This is an contest which I entered.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/category/10

I haven't told anyone I know about it, because it's not the type of thing the people I know would really get into. Here is my entry;

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/239

I think time makes more sense as a consequence of motion, rather the dimensional
basis for it.
Consider; If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. While the atoms proceed
through this event and on to others, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future,
then in the past. So which is the real direction? If time is a fundamental dimension, then
physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. On the other hand, if
time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the
events created go from being in the future to being in the past.

Time as consequence of
motion means it has more in common with temperature, then space, since they are both
descriptions of and methods for measuring motion, rather then dimensional basis for it.
This relationship between the matter/energy moving forward in time, as the events
created move back in time applies to all scales, whether the earth rotating and creating
days, or a cesium atom going through transitions, or strings and their vibrations. This
isn't presentism, because as a measure of motion, it would be meaningless to describe
time as a point. The only absolute temperature is the cessation of all motion and the
same would apply to time.
If energy is perfectly conserved, there is no time function for energy, because it simply
is, so the only time function is a consequence of the energy, not the basis for it. Just as
temperature is a consequence of energy and when temperature changes, it is because
energy is dissipated to, or consolidated from other areas. So with time, when one
potential direction of events prevails, others are reduced or dissipated, so the energy
consolidates to the events that happen, not alternatives. The energy doesn’t collapse,
but the information does, as it goes from future potential to past circumstance.
The sun appears to travel from east to west, but it’s the earth rotating west to east. To
the extent reality just is, a clock to reflect that would have a stable hand to represent
what is, with the face rotating the units of time past it. Currently the clock represents the
sun moving east to west, so it has hands moving left to right across the top of the clock.

Think about a thermal medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules
moving about. If we were to construct a time keeping device out of this we would take
the motion of one of these points of reference and measure it against the medium it is
moving through. The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock.
Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all
other clocks. The motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/
face of the clock. At any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an
event, so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones, the medium
against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is
displaced by the next, as all these individual points move around, so the events go from
future potential to past circumstance. The illusion of direction is created because the
physical reality of the points moves one way through the series of circumstances,
though these events go the other way. There are innumerable points of reference
describing their own narrative and all this activity exists in an equilibrium, so every
potential clock constitutes its own measure of time.
This model defines life as well. The physical brain moves forward in time, but the mind
is a record of the events receding into the past. Most motion is at the speed of light, but
we cannot process it in real time, so our minds create flashes of perception, like frames
of film. Thus to us, time does seem like a series of instants. Of course these thoughts
go from present to past, as the brain goes on to the next. Ultimately life amounts to a
larger organism that is constantly moving on to the next generation and shedding the
old like dead skin. It is the units of our individual lives, like markers on the face of a
clock, that start in the future and end up in the past.
Regards,
John Merryman
Sparks, Maryland

and a few of the postings I've made on others entries;

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/257

Kyle,

The most effective model I find for understanding reality is the convection cycle, as exemplified in Complexity Theory. Bottom up process is the energy that expands outward until it cools and coagulates into the top down order and structure which provides the frame which that expanding energy motivates and keeps from completely falling inward. Physics projects these two directions to infinity. That the energy filling the universe expands from the absolute to the infinite and that gravity collapses the structure defining the universe from the infinite to the absolute, but I'm not going to argue the extremes, just examine how they interact in the middle. The middle is the present, between the order of yesterday and the energy that will decide tomorrow.

For one thing, we exist in a Platonic culture which assumes ideals are both source and goal, whether it is monotheistic religion assuming a deity from which we have fallen and seek to return, or science seeking the Theory of Everything that explains all and answers all. This results in an inherent conceptual schizophrenia, because source is basis, while goals are aspirational apex. It's similar to assuming the infinite and the absolute are one and the same. We, the west, need to start thinking in terms of the dualities. Any monolithic frame you can imagine conjures up its opposite. There isn't even a happy medium, as that's just prelude to stagnation. Reductionist modeling is a form of order lacking vitality, dependent on the strength of its content, but shorn of context. Nodes sans network. Meaning is static reductionism, but reality is dynamic and wholistic.

Think how well this relationship defines everything from political and economic cycles, as they rise on raw energy, then cool and consume the structure which defined them. Just follow the news. Is this the end, or will another model rise to replace what we assumed was the law of the land?

