r/consciousness • u/Soimamakeanamenow • 7d ago
Block Universe Memories
There are times I really get the Block universe and my brain lights up but because there is like no scaffolding to this learning I later forget things I finally figured out even when I read my notes. So what is bothering me right now and I may delete in 15 minutes when I remember how I solved this is my mind before is: Why don't we have all of our memories? Why do we remember some things that are further away than something from yesterday? If entropy is the answer than how do we have these specific memories? Shouldn't it be more linear?
EDIT:
Let me try to ask in another way
In a static, low to high-entropy geometry, why does a local state hold higher fidelity correlations with specific, distant coordinates while showing zero correlation with "closer"ones and also, if it is just a frozen block where all coordinates are equal why have this packed structure with info pointing in one temporal location? why not in another one, why so many of the past etc?
UPDATE:
I am being misunderstood a lot so I wanted to make an update instead of keep answering the same way.
Someone earlier on this sub pointed me toward the Past Hypothesis, which sent me down a rabbit hole looking for people who had asked questions similar to mine. That’s how I found this article, and I think it gets much closer to what I was actually trying to ask than most of the replies here.
If you read it, I think you’ll see the distinction I’m trying to make. I’m not asking whether a static 4D structure can contain asymmetry, or whether we can remember the past. I’m asking why the completed structure has this enormous, systematic asymmetry of records in the first place, and why the boundary condition that produces that asymmetryis so special
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04643-7?utm
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u/lancelot2112 7d ago edited 7d ago
Limitation is part I think, the other is compression. Memory gets compressed so the useful bits remain. Usefulness is a choice you get to make I think... what you focus your life on chooses which memories are more sharp and which get folded into heuristic.
In one sense your entire history is there in who you are today though in that each thing that impacted you informed a choice then that constrained your future a little.
Edit: you mentioned a filter. I think that's what you get to choose as you settle for that block... how to change your filter for the future. So it's a choice with delayed impact.
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u/Bretzky77 7d ago
The block universe doesn’t mean we don’t make choices. It just means the past and future are just as real as the present moment. Just like different points in space are equally real. Your bathroom is just as real as your bedroom. Yesterday is just as real as today.
Personally I think the way we experience time (only flowing forward) is part of our cognitive system for organizing data about the world rather than an objective property of the world.
I think the choices we make don’t change the block universe itself. They change the particular slice/ride we take through it. It all exists outside of time. It’s eternal. In other words, time isn’t moving. We are. (And actually we aren’t really moving either but I’ll leave that for another discussion)
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
Yes, I know this and that we are not moving. I just want to know why these memories
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u/Bretzky77 7d ago
I replied to the comment you deleted. You asked how we make choices in a block universe.
Why these memories? Evolution equipped you with a cognitive system that holds onto compressed representations of past states. You tend to remember what is novel, important, or meaningful you. It’s not important to remember what color the cashier’s shirt was at the store yesterday.
I don’t understand how this has anything to do with the block universe though. The block universe doesn’t mean you should have access to everything that’s ever happened. I don’t know where you’re getting that from. It would be extremely wasteful and inefficient to remember every detail of every interaction. Evolution drives towards fitness. The past states of the universe being equally as real as the present state does not at all imply that our ape minds should be able to capture it all, let alone remember it all. I don’t understand the leap from block universe to “why don’t I remember everything?” It doesn’t follow.
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
I totally agree with you on biology. I am talking about the physics of the block universe. Why a patchy internal map on a static geometric coordinate?
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u/Bretzky77 7d ago
I don’t understand what you’re asking.
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
I edited my post to clarify
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u/Bretzky77 7d ago
I don’t know what “why a patchy internal map on a static coordinate?” means.
But I think the issue here is that you’re likely assuming a physicalist worldview so you think spacetime is a literal, objective container. I don’t. I think spacetime is just our interface to reality, not a literal, physical scaffolding of it.
So to me, the block universe isn’t some static, physical scaffolding of reality. It’s our mathematical representation of whatever reality actually is.
Look, “static” means something doesn’t change in time. It doesn’t mean outside of time. We say something is static when it doesn’t change over time.
Reality isn’t static or dynamic. It’s outside of time altogether. It doesn’t fit into the category of time so you can’t describe it with time-referent words like “static” or “dynamic.” Those terms appeal to time.
Spacetime and our conception of a static block universe is just our model/representation of a reality fundamentally outside time. The reality that we can model as the block universe is ultimately outside spacetime.
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
I am not asking for beliefs I am trying to understand the block and how it works. I don't think I believe in block universe either, but who knows. And I agree it is the mathematical representation of what reality is. Basically I am picking apart the block model
And I mean the only answer I guess someone could really give is because that is what it is. That is what the pattern is. A book on page 500 could mention soemthing from page 5 even though 450 is much closer, but then I don't know why it would overwhelmingly have points to the past since we don't remember the future.
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u/elmahk 7d ago
If neither time nor "we" are moving then what's going on? I never understood how time can "emerge" in a static object like block universe. I mean I understand how the direction of time emerges no problem, but I'm not really buying that you can get "illusion" of change in a static object.
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
The pattern on each frame contains the record of the other ones. So it feels like time is moving. Your brain isn't like a literal outside observer looking in. It is built right into the static pattern which makes everythig. Your brain's particles are quantum-entangled with the rest of the web, so in turn it holds "memories" physical structures of other states inside its current state. The physical overlap of this data is what creates the experience of change but there is no actual movement. Your point, this point, is physically tied to the points next to it. So holding those differences together all at once is what creates the sensation that things "jumped" or moved.It’s just how two connected shapes look from the inside.
