How to Avoid the Time Wars
jmossbridge.medium.com
jmossbridge.medium.com
For example her take on / comparison of nuclear war with time war:
> After that, I was no longer afraid of nuclear war. The solution was easy. We already knew nuclear war was a risk, we just had to avoid the paths of timelines that would lead to it.
> I’m not interested in losing time wars, or winning them. In real life, I think it’s a great idea to avoid them entirely.
And on avoiding bad events:
> “Time is like a room. If you want to avoid bumping into the chair when walking across the room, you can do that — but you have to know that there is a chair and where that chair is in the room.”
> It left me with the clear intuitive feeling that as a species we could work to avoid a particularly bad possible event or move toward a particularly good possible event, but we needed some intelligence about what those possibilities are and where/when they are in spacetime.
But it is refreshing to have a scientist talking about what she, exactly like her colleagues, doesn't know, but in her case hopes to. She leads with pointing out that everything she is saying could be wrong, so complaining about that amounts to petty griping.
To my knowledge, there is nothing in physics that says a future event cannot be precognized with perfect reliability, even if the person might act differently as a consequence of the knowledge. Not getting on a plane you are sure will crash is probably a desirable outcome, even if you can't convince anybody else.
A mechanism for such communication is a tough nut. Continuity of the individual--in one future, you die, another, you don't--seems to offer a sort of channel, but physics doesn't care whether you are alive or dead. However, if in one scenario your molecules get incinerated and scattered, in the other they continue moving in what we might call "you" formation, that is a physically objective change. If your cells can bounce signals off your past and future selves, and enounter a discontinuity, that could affect your reproductive fitness, so be fodder for evolution.
Life is not bound by our preconceptions of how physics ought to work; life explores the space of actual reality, and has often found ways to exploit phenomena we have not noticed, never mind understood. So, what she does might look a lot like woo, but that is not the same thing as actually being woo, and I am glad she is thinking about it, and telling us.
You are not obliged to be interested.
Somewhere in the middle the author also purports to build a time-machine using a photon detector, and possibly even admits it does not work (yet). Were not able to read that far due to the feeling of time being wasted.
"Here’s the proposal I’m offering in all seriousness. We avoid the time wars by accessing unconditional love on a global scale."
on edit: I see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29146558 already made the point.
I tried to play-along with the "time-travel" thing as some kind of metaphor, but she actually seems to mean it literally. I found this observation particularly woo-ish:
"What is important to point out here is that precognition is no longer just a scientific curiosity."
I couldn't read on past that.
In a not terribly rigorous experiment, confirmation was found after spending some money raised in a kick starter.
I won't write it off completely, but it would be interesting to replicate on the cheap with strictly solid state gear.
Is this the quality of education I can expect from UCSD?
How does this get on HN and does anyone actually believe it?
EDIT: I'm looking through the preprint PDF and it looks like they selected the future action (how long to expose for) using the last bit of the previous observation as a random seed (see page 9).
That will of course create a correlation from the past event to the future action, and they use that correlation to try to claim that the future action is impacting the past observation. It's 100% bogus and terrible science.
I don't know how they could possibly not see an issue with using the very measurement they're trying to find a correlation with as the source of randomness for deciding the future action instead of literally any other pure RNG available. It really seems like they were maliciously creating that correlation for academic clout, job prospects, etc.
FYI -- the same effect has recently been replicated by a Berkeley physicist using a totally independent random number generator. But I understand the concern here; that's why I asked him to try to replicate it using better equipment.
As to the concern about it being Arduino-based -- it's easy to criticize experiments because they don't use sophisticated equipment. However, what actually matters is if you can find an explanation for why the student-level equipment would result in the artifact(s) you suspect are there. That's more difficult to do, and in fact no one has been able to do it yet.
We will see how this shakes down, but I've been doing the experiment continously for two years and the effect is robust.
Thanks to everyone for reading the article. The argument is good to read. It's a delight to me that people are thinking about these issues, since as should be clear from the article, I think they are important to think about.
And, of course, I certainly don't have all the right answers. But science isn't about that -- it's about allowing yourself to be brave enough to find questions that you are curious to answer (even if no one else is) -- and rigorously trying to discover the answers. Or at least, further questions.
-- Julia
Many software developers work daily within infrastructure (e.g. git source revision) with features to model and manage event sequences/history. If a software developer works on multiple projects, or variations of one project over an extended time, they quickly find themselves negotiating with past selves (software archaeology) and future selves (technical debt).
Another petri dish for time travel concepts is the finance industry, which has developed countless financial instruments to estimate the present-time value/risks of future-time assets. Compute infrastructure is used to model financial futures, most of which never happen, so we can collectively encourage a small subset to become real.
The lives of some HN participants have been changed by just one of those instruments (stock options) and their time-travel (tax, vesting, bonus, cliffs, retention, signaling) incentives. Cryptocurrency "smart" contracts can commoditize math-based social engineering of present behavior in pursuit or avoidance of future events.
What's the game-theoretic Prisoner's Dilemma equivalent, during a mental negotiation with hypothetical past, future or even concurrent selves?
And it brings up the point that while I've talked with many folks in different fields about time-travel thinking, I have never found a field where it's not useful to bend one's mind in this way. I've come to the conclusion that we have to shift the way we think about ourselves in time, so we can navigate more successfully as a species. I suppose that's obvious from the article.
Anyway, to address your question re: Prisoner's Dilemma equivalent within a time-travel paradigm -- isn't that what virtually every Dr. Who episode is really asking?
But more recently -- to my view the movie Arrival successfully solves a time-travel-inspired Prisoner's Dilemma by modeling the Present Amy Adams as capable of negotiating with her Past and Future selves (as the captors) and bringing actionable tactics into the Present. So she not only succeeds in being released from prison, she saves the world too.
So it's communication and collaboration with the captors (the non-Present versions of ourselves) that can turn them (us) into advocates.
Meanwhile, the other prisoners are the aliens, who have access to the same strategy over time (and use it to teach Amy Adams' character). There can't be any clear communication between them, but they can circumvent this by connecting in the future and being aware of that connection in the Past/Present.
So it's a brilliant solution to the prisoner's dilemma -- just because you can't communicate in the present doesn't mean that after you get released you can't share how you did it!
The interesting thing about the future, in general, is it's way less crowded than the past and present -- because the past and present are where most people think you have to do things to get them done.