Thursday, June 7, 2018

External time as such doesn't matter to us

Suppose a deity threatened to move us all to a universe where everything is pretty much as in our world, except that electric charges are reversed and the laws of nature are tweaked to ensure that this reverse doesn’t affect our lives. Thus, in that world, we are based not on carbon atoms, but on anti-carbon anti-atoms (they will have six anti-protons and six positrons, etc.), but the laws are tweaked so that the anti-atoms would behave just like atoms.

Assuming we can survive the shift, it seems that except for sentimental considerations (maybe when Grandma’s old wedding ring is replaced by a ring of anti-gold, it’s no longer the same ring) it would make no difference to us.

Similarly, if the deity threatened to spatially rotate the world by 180 degrees around some axis, that would make no difference to us.

What if the deity offered to rotate our world in time by 180 degrees, with causation now running temporally backwards, with us being born in the future and dying in the past, but everything being kept intact. It seems to me that this would make no difference to us.

Similarly, it seems to me that if the deity offered to rotate our four-dimensional world so that the temporal dimension and a spatial dimension were swapped, so that we would be born and die at the same time, but in different places along a spatial axis, and causation would run unidirectionally along the spatial axis, again that would make no difference to us.

I think these thought experiments suggest that external time as such is not important. What matters is how the distribution of things interacts with the causal order.

To be honest, though, I am not completely confident that any of these thought experiments make sense. It could be that any dimension along which causation runs much as causation runs along the temporal direction in our world is therefore a time dimension. But if so, then I think it's still true that it is causation, not external time as such, that matters.

I am less confident of this in the case of internal time.

3 comments:

Sam Harper said...

I think changing the direction of time would make a huge difference to us because instead of entropy increasing, entropy would be decreasing.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Yeah, but causation would still go along with the direction of increasing entropy. And memory presumably tracks causation, since memories are caused by the remembered events. So, one's present observations would be observations of higher entropy events than the (future!) events that one is remembering.

Sam Harper said...

Oh! i see. That makes sense. That's an interesting thought.