{"id":952,"date":"2013-04-28T21:35:41","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T04:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/?p=952"},"modified":"2013-04-28T22:01:53","modified_gmt":"2013-04-29T05:01:53","slug":"i-dont-understand-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/2013\/04\/i-dont-understand-time\/","title":{"rendered":"I Don't Understand Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our subjective experience would have it that time &quot;moves forward&quot;: the past is no longer, and the future is indeterminate and &quot;hasn't happened yet.&quot; But it can't <em>actually<\/em> work that way: special relativity tells us that there's no absolute space of simultaneity; given two spacelike separated events, whether one happened &quot;before&quot; or &quot;after&quot; the other depends on where you are and how fast you're going. This leads us to a &quot;block universe&quot; view: our 3+1 dimensional universe, past, present, and future, simply <em>exists<\/em>, and the subjective arrow of time somehow arises from our perspective embedded within it.<\/p>\n<p>Without knowing much in the way of physics or cognitive science myself, I can only wonder if there aren't still more confusions to dissolved, intuitions to be unlearned in the service of a more accurate understanding. We know things about the past from our memories and by observing documents; we might then say that memories and documents are forms of probabilistic evidence about another point in spacetime. But <em>predictions<\/em> about the <em>future<\/em> are <em>also<\/em> a form of probabilistic evidence about another point in spacetime. There's a sort of symmetry there, isn't there? Could we perhaps imagine that minds constructed differently from our own wouldn't perceive the same kind of arrow of time that we do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our subjective experience would have it that time &quot;moves forward&quot;: the past is no longer, and the future is indeterminate and &quot;hasn't happened yet.&quot; But it can't actually work that way: special relativity tells us that there's no absolute space &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/2013\/04\/i-dont-understand-time\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[61],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=952"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":955,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions\/955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}