense of equally.
But how does that explain the experience we have of living our lives in the order of the real numbers, and the fact that it keeps getting later?
A too-cute answer is, "Because the arrow of time points in the direction of increasing entropy." More carefully, how could you distinguish the experience of living the events out of order from living them in order, or from living them simultaneously? All you have is the state of your brain at that given point in time. -----