Life is a braid in spacetime

When you say "information" what do you mean exactly? I can see information as a set of constraints that arises in the system due to how it evolves, and that those constraints enable structure to emerge, and that with the law of conservation of energy no energy can be created or destroyed, it means that all those structures can only do what they can do, any deviation from the constraints will require new energy or removing energy from the system to alter the course.

I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :

> Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that.

I admire the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (by Giulio Tononi) a lot. It provides an impressive intuition pump towards the nature of consciousness and the necessary conditions for it to arise. It also goes much deeper than "consciousness is a complex pattern in space-time", by detailing "what does it mean to be complex?", what kind of complexity leads to consciousness and how can we compare various systems to see their degree of consciousness/complexity.

The IIT surely does not give a definitive answer on consciousness, it is not even able to compute an approximate complexity score for the human brain, and doesn't explain why complexity is linked to consciousness in the first place, but it helps us see in many directions where we could only stumble in darkness before.

All that can be, is. A mathematical proof is a statement about what can be in a particular system. A system can be anything that can be dreamed, by yourself, or indeed by the universe. Therefore mathematics in it's widest definition is the study of what can be in the universe.

Its like this: If something is to exist, would it not be absolutely absurd that only this exists? This universe in this particular configuration, out of all the possible configurations? It cannot be. Either there is nothing or there is everything. If there is everything then all possible configurations of thing are. Some of those things have patterns within them that 'percieve' the world to be time like. When really the whole thing is timeless, it is like all configurations of thing saved onto one giant hardrive, your life in bits on a 2 dimensional substrate. From the outside its timeless. From the context of you at x,y,z it is timefull.

Is this not totally obvious? How can this not be obviously true to everyone?

You can argue that Time is an illusion. You can argue that our intelligence allowed us to break free from the harsh laws of nature and evolution too soon, so we never acquired the necessary sensors and abilities. Maybe if we had to compete against multiple equally intelligent species, we would have acquired them. However, I think that using a "vision of Time as it really is" sensor correctly would require a far more complex and energy-hungry brain, so it's probably not "worth it" from an evolutionary perspective. Or maybe it's out of reach of carbon-based organisms.

However Mathematics are different. It's not a perception. It even allowed us to discover things we could not perceive, and explore things we cannot perceive. It is independent from us and the universe. And if you still want to throw away Mathematics, you'll also have to throw away logic, which is kind of an issue. The only thing one could seriously argue, is that something better than Mathematics exists, like General Relatively is "better" than Newtonian mechanics. But maybe that is out of our reach, too.

Meanwhile, repeat after me: I believe in modus ponens, set theory and monads.

My take on it is that special relativity provides no evidence that time is an extra dimension (like the spatial dimensions) in anything but a mathematical sense.

General relativity however has quite a lot of effects that mingle together space and time in various ways, so I'm still thinking about that one.

Time can be a dimension and still be treated differently.

In fact, in special relativity, it is. When calculating the spacetime "distance" between two events, we use something that looks like the Pythagorean theorem, but we must always make sure to put a different sign in front of time than we do space. (If we sum the squares of space, we must subtract the square of time) (see: minkowski metric, really any metric)

Another point of interest would be the matrix representation of the Lorentz transformation (the way to go from one reference frame to another). The matrix "mixes" the values of the time coordinate with the space coordinates, and the space coordinates with each other, but time is mixed differently. (This is a nice one to bring up because its clear if you just look at the matrix.)

This is very significant for people wondering about time's status as a dimension. It is emphatically not the same kind of dimension as space, even if we choose to represent it as a component of the position vector.

I really like the presentation in one of Lev Landau's books. He calls it a fictitious 4-dimensional space. That's the correct way to look at it, spacetime is just a mental model, a tool for describing physical laws. So depending on the mental model or framework we decide to use, time can be a dimension or something completely different.

dahart: >> has been mistranslated in popular science culture as a thing that somehow opens up the option of time travel.

Ah, time travel isn't science fiction. Clearly we have concrete experiments that show this is common place, easy and done all the time.

The faster you go in the space dimension, the slow you move in the time dimension. Now certainly being able to go back in time is something of speculation, and more the realm of science fiction. but that you can jump into other people's future is fact.

I like the naiveté of this comment, it reminds me what HN used to be, a place for wonder and discovery. Thanks for your comment.

Thinking of lifelines in space-time got me through some dark times years ago.

Have a look at Primo Levi's The Periodic Table - the book is a collection of biographical essays each themed with a chemical element. The last essay, Carbon, tells the story of a single carbon atom over the years. Another perspective.

Actually there are parts of you that were parts of you in your twenties. Some of the brain cells, some of your heart cells, and if you are a woman, your eggs.

Unless you are talking about how matter pops in and out of a apparent reality, in which case we're going too far down for me.

As a trained, but non-practicing, physicist, I would like you to elaborate about your first paragraph. I am used to using units where c=1, I think that is what you are referencing: a "meter" of time is the time it takes light to go a meter (which is to say, a very small amount of time) and so a second is 3x10^8 m. I don't see how this changes the pattern we would make in spacetime. If we assume no one ever moves (a nice physics-y approximation), but the particles that make them up do, so I don't see why we wouldn't look like the middle pattern while alive. Then after death, the disintegration is exaggerated, but again, it seems more-or-less right to me. What am I missing?

Any in-depth and technical sources you'd recommend?

Interesting that everyone automatically defaults to Greg Egan when thinking of hard mind-bending sci-fi that explores concepts like these. I don't even remember how I got into Greg Egan, but do you have any other favorite authors who play with concepts like these?

In my head, Greg Egan is filed under the "Math-Fi" directory, as that's what I generally associate him with but he's very well versed in pretty much everything (Biology, Physics, etc).