In order to apply Poincarè recurrence it is the set of available points of the phase space that must be “compact” and this is likely the case if we assume that the total energy of the universe is finite.
Marco Discendenti
Karma: 33
Entropy “reversal”—i.e. decrease—must be equally frequent as entropy increases: you cannot have an increase if you didn’t have a decrease before. My graph is not quantitatively accurate for sure but with a rescaling of times it should be ok.
Ok but even if I remove the idea of “entropy” from my argument the core problematic issue is still here: we have 50% probability that our universe is evolving in the opposite direction and an incredibly long chain of inbelievably improbable events is happening, and even if it is not happening right now it would happen with the same frequency of the standard “probable” evolution.
If we want to “define the direction of time by the increase in Entropy” then we have a problem in a universe where entropy is not monotonic, the definition doens’t work
The “age of the universe” could be not really the age of the universe but the time after the last entropy minimum reached in a never-ending sequence of fluctuations
Unconvenient consequences of the logic behind the second law of thermodynamics
It’s not enitrely clear what does t mean to create a number of “me”: my consciuousness is only one and cannot be more than one and I only can feel sensations from one sigle body. If the idea is just to generate a certain number of physical copies of my body and embed my present consciousness into one of them at random then the problem is at least clear and determined from a mathematical point of view: it seems to be a simple probability problem about conditional probability. You are asking what is the probability that an event happened in the past given the condition of some a priori possible consequence, it can be easily solved by Bayes’ formula and the probability is about one over 1 billion.
There are two similar clusters/tensions in arts:
visual art: on one hand you have to design the “big picture”, with all its equilibia, balances and tensions, on the other hand you have to design the local and fine details, wich is something less imaginative and more formal and technical, with strict rules (for anatomy, shadows,...)
creative writing: your story need to have emotional tensions on the scale of the general plot, but need also to be realistic and credible on the scale of more detailed single events and interactions, wich must respect some stricter constrains
music composition: you need to design a general theme and mood and then you have to articulate the detailed development of the melodies and rithms which need to observe stricter rules in order to work appropriately
Thank you for your insights! You say: ” Yes! You do have to think about the amount of games you play if your utility function is not linear”
Let’s consider the case of rational agents acting in a temporal framework where they are faced with daily decisions. If they need to consider all their future possible choices in order to decide for a single present choice then it seems they are always completely unable to make any single decision (the computation to be made seems almost never ending) and this principle of expected utility maximization would turn out to be useless. How do we make rational decisions then?
You do have spontatenous entropy decreases in very “small” environment. For gas in a box with 3 particles entropy is fluctuating in human-scale times.