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Comment by barfbagginus | Hacker News Reader

Could be our universe and timeline is a boltzman universe/boltzman timeline embedded in some large timeless crystalline state space.

That would kinda suck, because we'd be static crystals. But from the subjective perspective of a self aware sub crystal is maybe not so bad. Perhaps reality is malleable and magical.

For instance it might be possible to travel to other universes. From the global view, we have multiple atemporal subjective timelines, with subjective agents popping out of one reality and into another thanks to some crystals and magnets with special geometries. From the subjective view, you have a Rick and Morty episode

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Why would it suck/what would it change?

There are so many (largely metaphysical) theories for things that our universe might actually be a subjective emergent phenomenon of (a simulation, somebody's dream, a timeless static meta-universe, just to name a few) – but given that there is subjective consciousness in this universe, does it matter what substrate it's actually embedded in for our (or somebody else's, for that matter) ability to ascribe meaning to the emergent phenomenon itself?

In other words, somehow I wouldn't feel much worse about "time not being real" than I'd feel about matter, gravity etc. "not being real", being caused by the vibration of cold, unfeeling superstrings etc.

Just speculation on my part, but I think what they're concerned about is that if time doesn't actually exist and we're all just part of a static crystal, then free will can't exist because everything already happened at once.

It's the ultimate form of determinism: not only is everything predetermined but it already happened and we're just experiencing it as though it hasn't yet.

> It's the ultimate form of determinism: not only is everything predetermined but it already happened and we're just experiencing it as though it hasn't yet.

I'm not being glib or contrary when I ask this question: in what ways does this matter beyond the philosophical implications?

Determinism vs. non-determinism is indeed philosophy, so the implications of getting it wrong can be pretty significant (someone could see themselves as free from moral responsibility to not do bad things to others, because determinism).

Sorry, to be more clear: I'm more interested in whether this matters from a scientific/measurement perspective.

Well, not in a way that you don't already accept for general relativity and quantum mechanics, and not for any metaphysical reasons.

But did you know that GR predicts we can build a sub light star drive that shields passengers from acceleration, just by using laser beams to hold together a Jupiter sized shell of matter. The matter shell could be accelerated at 100 Gs by massive star scaled lasers. But so long as it respects certain warp equations and energy conditions, the passengers would feel no acceleration.

That's possible with just physical matter, but GR also predicts negative energy. That allows us to theoretically build things like portals to far away portions of space, just by spinning a ring of matter and zapping it with negative energy.

The weird possibilities only seem to multiply if you add quantum states to the mix, and the potential for a larger quantum universe. Think of that a giving us many extra toe holds into the kind of spacetime fuckery that GM enables. Plus new kinds, like the idea that different realities or nonlocal regions of space could share quantum variables and allow universal travel and communication that way. Which is just amazing , and also terrifying because of the possibility of encountering very strange and dangerous places!

The strange part is not that there is some outer spacetime view where things are static and crystalline. It's that the bulk crystalline structure seems weirdly malleable and reconfigurable by subjective agents, and likely inhabited by other minds that live in portions of that crystal that are alien, and maybe even fundamentally dangerous to us. That makes these hyper determinist models a real mind trip! Okay, the structure is determined. But why is it determined in such a way that it causes such weird and disruptive potential experiences for subjective beings? And how would we cope if the structure let us build hyper technologies to, eg, contact aliens, travel to other universes, or change the laws of space and time?

Modeling reality as a static system does not eliminate free will.

When you model reality as some static crystal you observe from the outside, your intuition helpfully adds things like 1) some outside where there is time (otherwise “static” has no meaning, it’s defined in terms of time) and 2) you (the conscious observer with free will to inspect the crystal). Those things create the tension of respectively “everything already happened” and “no free will in there, surely”, but very counter-intuitively they don’t belong in that model in the first place.

I agree that the argument that there must be no free will because everything already happened is a circular argument. It simply equates determinism with the antithesis of free will, without proving why that should be the case, or even giving us a model of free will. But after eliminating that mental trap, what what is your model of how deterministic free will works? I think that unless we have one, we're still in a circular argument - it's the opposite circular argument to the one we had before, but still in circular form.

That is, just like insisting determinism must eliminate free will is begging the question, simply insisting that determinism does not eliminate free will is also insufficient.

We also need a theory of free will that is compatible with determinism. In another subthread to OP's question, I detail my idea of a protected computational substructure as the best version of free will a determinist can expect, and suggest that's enough to explain the survival benefits of what we call free will. If you are in need of a model I propose that one.

But I am also curious about your thoughts, especially if you have a very different model in mind! What kind of model do you have in mind?

How goes "it already happened" with infinite time? Does it mean there is no infinite time?

Also no free will sounds so horrible yet so liberating.

Why assume infinite time? Time appears quite finite in the only direction we can measure.

Incidentally, this is Catholic theology. God is "outside of time" and perceives all of eternity at once.

> this is Catholic theology

>> free will can't exist because everything already happened at once

No, it’s definitely not.

I'm okay with compatibilist deterministic free will theories like those from dennet or tegmark.

Those say that free will is possible if a being establishes a computationally independent substrate and uses that to compute optimal choices for a self model.

This relative computational independence is the best we can hope for, and I believe the resulting freedom is strong enough to explain our subjective experiences of feeling like we're freely choosing. All we're doing is scoping out our possible actions, and picking one that lines up with our self models. And that matters because it's as free as we can be, and it improves our survival ability beyond than of a being with no protected internal model.

My real concern, if reality is just a bundle of all possible existence states threaded together, is that there might easily exist very scary and unpleasant states of existence, and it might be possible to subjectively encounter those states in a way that is terrifying and causes huge amounts of suffering.

The universe where things happen in different times and for clear physical reasons seems less likely to expose us to terrible irrational cosmic horror, compared to the random bundle of all possible chaotic states.

In the universe I'm proposing you might accidentally create a portal to a sub universe of hellish demonic entities. Those things exist already right now in parallel with you and they want to be where you are, like on a Rick and Morty episode!

I would honestly prefer to be in a less cosmically terrifying and alienating universe, if possible! Perhaps the universe is just very very big, but not a jumbled multiverse where everything is happening all at once.

I think I'd love to read a fantasy book based on this premise

A fantasy book that comes to mind is The Dark Tower, by King.

The universe is unraveling into a bundle of broken times and locations, falling apart because the old society "moved on" to another plane of existence...

It doesn't have this idea of the the world being a static crystal. But it's interesting to think of a static crystal spacetime that eventually seems to fall apart.

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