Cool. Except that one or the other of us didn’t quite understand Drescher. Because my understanding was that he considered and rejected the idea that the arrow of perceived time is the same as the order of increased entropy. I thought he said that it is the inter-particle correlations that matter for subjective time—not entropy as such. But perhaps I misunderstood.
I’m glad you bring this up, I’ve been interested in a discussion on this.
Drescher makes extensive use of the generalized concept of a “wake”: in the ball case, a wake is where you can identify which direction is “pastward”, i.e., to the direction of minimal inter-particle entanglement. Any mechanism that allows such an identification can be though of as a generalization of the “wake” that happens in the setup.
One such wake is the formation of memories (including memories in a brain), which, like the literal wake, exploit regularities of the environment to “know” the pastward direction, and (also like the wake) necessarily involve localized decrease but global increase of entropy. (edit: original was reversed)
So yes, I agree that Drescher is saying that the interparticle correlations are what determine the subjective feeling of time—but he’s also saying that the subjective feeling (memory formation) necessarily involves a local decrease of entropy and counterbalancing increase somewhere else.
I’m glad you bring this up, I’ve been interested in a discussion on this.
Unfortunately, I’m probably not the ideal person to carry out this discussion with you. I got my copy of the book through interlibrary-loan and it is due back tomorrow. :-(
Cool. Except that one or the other of us didn’t quite understand Drescher. Because my understanding was that he considered and rejected the idea that the arrow of perceived time is the same as the order of increased entropy. I thought he said that it is the inter-particle correlations that matter for subjective time—not entropy as such. But perhaps I misunderstood.
I’m glad you bring this up, I’ve been interested in a discussion on this.
Drescher makes extensive use of the generalized concept of a “wake”: in the ball case, a wake is where you can identify which direction is “pastward”, i.e., to the direction of minimal inter-particle entanglement. Any mechanism that allows such an identification can be though of as a generalization of the “wake” that happens in the setup.
One such wake is the formation of memories (including memories in a brain), which, like the literal wake, exploit regularities of the environment to “know” the pastward direction, and (also like the wake) necessarily involve localized decrease but global increase of entropy. (edit: original was reversed)
So yes, I agree that Drescher is saying that the interparticle correlations are what determine the subjective feeling of time—but he’s also saying that the subjective feeling (memory formation) necessarily involves a local decrease of entropy and counterbalancing increase somewhere else.
Unfortunately, I’m probably not the ideal person to carry out this discussion with you. I got my copy of the book through interlibrary-loan and it is due back tomorrow. :-(