A short comment. Simplicity and complexity are features of our picture of
the world rather than of the world (which is continuous and therefore not
individuated, and so neither simple nor complex). For this reason I do not
find *definitions* of the passage of time in terms of entropy movement on
the complex - simple axis terribly plausible. Time passes, and there's an
end on it. This is as much as we can say, this is what time is.
One might also point out that it is a *moment* of time that passes, not time
itself, and that moments, like simplicity and complexity, are features of
our pictures, not of the world itself.
Specify a moment - it is gone. Facts grow old and die on our tongue as we
speak them. You need no theory to know this. You need no treatise on times
arrow, no deep appreciuation of Zeno's paradox. You just need to listen
quietly, and to feel the failure of words to catch up with things, the
strain and effort of poetry, the nearness and the almost but not quite
hitting the mark. The absence of any mark.
"
Time Passes. Listen. Time Passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt
and and silent black, bandaged night.....
"
Time passes. Welsh time, English time, American time. Time passes.
And
"things fall apart
the center cannot hold"
- but only because the falling apart and the center are part of our
pictures, and those pictures are rushing forward, we are rushing them
forward, refining and abandoning them in pursuit of quality. Purposes and
projects: these are natural conditions of consciousness and what govern the
perception of time as a flow of moments, but they are also conditions of
consciousness that themselves *require* the flow of time, for which the flow
of time is a priori. If we could abandon all purposes and projects, perhaps
we could experience some strange and timeless directionless eternity. And
this is what some report - though I have not glimpsed it myself I can
recognise it as a theoretrical possibility. In all other situations time is
an arrow, a river, an avalanche, a train. It is headed somewhere, we know
not where, and it is headed there because we are too. Slowly, quickly,
calmly, angrily, we move on.
> From: Magnus Berg <McMagnus@hem.passagen.se>
> Reply-To: moq_focus@moq.org
> Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 07:59:39 +0200
> To: MOQ focus <moq_focus@moq.org>
> Subject: Re: MF Entropy, information and time
>
> Hi Jonathan
>
>> Let me interject an inversion . . .
>> . . . AS ENTROPY/DISORDER INCREASES, TIME IS PERCEIVED SAID TO PASS".
>> It may be an aside to Magnus's main point, but let's not forget that TIME and
>> not entropy is the topic of the month.
>
> Forgive me if I draw the wrong conclusion here but I thought that the "Time's
> arrow" theme you mentioned a few days ago suggested that time and entropy was
> more or less the same thing?
>
> I'm not too keen on that idea myself I'm afraid. I'm sure the equations of
> thermodynamics are watertight enough but it feels like defining one week as
> "the time it takes for my desk to become cluttered with printouts".
>
> I don't mean to make fun of the second law, and maybe I'm just old-fashioned
> about this time concept, but time seems to be a more basic concept than the
> rest of the second law.
>
>> Magnus, I don't think that there is any such beast as a "quantum particle".
>> Particles are particles and belong squarely in Pirsig's inorganic level. The
>> problem with isolated particles is that they cannot exhibit population
>> behaviour! This makes it very hard to talk about thermodynamics and entropy
>> which - those "properties of state" are essentially descriptions populations
>> of particles. It thus makes sense to me that IF TIME IS A CONSEQUENCE OF
>> ENTROPY INCREASE,then when we try and look at single particles we lose sense
>> of both entropy and time.
>
> But time is still *there*! Granted, it's difficult to measure it because our
> methods to measure time are based on entropy increase, but that doesn't mean
> time just vanished. Imagine hundreds of radioactive isotopes, take one at a
> time and measure the time it takes for it to disintegrate. Even though each
> isotope is a population of only one particle and consequently, the time it
> takes to disintegrate will vary quite a bit, the average time will still be
> very close to the decay rate of that particular isotope. Right?
>
> This means that single, lonesome particles still have a quite good grasp of
> time. It does *not* mean that the different isotopes had different time
> scales... methinks, I think it means that they simply disintegrated at
> different
> times according to the decay probability of the isotope. They don't have to
> hide in large populations to average out the individual differences. As long
> as it's an inorganic pattern, time will be defined.
>
>
>> It is little wonder that time has strange properties
>> in those "quantum" experiments.
>
> What I meant with quantum "particles", quantas, whatever, hmm... quantum
> patterns
> of course. :) I'll take that again.
>
> What I meant with quantum patterns having no sense of time is something
> completely
> different than small populations of inorganic particles. These guys travel
> through
> time like it was up, left, or forward.
>
> Magnus
> ------- End of forwarded message -------
>
>
> MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
>
------- End of forwarded message -------
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