Time itself is this relation between order and energy. We think of it as cause and effect, proceeding from past to future, but as you point out, only the moment exists. Time is like temperature, a measure of motion. As this motion creates frames of reference, one event is replaced by the next, so actually time really is these events going from future potential to past circumstance. The energy goes past to future. The order goes future to past. As our physical brains move into the future, our minds are the record of events receding into the past. It's not the sun moving east to west, but the earth rotating west to east.

As for free will, contrary to monotheistic tradition, good and bad are not a top down existential duel between the forces of light and darkness, but the basic binary code of biological calculation. Single celled organisms distinguish between beneficial and detrimental. Our bodies, our selves, our context are making near infinite numbers of these calculations every minute. What rises to the surface is the balance which decides what is good and bad. We don't arrive at that point and then decide. The decision is in the distinction. If we chose bad, we don't last very long and there is no will to express. This concept of "free will" is an artifact of the perspective of those fortunate enough to ride economic and political updrafts which allow them more choices than they can take advantage of. The alternative vision is of Nietzsche's theory of the "will to power." That's when the options are less then those wishing to take them, so those who chose correctly as to what is beneficial, vs. detrimental, are the ones which survive. Up until now, humanity has survived by whatever direction is most convincing to the most people, thereby providing the energy of numbers. Currently we are at an impasse, where our numbers are starting to exceed the carrying capacity of our planet. We can crash and burn, or we can transition to the next biological level, from being top predator in a collapsing ecosystem, to being central nervous system to the planetary organism. You are a good bit younger than I, so you will have the potential to see how it turns out. It should be an interesting life.

Between black and white are not just shades of grey, but all the colors of the spectrum.

Kyle,

Pagels has always been one of my favorite authors, though it's been decades since I read him. I'm not a physicist, just someone for whom curiosity has been a primary emotion.

There is a fundamental Catch 22 that makes reality a tough knot to untie. The better we get at understanding the enormity of the situation, the more overwhelming it seems. This manifests itself in many ways. Even those who climb to the pinnacle of power find themselves trapped by it. For one thing, the higher up the ladder you are, the more dependent on the ladder you are. Also those who do climb the highest ladders are often those most adept at climbing each step, rather than those who can envision the larger situation and are at a loss when they do get to the top. As our current economic and political leadership so aptly exemplifies. Specialists when you need generalists, but no generalist could make it that far. The "Peter Principle" writ large. Also, definition is limitation and limitation is definition. To transcend this material reality, we need to shed the very knowledge of it that makes it real. That's something of the situation of the spiritual absolute, the source of our being, as the essence from which we rise, as opposed to the deistic assumption of an all-knowing ideal. We are limited by our very knowledge, as we use it to escape the limits of our ignorance. Consciousness is the raw energy of the moment, going into the future. Knowledge is that comets tail of information streaming away into the past.

The principles of this are not just a consequence of human fallibility, but are elemental to the nature of reality itself. In many ways, reality is an illusion. Just think of what you know from physics. It's mostly empty space, with an odd assortment of counteracting forces that do not seem to have an underlaying physical substance. Of course particle physics is determined to find one, but as far as they push the envelope, there seems to just be another layer of activity holding it up. Currently it's strings, with extra dimensions curled up inside. Could they just be describing vortexes, with the geometry of their inner surfaces curled around inside?. Instead of looking for answers at the extremes, how might this relate to our own scale. Apply the relationship I drew between energy and order to nodes and networks. This focus on particles is like defining the network in terms of the nodes, yet in our everyday experience, we have come to realize the nodes are effect and the network is cause. The problem with this attempt to create a static model, reduced to the nodes, is because, as I pointed out originally, reality is an illusion, manifested by competing forces, so if you freeze the frame, you don't have a bunch of nodes stopped in place, but just an non-fluctuating vacuum. So it seems physics has given us the concepts to see beyond the physical, even as it is stuck in the effort to find it.

