this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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"They" don't have any proof.
The person most qualified to speak on this is Sir Roger Penrose, and he believes quantum wave collapse is caused by gravity, and rather than happening faster than the speed of light it's actually reversing time and happening in the past.
That "prunes" the multiverse leaving us with one prime timeline. So the multiverse would only exist for fractions of a second before collapsing back into one retroactively before it even existed.
And I can only assume the writers of Loki knows about him and that's why it sounds like I'm just explaining the MCU.
Seriously, Penrose is basically the Einstein of this generation. He finished up a lot of Einstein's work, and has spent the last couple decades looking into this and what consciousness actually is. If it sounds like science fiction, is because writers would take the five minutes to read what the world's smartest physicist thinks.
If it sounds confusing, it's because the only thing in the universe that requires linear time in one direction is consciousness. So we only experience time like that. Everything else really doesn't give a shit about time, especially at the quantum level.
But yeah, a "bigger" infinite can exist than a "smaller" infinite. It's too confusing for me to understand, but a bunch of really really smart people have been looking into it. It's kind of the same thing. Humans are limited, and our way of expressing ideas even more so.
Eventually we might figure out a way to explain that doesn't break the brains of 99.99999999% of humans.
But if you want to try and understand, there's lots of writing on it and even a decent Netflix documentary
Is that really true? I feel like a lot of things thay are not consciousness still have causal relationships.
A simple example is combustion. It needs fuel and an ignition. It produces light and heat that transfer energy to its environment. This couldn't work in reverse or independent of time.
No, we can't make it happen in reverse in the perception of time we need to have consciousness.
It's not that everything has to confirm to how we experience it. It's that we can only observe things in the way we can experience it.
Now, while Penrose finished up Einsteins work on relativity, I get most people do t know who he is.
But even Einstein himself disagreed with you before Penrose finished it.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/
Serious, if you're saying time is constant and can only flow in one direction, you're arguing with the literal foundation physics is built on.
Time just isn't a necessity for anything except consciousness.
This is crazy complicated though, and I'm not even going to pretend to understand all of it. So it's hard to explain. I'd suggest a lot of reading if you want to know more rather than me try to summarize.
But yes, if you do the actual physics of something being set on fire, the equation works just fine both ways
Instead of saying it can only work one way, it's more accurate to say a consciousness can only experience it one way. Which might not even be technically true.
A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn't violate a damn thing with our system of physics.
Edit:
Specifically for causal stuff:
Show a person a causaul relationship out of order (acb rather than abc) and they're report that they observed abc. The conscious mind can't rationalize acb, so it overrides it
This may very well be happening constantly and we just don't even know it.
All this stuff is incredibly interesting, it's just even harder to wrap our minds around, because our minds may have evolved to handle all this stuff as a background process. Because consciousness needs to experience stuff in abc order to make any sense out of anything.
It's a real mindfuck, literally. There's a very good chance we'll never be able to understand because we're conscious
Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.
This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.
I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose's theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it "seems weird" for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.
It's not spontaneous...
It's happening in cba order rather abc.
Conservation of energy mate, whether it's energy or mass, it's not going anywhere.
So in a contained universe, it doesn't matter if it's an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.
The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.
Like, think of it as a seed becoming a tree. Mass is being "created" from energy.
But the laws of thermodynamics as were used to them are predicated on a linear one direction passage of time, because humans are the ones who explained it, and that's the only reality our conscious minds can comprehend
If what I'm saying doesn't make sense, it's because this is ridiculously complicated. Any flaws are because of me trying to explain it which is why I said if someone wants to understand more, they're going to have to spend a lot of time reading some really heavy scientific literature.
You're talking more about Penroses further hypothesis that consciousness is because of quantum collapse inside of the brain. That is where challenges arise.
But Penrose is smart enough to say he doesn't know everything, and he has spent decades talking about this stuff in the scientific community because he wants it challenged. That's kind of how science works....
Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.
There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.
Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the 'spreading out' of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.
Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.
Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose's views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.
Because what is acting on it is the energy that turns back into matter...
Look, I'm not going to argue this. Feel free to start reading about it on your own, and good luck.
Einstein abandoned the static universe theory when we confirmed expansion. Time is absolutely not constant but it is unidirectional according to Einstein himself after the Hubble Telescope verified that everything everywhere is expanding. The radius of the universe depends on time.
If I showed you a 1 second video of an apple falling from a tree, would you say the apple would continue to fall forever? After all, the only evidence you have is the apple falling.
Penrose, (who again was the one to finish up and prove a lot of Einstein 's work btw) believes we're just looking at a very tiny piece of the puzzle. And Big Bangs are cyclical.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/black-holes-prove-the-universe-keeps-exploding-claims-physicist/
https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/36137
Personally I think it's more like fireworks going off in the sky all over than one single repeating big bang.
But Penrose literally just won a Novel a few years ago. He's literally the person most qualified to talk about this. And he's been doing it for decades. Right after he finished up Einsteins work.
What you're doing is like insisting the sun orbits Earth because that's what accepted.
Penrose is literally bleeding edge physics. Just because he hasn't convinced everyone he's right yet, doesn't mean he's wrong. Science moves pretty fucking slow, someone next generation will.probably price Penrose right, just like Einstein wasn't proven right until Penrose and Hawking showed up to do it while working together.
It's literally how science works man...