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>>6255
Entropy explains the arrow of time, but not our perception of it. Memory does.
Time appears to move forward because we remember the past but not the future.
Assume time to be a linear quantity. A line. Assume you can move along this line in either direction in any speed. But you cannot skip points on the line. You can only move from point to adjacent point. Points A, B, C, D, E, F, G. With A to G being the direction of increasing global entropy.
Our perception of this is that you move 'forward' at a fixed speed. This is why we perceive it that way:
At each point you traverse, you record a memory of it as you pass it. A collection of these memories is what you call your past.
As you move from point A to point B to C to D, E, F and G, you only have a memory of all the points you have already been to, in the order you have been to them.
You start at point A, then move along B, C, D and reach E. If when you reach point E, the next point you experience is point D and then C and then B, you have the feeling of moving backward in time, only because you have already seen those points in the reverse order. If you had never been to B, C and D; if you had begun at point G and moved along F, E, D instead, you would still feel time to be moving 'forward', although you are moving in the direction of decreasing global entropy.
The entropy decreasing universe.
Imagine that you live in a universe where entropy always decreases. You start off as ashes, become a charred corpse, then an old man, and then grow younger and so on. But your memory does not start off with information and then lose it. You start off with a blank slate and then see new things.
When you un-drop an egg, you've seen the egg broken before you see it full. For a person in this universe who's never experienced an entropy-increasing universe, the un-breaking of the egg is natural. An egg that falls and breaks is what would be perceived as a reversal of time because it would involve a global increase in entropy, which is not natural in that universe.
It would seem unnatural because he has never experienced a scenario where he already had a memory of the egg unbroken before he saw it un-break. Similar to the way we, in our entropy increasing universe, never already have a memory of a broken egg before seeing the same egg break.
Entropy explains the arrow of time, but not our perception of it. Memory does.
When we say time moves 'forward', what we actually mean is that all processes progress in the direction of increasing global entropy.
When we feel time moving 'forward', it's because 'forward' is define as the direction in which new experiences occur and new memories are created in our minds.
If time moved forward, we’d move backward; it’s us who move forward, not time.
Time’s an accepted convention - a "dimension". We perceive ourselves as moving forward toward new events. They’re new because they’re unknown to us. They haven't occurred yet so they’re a surprise.
Events that have already occurred are known; these we accept as "past events".
Our forward motion in time is described by the theory of relativity where time is vector summed with our motion in space; thus time is variable but always positive and always “forward”.
Some people say that all of time exists as an infinite sequence of parallel slices of reality. In this model, we aren't really moving forward in time, we inhabit all of those slices and, in each slice, we imagine a future which is waiting for us and a past that has already occurred. I find that hard to accept but I’m not a physicist or a philosopher, what do you expect?
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