Fortunately I'm not trying to make a living at this because those who do, don't care for this line of reasoning and I wouldn't be able to climb very far up the ladder. Which isn't to say there isn't a great deal to learn from crashing these particles together and seeing what comes up, but I do think the larger pattern might be as basic as the convection cycle. My first clue was learning that the expansion of the universe is effectively balanced, or nearly so, by the force of gravity; Omega=1. Gravity and the expansion co-exist, so if they cancel each other out, it's a complimentary cycle, not a sequential one. Think of the model of gravity as the ball on the sheet of rubber. Where there are not gravitational objects, would the sheet be flat, or would it be pushed the other way in reaction to those areas where there are gravitational wells? Yes, the space is expanding, but it's also collapsing into these wells at the same rate. It's like running up a down escalator. The floors are not actually moving apart because you have to cover more space, since that space is folding into the floors(and being pushed back out as radiation). So light that crosses space is stretched, but it's a front of a wave that is also falling into all the innumerable gravity wells along the way, so it is both stretching and collapsing. (Of course we are only measuring what collapses into our telescopes and that has climbed a long way.) The light is being continually stretched and the further it travels, the more this effect is compounded. The redshift light is further redshifted so that eventually the source seems to be receding at the speed of light and this creates a horizon line over which visible light cannot go, only black body radiation. Thus other galaxies are redshifted directly away from us, proportional to their distance. Big Bang Theory tries to explain why other galaxies are redshifted such that they appear to be all moving away from us and not have our position as the center of the universe by saying that it is space itself which is expanding. The rising loaf of bread analogy. The problem with this argument is that if space is expanding, than our only real measure of space, the speed of light, should increase proportionally. Example; If two sources are x lightyears apart and the universe were to expand to twice its previous size, should they be 2x lightyears apart, or should they still be x lightyears apart? If they are 2x, that's not expanding space, that's an increasing distance of stable space. If they still appear x lightyears apart, as they should if space itself is expanding, than the whole argument is meaningless in the first place, as it wouldn't explain redshift. So yes, our measure of space expands for the light which crosses these enormous distances, but it is effectively an optical effect on that light, just as the bending of light around a gravitational object is an optical effect that causes the source to appear to move from our perspective, not because it does move. I realize I'm going way out on a limb here, if you haven't followed the history of the Big Bang theory and all the questions raised and the logical patchwork required to save it, from Inflation Theory to Dark Energy. Not to mention all the minor fudges required to fit the age of its processes into 13.7 billion years. I must say though, that it is a masterwork of math, but than so were epicycles.

Say the universe is explainable as a convection cycle. Galaxies would be the gravitational vortexes into which matter falls and energy radiates away from. That which falls into the black holes is ejected as electron jets out the poles. On the other side of the cycle is the cosmic background radiation that has traveled over that previously mentioned horizon line and cooled to the point it is only stable to the "dew point" phase transition of 2.7k. Above that and it effectively condenses out as particles. How does radiation condense? Consider that it effectively travels as a wave, yet when we try to measure it, it strikes our sensors as particles/photons. Just as moisture in the air condenses out as drops of water.

Now put it into the relationship of order and energy, as I defined them in terms of the two directions of time; The energy is constantly going onto the future, as the information defining the units of time fall away into the past. Everything is ultimately only the energy, just as time only exists as the present, but as this energy is constantly radiating out as waves and collapsing back down as particles, it creates this dichotomy of the pure energy and the information it creates and which defines it. These are the two directions meeting in the middle. Just as the energy is constantly expanding and gravity is constantly collapsing, it is a simultaneous process.

I'll leave it at that for the moment, as most people don't get that far before assuming I'm another fool(which may be true, but isn't proof I'm wrong). If I wanted to win this contest, I would have been wise not to go this far, but the fact is that my observation that time as a consequence of motion, rather than the basis for it, means that time goes future to past, grew out of trying to make sense of cosmology, so it is hard for me not to get quickly drawn into this larger conversation.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/267

Doug,

I understand the entropic, cause and effect direction of time. My observation is that this series of occurrences is manifested by the same energy set. So, from a physical standpoint, which is foundational; The energy, or the events. If we view the energy as the constant and the time vector of these events as the consequence, the flow of time is of the events going from future potential to past circumstance. The earth doesn't exist in a block time, where it is yesterday, today and tomorrow. By the motion of rotation, the event that is today, becomes yesterday. Yesterday and tomorrow don't exist because the energy to manifest them is busy with today. Otherwise there would have to be sufficient energy to manifest every point in time and that just isn't very efficient. Also the transition from one energy set to the next would be complicated, to say the least.

