That’s a good link, thanks. I’m warm to compatibilism. I think I’ve confused the conversation by using the wrong terms, though. Instead of pointing at a lack of free will I should have pointed at the complete lack of causality, which is more constraining. You can read EY on it here.
My interpretation of this would be that space-time would be a fixed object that exists in it’s entirety. In the same sense that you could take a cross sectional scan of a sneaker and play it from rear to front, there would be a logical consistency to how the slides transformed as you progressed through the shoe, but it would not make any sense to say that one part caused another. In this analogy, 4-dimensional space-time is the shoe, and the cross section is 3-dimensional space. We play it from back to front, watching a movie of the universe, but the entire universe from beginning to end already existed; we’re just looking at a slide of it at a time. Everything is consistent as the cross section passes through, but there’s no causality in play, it’s just an object being viewed in sequential slices. Much like EY’s modified game of Life with time-travel.
This actually seems pretty unsatisfying because there is a strong impression that the world is being run mostly on causality in the normal direction, with reverse causality coming in occasionally. This seems to me to work better with the iterating model.
Regarding the time for trials and iterations, I would refer to simulation as an analogy. “World time” is happening in the simulation, and this is what the characters are aware of. From within the simulated world, how much “Meta time” has elapsed outside of the simulation (i.e. the time stream that the computer is in), or how many failed attempts have been dumped from RAM is not very relevant in the sense that these facts don’t have any impact on “the world” (the simulated one) and are in fact probably unknowable to its inhabitants unless access to that meta-information has been somehow granted. To a denizen of the world, the fact that we switched from world version 721.213 to world version 779.344 last Tuesday at 9:41am is unknowable, the transition seamless, the lost attempts erased from world time even though they still occurred in meta time.
I’m not saying HPMOR is a simulated world. That’s just a model I’m using to think about timelines being destroyed and recalculating.
The nature of causality is controversial, but in my opinion it should be understood as a feature of the second law of thermodynamics. That causes precede their effects is an empirical law, not a logical necessity. Time turners can violate this in certain ways, but they don’t throw it out entirely.
As you look through the block universe, you can observe various features corresponding to causality: the increase in macroscopic entropy, the expansion of radiation, the human creatures inside that remember the past and plan for the future. The block universe model doesn’t eliminate causality; it is a physical feature within that universe.
That’s a good link, thanks. I’m warm to compatibilism. I think I’ve confused the conversation by using the wrong terms, though. Instead of pointing at a lack of free will I should have pointed at the complete lack of causality, which is more constraining. You can read EY on it here.
My interpretation of this would be that space-time would be a fixed object that exists in it’s entirety. In the same sense that you could take a cross sectional scan of a sneaker and play it from rear to front, there would be a logical consistency to how the slides transformed as you progressed through the shoe, but it would not make any sense to say that one part caused another. In this analogy, 4-dimensional space-time is the shoe, and the cross section is 3-dimensional space. We play it from back to front, watching a movie of the universe, but the entire universe from beginning to end already existed; we’re just looking at a slide of it at a time. Everything is consistent as the cross section passes through, but there’s no causality in play, it’s just an object being viewed in sequential slices. Much like EY’s modified game of Life with time-travel.
This actually seems pretty unsatisfying because there is a strong impression that the world is being run mostly on causality in the normal direction, with reverse causality coming in occasionally. This seems to me to work better with the iterating model.
Regarding the time for trials and iterations, I would refer to simulation as an analogy. “World time” is happening in the simulation, and this is what the characters are aware of. From within the simulated world, how much “Meta time” has elapsed outside of the simulation (i.e. the time stream that the computer is in), or how many failed attempts have been dumped from RAM is not very relevant in the sense that these facts don’t have any impact on “the world” (the simulated one) and are in fact probably unknowable to its inhabitants unless access to that meta-information has been somehow granted. To a denizen of the world, the fact that we switched from world version 721.213 to world version 779.344 last Tuesday at 9:41am is unknowable, the transition seamless, the lost attempts erased from world time even though they still occurred in meta time.
I’m not saying HPMOR is a simulated world. That’s just a model I’m using to think about timelines being destroyed and recalculating.
The nature of causality is controversial, but in my opinion it should be understood as a feature of the second law of thermodynamics. That causes precede their effects is an empirical law, not a logical necessity. Time turners can violate this in certain ways, but they don’t throw it out entirely.
As you look through the block universe, you can observe various features corresponding to causality: the increase in macroscopic entropy, the expansion of radiation, the human creatures inside that remember the past and plan for the future. The block universe model doesn’t eliminate causality; it is a physical feature within that universe.