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am_Unition  ·  3424 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: BBC - Future - Neuroscience: The man who saw time stand still

    -What? Why? I love sleeping. But I also love being awake. It's a burden to love all states of existence, I know.

I have always had the same burden. I'm biased towards one side though; I'm always awake when I express opinions on Hubski. "I hate loving sleep" is something I've said before.

    To your knowledge, is there a good example of a process in physics that was thought to not be reversible or that was popularly thought to be "set in stone" but has since been proven otherwise?

No, not really. We've long since had some kind of inkling that things got more mixed-up/chaotic as time went on, which is the concept of entropy, in a nutshell. But that is for systems on the macroscopic scale, human experiences. Many microscopic (actually, much smaller than "microscopic" scale) events in Quantum Mechanics (QM) are symmetric under a time reversal, such as the emission or absorption of an energy-specific photon by an electron in an atom. Still, that was one of the least weird things that QM told us. And General Relativity (GR) was also reversible in time, aside from all of the latest black hole Hawking radiation and holographic information surface stuff that's come out lately, which does have some thermodynamics-like statistics incorporated into it.

    I'm not sure if my question is articulated properly but I guess what I'm asking is, what advances in the understanding of physics have enabled us to throw out our innate assumptions?

Yeah, I think so. The smallest units of reality seem to be quantized/discrete, and not infinitely small. Not measurable with modern technology, but theory points to a limit at the "Planck scale"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units). I guess, if we're living in a computer, that is the spatial, temporal, energy, and momentum phase space resolution for the simulation we're inside of right now. So I'm asking; If time moves forward one Planck unit (that's 10^-43 seconds) at a time, what's making it roll over with relative routineness? It's like a condition written into the system. And yeah, maybe it's hardwired into our experience because of the way that we're physically constructed, brain in particular. Maybe we can even overcome that limitation, but I doubt it happening within our lifetimes.

    We are born in to a linear way of processing time. This is innate. I wonder, have other such processes that are innate been changed during our human evolution?

The contrast of our civilization's triumphs compared to relatively close biological kin is evidence that we have changed "innate" processes, because I think you have to approach what "innate" entails relativistically. That we are debating the nature of time over a communication network the size of Earth springs to mind. The internet and even smartphone technology have changed the way we will behave. Forever. And relatively quickly, compared to the preceding timescale of technology. Again, maybe it's not an impossible notion that we'll conquer the issue of unidirectional time with technology. But I'm uhhhh.. I'm still working on it.

So. All of this? It's more than likely bullshit, because it's still framing everything in reference to currently accepted, mainstream physics, which is known to be incomplete.