Time's Arrow; requires a brain (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 00:55 (2978 days ago) @ David Turell

Time requires a brain. Physical laws do not need or recognize time nor does quantum mechanics. Time requires memories: - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/09/26/the-arrow-of-time-its-all-in-our-head... - Our paper shows that time doesn't just exist “out there” ticking away from past to future, but rather is an emergent property that depends on the observer's ability to preserve information about experienced events.
 
A new paper just published in Annalen der Physik — which published Albert Einstein's theories of special and general relativity — Dmitry Podolsky, a theoretical physicist now working on aging at Harvard University, and I explain how the arrow of time ? indeed time itself ? is directly related to the nature of the observer (that is, us).
Our paper shows that time doesn't just exist “out there” ticking away from past to future, but rather is an emergent property that depends on the observer's ability to preserve information about experienced events. - Einstein's collaborator, John Wheeler (who coined the word “black hole”) argued that time itself emerges due to a decoherence of the wave function describing the universe, which is subject to the laws of quantum gravity. However, our paper shows that the intrinsic properties of quantum gravity and matter alone cannot explain the tremendous effectiveness of the emergence of time and the lack of quantum entanglement in our ordinary, everyday macroscopic world. Instead, it is necessary to include the properties of the observer, and in particular, the way we process and remember information. Our new paper suggests that the emergence of the arrow of time is related to the ability of observers to preserve information about experienced events. - For years physicists have known that Newton's laws, Einstein's equations, and even those of the quantum theory, are all time-symmetrical. Time plays absolutely no role. There is no forward movement of time. So if the laws of physics should work just as well for events going forward or going backward in time, then why do we only experience growing older? All our scientific theories tell us that we should be able to experience the future just like we experience the past.
 
The answer is that we observers have memory and can only remember events which we have observed in the past. Quantum mechanical trajectories “future to past” are associated with erasing of memory, since any process which decreases entropy (decline in order) leads to the decrease of entanglement between our memory and observed events.  In other words, if we do experience the future (which we might), we are not able to store the memories about such processes. You can't go back in time without this information being erased from your brain.  By contrast, if you experience the future by using the usual route “past > present > future,” you accumulate memories and entropy grows. - Thus, a “brainless” observer — that is, an observer without the ability to store observed events — does not experience time or a world in which we age. 
Aging truly, is all in your head. - Comment: We have observed before, time as it appears to us is a series of memories. It takes a brain. The whole article contains a review of quantum theories which seem to defy time, i.e., being in two differing states at the same time.