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posted by martyb on Tuesday May 06 2014, @02:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the second-chances-come-first dept.

Thought experiment proposed to reconcile psychological versus thermodynamic arrows of time:

A pair of physicists has proposed a thought experiment to help reconcile the seeming disparity between the psychological and thermodynamic arrows of time. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review E, Leonard Mlodinow and Todd Brun claim their thought experiment demonstrates that the two seemingly contradictory views of time, must always align.

When ordinary people think about time, they see the past as something that has come before and the future as a great unknown yet to come. We can remember the past, because it has happened already, but not the future, because it hasn't. Physicists, on the other hand see time as able to move either forward or backwards (towards greater entropy), which implies that we should be able to remember events in the future. So, why can't we?

It's because of the way our memories work the two say, and they've created a thought experiment to demonstrate what they mean. Imagine, they write, two chambers connected by an atomic sized tube with a turnstile in it. If there is gas in one of the chambers, individual atoms of it will move through the tube to the other chamber (towards higher entropy) tripping the turnstile as they go, in effect, counting the atoms as they pass by, until both sides have equal numbers of atoms-creating a state of equilibrium.

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-thought-psychological -thermodynamic-arrows.html

Arrow of Time FAQ

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/47

http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysR evE.89.052102

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by acid andy on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:36PM

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:36PM (#40299) Homepage Journal

    If you throw out dualism and accept only physicalism I don't see how that leaves any place for a first person perspective. You can conduct physical experiments for the rest of eternity without explaining the difference between a being's first person experience of being alive and an objective third person examination of the physics that describes their brain's state and behaviour.

    If the first person experience is somehow an emergent quality, then explain how it emerges without resorting to dualism. I dare you.

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:18PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:18PM (#40343)

    Your argument sounds interesting for 1814, now mix in the effects of the last two centuries of neuroscience, studying the effects of physical brain damage, study of electrical signals in the brain vs mental state, a seemingly infinite variety of psychoactive drugs that only affect the brain therefore should have no effect on mental state, correlation between mental thought and f-MRI physical observation, and then try to rewrite your argument. I double, no, triple dog dare you to try it.

    If its not an emergent quality, how come people on opposite sides of the globe, especially in the old days before modern communications and travel, can come up with identical hard science ideas, or at least some identical ideas at all? Archeology and translating a foreign (or dead) language should be impossible if thought isn't inherently emergent.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by acid andy on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:58PM

      by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:58PM (#40357) Homepage Journal

      I wasn't referring to thought. Yes, thoughts can be transcribed or even deduced via brain scans as can emotions and sensations to a greater or lesser extent. I'm referring purely to the first person point of view, that piece of information that determines that you are VLM and not someone else, that you have a first person view of VLMs thoughts and sensations and a third person view of all the other beings around you. You can try and argue that the first person perspective is an illusion, but at the most fundamental level it is what you are. We can conceive of a world where no living creature has any first person experience, all are machines processing sensory inputs to change physical states, that can only be viewed from the third person. This is the so called "philosophical zombie" thought experiment. The thing is, if you have a first person view of the world, then you must know that the world is not this way.

      --
      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?