> entire concept of time
“Entire” concept is stretching it, causality and entropy are not man made.
If you want to look at ideas people made up that have way too much influence on our lives, you need look no further than your wallet.
“Entire” concept is stretching it, causality and entropy are not man made.
If you want to look at ideas people made up that have way too much influence on our lives, you need look no further than your wallet.
The entropy of some data is well-defined with respect to a model, but the model choice is free. I.e. different models will assign different entropy to the same data.
And how do we choose a model...? Well, formally by minimizing the information needed to describe both the model and data (the sum of model complexity and data entropy under the model) [1]
You might argue that's all too information-theoretic and in physics there simply is an objective count of the state-space, a maximum entropy, and so on. Alas, there is not even general consensus on whether there is a locally finite number of degrees of freedom.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
E.g. the KT estimator is, for each individual Bernoulli sequence, as good as the best Bernoulli model for that sequence with at most 1/2 but difference (independent of sequence length)
It is undecidable/uncomputable, and only well defined up to a constant, but you have a “universally universal” model - Kolmogorov complexity. In that sense, entropy IS an absolute.
So a better way to put it is that time is real, but only as it relates to our perception. And that is always subjectively contingent. The concept of "time" outside of any subjective perception doesn't really make sense. Even if you're purely limiting it to "causality", then you're going to run into a host of issues if you think you can order causal interactions into a linear "time"line.
As that would definitively declare that there's no going back in time, there's no negative mass, and perhaps philosophically--theres no free will.
Or worse.
Presumably the probability of a brain appearing as a disordered psychiatric monster is far higher than the probability of arriving as an Earth-normal tenured cosmologist.
Given that we fundamentally depend on our own, very human, sensory and cognitive apparatus to make any kind of judgement I have a hard time imagining a proof or even a convincing argument of this without falling back on “it’s obvious” (etc).
Yes, I am being obtuse. Sorry about that. Just for the record.