mindlace

What does it mean to say that time is the distance of difference?

First it is extending an epistemological observation to an ontological hypothesis. The observation is that the only way an entity can be known is through the apprehension of qualities, and quality can only be apprehended through relation. The ontological hypothesis is the relation of qualities is the only way entities can share causality.

(This has the interesting side effect of implying that knowing is a special form of this sort of causality.)

The experimental evidence I would expect to support this would be a quantum of change, and indeed there does seem to be that- a quantum of energy, time, and space – as described by Planck, or at least as I understand his descriptions by reading third parties.

I understand that there is still some controversy over these matters, but it seems like the evidence is pointing strongly in the direction and favour of nature being fundamentally quantized.

What is slightly less controversial than space quantization is energy quantization; elements of energy, like electrons, relate to each other via photons.

What this means is we can “slice up” the universe on these planck boundaries and get something like constituent “points” of existence – an “energy occuring over time in a space”.

Now let’s say I have taken a universe much like our own, chopped it into these little points, handed you these points unordered and asked you to put them back together. It’s like the chinese room experiment except you’re being asked to put these pieces back in an order such that it recreates some plausible set, with extra credit if you make it like a set (your experience) you already have.

For lack of a better way of putting it, you get a lego set where the pieces only connect to each other in discrete ways, like the way that electrons only interact with each other via photons, and the assembled set is a universe. It’s OK, you have all the time you need.

One of the things that you’ll probably find is that most of your pieces are near-identical; in fact I’d bet that many of them are identical, on the inductive basis that most of the “pieces” we find in our universe – like atoms, molecules, and so on – are identical across many types of measurement; a molecule of H₂O at a given temperature and pressure behaves precisely like another molecule of H₂O.

As a thought experiment, imagine we have a litre of pure H₂O at STP, and a marvelous device that allows us to record what occurs in the volume at plank-volume resolution.

Within a few minutes, we would know pretty near all of the states that the H2O is ever going to occupy.  That’s not to say that each portion of the liter occupied all of its possible states, but if you chop the liter up into plank-volume “cubes” the set of relations that any one of the molecules could have with the others has been had by some other molecule in the same volume.

Now even if you don’t, for the moment, believe in the many worlds hypothesis, you can perhaps see how the scenario I’ve just described paints a picture of a bunch of points strung together in this crazy interwoven tapestry, but that the set of points is far smaller than the qualitative set an experiencer in that universe would observe.

So you complete your task, and have a reasonable facsimile of your experiential universe. Does the universe you’re holding have an isomorph in your past? Is there more than one way you can put a universe together that results in one that is indistinguishable from the other?

I think you can put them together many different ways and still achieve universes sufficiently like our own as to be indistinguishable.

There are some joinings that the elements in question cannot engage in until some other, prior joining has taken place; we were once a stew of baryons, in all of our possible histories. This is the source of the “arrow” of time.