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Time is all in our heads?

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Of course. From Robert Lanza, Wake Forest U, at Discover Mag:

So if the laws of physics should work just as well for events going forward or going backward in time, then why do we only experience growing older? All our scientific theories tell us that we should be able to experience the future just like we experience the past.

The answer is that we observers have memory and can only remember events which we have observed in the past. Quantum mechanical trajectories “future to past” are associated with erasing of memory, since any process which decreases entropy (decline in order) leads to the decrease of entanglement between our memory and observed events. In other words, if we do experience the future (which we might), we are not able to store the memories about such processes. You can’t go back in time without this information being erased from your brain. By contrast, if you experience the future by using the usual route “past > present > future,” you accumulate memories and entropy grows.More.

Has this person yet been called on to advise heads of state?

See also: Objective fact is sexist? Prof complains of “institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging.”

Astrophysicist on evolution breeding reality sense out of us
NPR’s Adam Frank: I find the logic in Hoffman’s ideas both exciting and potentially appealing because of other philosophical biases I carry around in my head. (But he suspects the theory is ultimately wrong.)

and

The war on falsifiability

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Comments
Perhaps there are many definitions of time, but only one is valid. The problem is which one? Here's one that was popular in the 1970s:
Time (according to Pink Floyd) Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today And then one day you find ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking Racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
Songwriters: ANDREW WRIGHT, SIMON SMITH © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, T.R.O. INC. For non-commercial use only. Data from: LyricFind
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way ? Stop waiting! Here's the Way - the embodiment of the unification of time:
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup [present], you proclaim the Lord's death [past] until He comes [future]. 1 Corinthians 11:26 (ESV)
Past, present, future, all in one unifying entity: the self-proclaimed Way. It's all about Him only. That's the Way! Run to it! Run, before it's too late.Dionisio
September 27, 2016
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Time is real and PHYSICAL. It is just as physical as motion. Time has meaning only in relation to space. Quantum Mechanics is weird because it is the realm of unit space. There is no "inside" to this space; all positions are equivalent, there are no trajectories, etc. All variation is in time. The weirdness comes from forcing a "when" phenomena into a "where" type of reference system. Special and General Relativity are "local" theories by design and intent. They are out-of-scope when attempts are made to apply them to "non-local" phenomena. There is more on these themes in: "Beyond Einstein: non-local physics" by Brian Fraser (2015) The free 22 page paper can be downloaded from: http://scripturalphysics.org/4v4a/BeyondEinstein.html The .html file gives a link to the .pdf file but the former has additional information, and many more links and insights.BrianFraser
September 27, 2016
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as to:
The Arrow of Time? It’s All in Our Heads - Robert Lanza - September 26, 2016 Excerpt: For years physicists have known that Newton’s laws, Einstein’s equations, and even those of the quantum theory, are all time-symmetrical. Time plays absolutely no role. There is no forward movement of time. Thus, many scientists question whether time even exists. Indeed, Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single special present but that all moments are equally real.,,, Thus, a “brainless” observer — that is, an observer without the ability to store observed events — does not experience time or a world in which we age. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/09/26/the-arrow-of-time-its-all-in-our-heads/
His prediction that an 'observer with no brain does not experience time', which he apparently developed solely by looking at quantum theory and relativity itself, a prediction which specifically states “a “brainless” observer,, does not experience time or a world in which we age”, finds rather stunning confirmation in near death experiences:
'In the 'spirit world,,, instantly, there was no sense of time. See, everything on earth is related to time. You got up this morning, you are going to go to bed tonight. Something is new, it will get old. Something is born, it's going to die. Everything on the physical plane is relative to time, but everything in the spiritual plane is relative to eternity. Instantly I was in total consciousness and awareness of eternity, and you and I as we live in this earth cannot even comprehend it, because everything that we have here is filled within the veil of the temporal life. In the spirit life that is more real than anything else and it is awesome. Eternity as a concept is awesome. There is no such thing as time. I knew that whatever happened was going to go on and on.' In The Presence Of Almighty God – The NDE of Mickey Robinson – video (testimony starts at 27:45 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s66DchGhhD0 'When you die, you enter eternity. It feels like you were always there, and you will always be there. You realize that existence on Earth is only just a brief instant.' Dr. Ken Ring - has extensively studied Near Death Experiences 'Earthly time has no meaning in the spirit realm. There is no concept of before or after. Everything - past, present, future - exists simultaneously.' - Kimberly Clark Sharp – Near Death Experiencer 'There is no way to tell whether minutes, hours or years go by. Existence is the only reality and it is inseparable from the eternal now.' - John Star - NDE Experiencer Special and General Relativity compared to Heavenly and Hellish Near Death Experiences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbKELVHcvSI&list=PLtAP1KN7ahia8hmDlCYEKifQ8n65oNpQ5