It is when we try to construct a physical description of reality in which energy moves along this vector that confusion arises. Consider quantum probability; When we view energy moving toward the probabilities of the future, it branches out into many worlds and cats who are both living and dead, but if we view it from the other direction and energy is just moving about and settling on those paths with the greatest probabilities, then it is future potential collapsing into past circumstance.

The irony here is that epicycles, physics greatest wrong turn, were based on the same basic conceptual error. We see the sun as moving east to west and the assumption was that it must be circling the earth in that direction. Yet the opposite is true, it is the earth rotating relative to the sun, west to east. Our clocks still represent that original assumption, in that from the northern hemisphere, we see the sun moving left to right, just as the hands of the clock go left to right across the top of the clock. So a clock which would truly represent the heliocentric reality would therefore have a stable hand to represent the sun and a face that rotated counterclockwise, or right to left across the top.

There are natives of South America who view the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. That is because their point of reference, the hands of their clock, is the energy, not the observer. Our model of the observer as the point of reference is actually more primitive, since we view time as the dimension along which we travel, from past events to future ones. While from their perspective, it is the event which occurs first, then it is observed. Now put that model in the context of Schrodinger's cat. The arrow of time travels from the quantum fluctuation, to the poison, to the cat, to the observer. Does that make some sense?

Doug,

"In other words, it’s not until the second measurement is made that the past has any meaning. A series of measurements in the present defines the past, which otherwise not only remains undefined, but undefinable."

So we are basically describing the same thing, that the past emerges from the present. We don't know what is going to happen, until it does, then it recedes into the past.

"I think it does make some sense, but I don’t know how to work with it. In my development of an RST-based theory, the present doesn’t materialize as an event, until a measurement is made, and since the measurement potentially can be made at any point on the surface of the expanding pseudoscalar, the path from the past to the present doesn’t materialize until the measurement in the present is made in relation to a past measurement."

The relationship between the digital and the analog is a matter of perspective. It is impossible to measure anything, unless there are distinctions, but unless these differences have a fundamental connection, then it is equally impossible to describe their relationship.

"With two events, it is impossible not to define the line between them,"

What if they simply have no connection, are in alternate universes, not recorded, etc. That's where the analog unity is essential.

"But what is just mind boggling to my mind is that there is no way to define the future or the past with a succession of measurements on the progression, since if one waits long enough between measurements, the possibility exists that any two or more measuring events can spatially coincide!

This means that distance cannot be definitely correlated with the passage of time, nor that spatial proximity can be confidently correlated with temporal proximity. The implications of this are immense, but inescapable. Causality is not sacrificed, it’s just that it is indeterminate!"

You are describing why a purely digital reality is impossible.

I've been trying to make a point to Dr. E, with his MDT, that as Einstein described the speed of light as the constant, then it is what we think of as this three dimensional reality which is shrinking, ie, receding into the past. Since all that really exists is this field of energy, whether it is traveling in relatively straight lines as light, or bound up in nuclear mass, it's still the same energy field, so the very concept of this four dimensional reality is borderline illusionary as the three dimensional space coordinate system is dependent on a speculative center point that is receding into the past along with the frame it anchors. It doesn't seem this way, as we function as the neural centerpoint of our own reality, but given the overwhelming nature of this field, our minds function by quantizing thoughts into a series, like frames of film, otherwise it's a blurr of energy. So our thinking requires this distinct series of thought, but the process is continuous. Think in terms of a factory; The product goes from beginning to end, while the production line faces the other direction, consuming raw material and expelling finished product. Our minds are a process of consuming raw information and expelling the quantized units of thought. When we are young, time seems to move very slowly, as we need to accumulate more information to form each thought and they seem disconnected. When we get older, the thoughts happen much faster, as each grows from the previous, so they are much more linear and connected. It is only when we develop this connection between thoughts that memory starts.

Taking it a step deeper, raw consciousness rides this wave of energy, while the process of thinking is that collapsing wave of the past. We exist, like individual thoughts, being formed from this raw consciousness, then collapse into ever more structured thinking, until, like a hardened crust, we can no longer grow with this wave and peel away into the past. Yet without a structured past, the future would be equally featureless. So mortality is essential to creating life. It cannot grow, unless it consumes the essence of the past.

Knowledge is that digital information receding into the past, while consciousness is that analog awareness proceeding into the future. When we loose that connection between thoughts, we lose the memory that came when the connection first developed.

I'll leave it at that....
John b.