- #1
CaptainQuasar
- 372
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If the universe were deterministic à la "[URL [Broken] Demon[/URL], in the sense that every event - every physical phenomenon and every attribute of physical phenomena - is completely and necessarily caused by previous events then all of time, past and future, is merely a stack of moments and our conscious experience of time passing is simply like a pointer moving along the stack of moments. (Well, not strictly a stack of moments due to relativity, but something like a mathematical partial order of them.)
But if on the other hand the universe is really non-deterministic - not in the sense that humans are unable to predict the future even with unlimited information, but in the sense that the particular outcomes of interactions within quantum phenomena that we can't predict with certainty are uncaused - then does it become a legitimate question: What is special about the present moment that makes it the point at which the uncertain probabilities of the future coalesce into the apparent certainties of the past?
Of course, one possible response is that only the parts of the past which we have present evidence of are actually certain, so the past isn't really that certain. But I'm really more interested in whether people think that's a scientifically intelligible question or if there's a better way to formulate it. It seems important because possible answers might be related to the nature of consciousness.
But if on the other hand the universe is really non-deterministic - not in the sense that humans are unable to predict the future even with unlimited information, but in the sense that the particular outcomes of interactions within quantum phenomena that we can't predict with certainty are uncaused - then does it become a legitimate question: What is special about the present moment that makes it the point at which the uncertain probabilities of the future coalesce into the apparent certainties of the past?
Of course, one possible response is that only the parts of the past which we have present evidence of are actually certain, so the past isn't really that certain. But I'm really more interested in whether people think that's a scientifically intelligible question or if there's a better way to formulate it. It seems important because possible answers might be related to the nature of consciousness.
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