Of related note: One of the primary reasons why Einstein never received a Noble Prize for relativity is because it directly conflicted with the 'mental' concept of time, i.e. 'the Now', that leading philosophers had developed:
Einstein was once asked by Rudolf Carnap (a philosopher): "Can physics demonstrate the existence of 'the now' in order to make the notion of 'now' into a scientifically valid term?" Einstein's answer was categorical, he said: "The experience of 'the now' cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics." Einstein vs. "The Now" of Philosophers and Quantum Mechanics – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwyHUxoKWNM&index=3&list=PLtAP1KN7ahia8hmDlCYEKifQ8n65oNpQ5 Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time - Wednesday 24 June 2015 Excerpt: The meeting of April 6 was supposed to be a cordial affair, though it ended up being anything but. ‘I have to say that day exploded and it was referenced over and over again in the 20th century,’ says Canales. ‘The key sentence was something that Einstein said: “The time of the philosophers did not exist.”’ It’s hard to know whether Bergson was expecting such a sharp jab. In just one sentence, Bergson’s notion of duration—a major part of his thesis on time—was dealt a mortal blow. As Canales reads it, the line was carefully crafted for maximum impact. ‘What he meant was that philosophers frequently based their stories on a psychological approach and [new] physical knowledge showed that these philosophical approaches were nothing more than errors of the mind.’ The night would only get worse. ‘This was extremely scandalous,’ says Canales. ‘Einstein had been invited by philosophers to speak at their society, and you had this physicist say very clearly that their time did not exist.’ Bergson was outraged, but the philosopher did not take it lying down. A few months later Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, an area of science that Canales noted, ‘hardly jolted the public’s imagination’. In truth, Einstein coveted recognition for his work on relativity. Bergson inflicted some return humiliation of his own. By casting doubt on Einstein’s theoretical trajectory, Bergson dissuaded the committee from awarding the prize for relativity. In 1922, the jury was still out on the correct interpretation of time. So began a dispute that festered for years and played into the larger rift between physics and philosophy, science and the humanities. Bergson was fond of saying that time was the experience of waiting for a lump of sugar to dissolve in a glass of water. It was a declaration that one could not talk about time without reference to human consciousness and human perception. Einstein would say that time is what clocks measure. Bergson would no doubt ask why we build clocks in the first place. ‘He argued that if we didn’t have a prior sense of time we wouldn’t have been led to build clocks and we wouldn’t even use them ... unless we wanted to go places and to events that mattered,’ says Canales. ‘You can see that their points of view were very different.’ In a theoretical nutshell this expressed perfectly the division between lived time and spacetime: subjective experience versus objective reality.,,, Just when Einstein thought he had it worked out, along came the discovery of quantum theory and with it the possibility of a Bergsonian universe of indeterminacy and change. God did, it seems, play dice with the universe, contra to Einstein’s famous aphorism. Some supporters went as far as to say that Bergson’s earlier work anticipated the quantum revolution of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg by four decades or more. Canales quotes the literary critic Andre Rousseaux, writing at the time of Bergson’s death. ‘The Bergson revolution will be doubled by a scientific revolution that, on its own, would have demanded the philosophical revolution that Bergson led, even if he had not done it.’ Was Bergson right after all? Time will tell. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/science-vs-philosophy-and-the-meaning-of-time/6539568
Bergson has indeed been vindicated by advances in quantum mechanics,
Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness - May 27, 2015 Excerpt: The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured. Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler's experiment then asks - at which point does the object decide? Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe wave like behavior (interference) or particle behavior (no interference) depends only on how it is actually measured at the end of its journey. This is exactly what the ANU team found. "It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. Despite the apparent weirdness, the results confirm the validity of quantum theory, which,, has enabled the development of many technologies such as LEDs, lasers and computer chips. The ANU team not only succeeded in building the experiment, which seemed nearly impossible when it was proposed in 1978, but reversed Wheeler's original concept of light beams being bounced by mirrors, and instead used atoms scattered by laser light. "Quantum physics' predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness," said Roman Khakimov, PhD student at the Research School of Physics and Engineering. http://phys.org/news/2015-05-quantum-theory-weirdness.html
i.e. 'the Now', as philosophers term it, and contrary to what Einstein thought possible for experimental physics, and according to advances in quantum mechanics, takes precedence over past events in time. Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to phrase Einstein's answer to the philosopher, Carnap, in this way:
"It is impossible for the experience of 'the now of the mind' to ever be divorced from physical measurement, it will always be a part of physics."
Quote and Verse:
“Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!” – Scott Aaronson – MIT associate Professor quantum computation - Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
bornagain77
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