if entropy is decreasing maybe your memory is just working “backwards”
I think the key to the puzzle is likely to be here: there’s likely to be some principled reason why agents embedded in physics will perceive the low-entropy time direction as “the past”, such that it’s not meaningful to ask which way is “really” “backwards”.
Here’s the way I understand it: A low-entropy state takes fewer bits to describe, and a high-entropy state takes more. Therefore, a high-entropy state can contain a description of a low-entropy state, but not vice-versa. This means that memories of the state of the universe can only point in the direction of decreasing entropy, i.e. into the past.
Yes! As Jaynes teaches us:
“[T]he order of increasing entropy is the order in which information is transfered, and has nothing to do with any temporal order.”
I think the key to the puzzle is likely to be here: there’s likely to be some principled reason why agents embedded in physics will perceive the low-entropy time direction as “the past”, such that it’s not meaningful to ask which way is “really” “backwards”.
Here’s the way I understand it: A low-entropy state takes fewer bits to describe, and a high-entropy state takes more. Therefore, a high-entropy state can contain a description of a low-entropy state, but not vice-versa. This means that memories of the state of the universe can only point in the direction of decreasing entropy, i.e. into the past.
Yes! As Jaynes teaches us: “[T]he order of increasing entropy is the order in which information is transfered, and has nothing to do with any temporal order.”
No. As I said in this comment, this can not be true, otherwise in the evening you would be able to mak prophecies about the following morning.
Your brain can not measure the entropy of the universe—and its own entropy is not monotone with time.