Claim: Only one past for a given present

From: Tim May <tcmay.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 13:00:28 -0800

On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 12:38 PM, George Levy wrote:

>
> Tim May wrote
>
> If you mean that "many presents" have "many pasts," yes. But the
> current present only has a limited number of pasts, possibly just one.
> (The origin of this asymmetry in the lattice of events is related to
> our being in one present.)
>
>
> I mean one (many?) present has many pasts as well as many futures.
> Many pasts are fundamentally caused by quantum uncertainty in memory
> devices; many presents are caused by uncertainty in observation
> devices; many futures are caused by uncertainty in the controlling
> devices. The past cannot be ascertained precisely just as the future
> cannot be predicted precisely. Our consciousness is a fuzzy point in
> the many world. It has an infinite number of pasts and an infinite
> number of futures, an everbranching tree toward the past and an
> everbranching tree toward the future. Taking many observer moments
> together, I view the many world more as a lattice then as a tree. Thus
> navigation in the many-world makes sense.
>

On your point about "many pasts are fundamentally caused by quantum
uncertainty in memory devices," I strongly disagree. There is only one
past for one present, whether RAMs dropped bits in recording them or
historians forgot something, etc.

(This is captured by the formalism of observations, as well. Even with
Uncertainty, all honest observers will report the same outcome of an
experiment. We have not seen a violation of this, nor is one expected.
There are various ways to look at this, including the topos-theoretic
view of subobject classifiers. But the point is that in our history
either an event happened or it did not. This is independent of whether
the event was observed, recorded, written about, remembered, etc.)

But this is a topic of great fascination for me, and I hope we can
continue to discuss it. I am quite strongly persuaded that "many pasts
for a particular present" is not a reality.

Understand that I am not including "current interpretations," as in
"Some historians think the Roman Empire fell because of lead in their
plumbing" sorts of theories of the past. I am referring to space-time
events.

As noted, I also view time and events as a lattice. But lattices have
certain properties of importance here. More on this later.


--Tim May
Received on Mon Jan 13 2003 - 16:05:30 PST