This sounds cool and deep but crashes headlong into the issue that the entropy rate and the excess entropy of any stochastic process is time-symmetric.
It’s time symmetric around a starting point t0 of low entropy. The further t is from t0, the more entropy you’ll have, in either direction. The absolute value |t−t0| is what matters.
In this case, t0 is usually taken to be the big bang. So the further in time you are from the big bang, the less the universe is like a dense uniform soup with little structure that needs description, and the higher your entropy will be. That’s how you get the subjective perception of temporal causality.
Presumably, this would hold to the other side of t0 as well, if there is one. But we can’t extrapolate past t0, because close to t0 everything gets really really energy dense, so we’d need to know how to do quantum gravity to calculate what the state on the other side might look like. So we can’t check that. And the notion of time as we’re discussing it here might break down at those energies anyway.
See also the Past Hypothesis. If we instead take a non-speculative starting point as t0, namely now, we could no longer trust our memories, including any evidence we believe to have about the entropy of the past being low, or about physical laws stating that entropy increases with distance from t0. David Albert therefore says doubting the Past Hypothesis would be “epistemically unstable”.
It’s time symmetric around a starting point t0 of low entropy. The further t is from t0, the more entropy you’ll have, in either direction. The absolute value |t−t0| is what matters.
In this case, t0 is usually taken to be the big bang. So the further in time you are from the big bang, the less the universe is like a dense uniform soup with little structure that needs description, and the higher your entropy will be. That’s how you get the subjective perception of temporal causality.
Presumably, this would hold to the other side of t0 as well, if there is one. But we can’t extrapolate past t0, because close to t0 everything gets really really energy dense, so we’d need to know how to do quantum gravity to calculate what the state on the other side might look like. So we can’t check that. And the notion of time as we’re discussing it here might break down at those energies anyway.
See also the Past Hypothesis. If we instead take a non-speculative starting point as t0, namely now, we could no longer trust our memories, including any evidence we believe to have about the entropy of the past being low, or about physical laws stating that entropy increases with distance from t0. David Albert therefore says doubting the Past Hypothesis would be “epistemically unstable”.