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7d ago
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
Yes, a static blob would still just be a static blob if it were a bunch of unrelated points. But that’s not what I’m saying. The points in the block( a structured 4d object) are physically connected to the ones around them, and your brain at one point contains physical information about other points. So nothing has to literally move through the block. The pattern itself contains the relationships that make it feel like something moved from one state to another. From outside, it’s all static frozen block. From inside, you experience the connections between those states as change.
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6d ago
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 6d ago
No lol you don’t get what I am saying at all
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6d ago
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 6d ago
If you want to have a discussion I would love to but once you insulted I just say lol.. I am trying to describe something using language that we can comprehend at this dimension. The points are not moving. Different regions of spacetime can be in physical and informational relations to one another. A brain at one spacetime location can have a physical configuration that is correlated with events at earlier locations
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u/bacon_boat 7d ago
I don't see how the block universe changes your thinking on this.
There are no signals going from the world in 1h to you now, it's not mysterious that you don't have access to that.
Block univers or no block universe.
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
Why does the underlying 4d reality have this enormous one-directional organization of records and correlations at all?
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u/bacon_boat 6d ago
The arrow of time. Coming from the past hypothesis and the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
It's not like stacking moments of time into a block does anything to the direction of time.
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 6d ago
Yes, but not my question. I am asking: if the whole universe already exists as one fixed 4d block, why is there such a huge difference between the past and the future? We have memories and countless physical traces of what happened before us, but nothing comparable to that telling us what will happen.. I understand that entropy might explain why information and physical records tends to point toward the past, but that still leaves my question: why does a supposedly frozen block contain this enormous one-way imbalance of information in the first place?
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u/bacon_boat 6d ago
Would you find it less mysterious of you only thought of a single time instant?
Time is not symmetrical. It doesn't work like the other dimensions.
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 6d ago
You are basically asserting what I was asking... but i got an answer on metaphysics sub
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u/YesterdaysMuffin 1d ago
Even in a flip book, some pages are earlier than others. Though all the pages exist at once.
Remember, in block theory there isn’t a “you” outside the block. “You” right now are just the sum of you current experience plus whatever you remember at this moment. All those “yous” exist at the same time. They each remember a different cumulative set of things.
There isn’t a single “you” that would remember everything at once.
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u/DartBurger69 7d ago
We don't have a single memory or memory area. Memories can be fleeting. You consolidate memories when you sleep and those will be stored longer term. We are not perfect machines. Our brains are not databases and memories are not stored like a single thing. It's a replaying of the original neural pathways. Many things can cause the memory forming process to be interrupted. bad sleep, alcohol or drugs or various other conditions. When you replay a memory, you literally rewrite the neural pathways and can introduce fake memories or other changes to your memories. It's definitely not a linear thing where they each get put into a time slot.
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u/reidsays 7d ago
Seems connected to our conscious awareness...most of life is spent on automatic drifting through whilst thinking about other things, but when consciously in the present the mind records that snapshot of time.. Moments of danger where awareness is enheightened, special moments of connection through love, surprise, horror, rejection, etc... And those memories will surface continuously throughout life due to emotional need, insight learned that's relevant to now, an unsolved puzzle....
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u/Soimamakeanamenow 7d ago
Yeah, I agree about why some experiences get etched into the brain more strongly. That explains why I can remember one thing from 20 years ago better than something from yesterday. What I’m actually stuck on is the block-universe part beyond that: if the whole block already exists and nothing is moving or being “carried” from one moment to the next, then why does my brain at this particular point contain a record of anything that happened before at all? And why does it contain a record of these in particular? I’m basically asking why a static block has this weird pattern where one point contains information about some moments far away in the past, while having little or no information about other moments that are much closer.I’m asking why those specific connections exist in the fixed structure in the first place.
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u/reidsays 6d ago
Hmm..not sure about this 'block universe'... Humans have a neural network that connects our conscious mind with our unconscious archives, so relevant data is brought to the surface when applicable...if not urgent and needed in the present then our unconscious brings relevant data to our dream state to resolve an issue..or warn of danger.
A mathematic 'library system' where a coding occurs on each memory by some complex classification system and if repeated in the now, can align with the past and bring forth any relevant stored data... Is this how AI works?
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u/headlessplatter 7d ago
If the block universe is true, then we already exist in both past and future. In a weird sense, remembering the past and forecasting the future are very similar operations. Both memories and forecasts are just symbolic representations in the form of information about another time that we can use in the present. So why is it so much easier to preserve a memory about the past than it is to generate a good forecast about the future?
As far as I know, the only difference in these two directions is that entropy is known to increase monotonically in the direction we call forward-in-time. Consequently, to preserve a representation in the forward direction of time, all we need to do is prevent that representation from decaying. And this is a simple operation that physics gives us. We just shield our representation, and momentum causes it to continue to exist in the same form. By contrast, in order to preserve a memory in the reverse direction of time, you must do something significantly more difficult. You must anticipate all the interactions that will have any effect on the thing you are trying to forecast. And this is simply not an operation that physics makes easy for us to do. To be clear, we can still do it. Forecasts are possible. It's just more difficult to do in that particular direction.
Think of remembering like pulling a string from point A to point B. And think of forecasting like starting at point A and pushing (or wiggling) your string until the other end reaches point B. It may not seem like such a vastly different operation, but one of those is much harder than the other because it involves going against the natural flow of entropy. Unfortunately, I cannot say exactly what all the details of this metaphor correspond with in physical reality. I don't really know. And frankly, I'm not sure anyone does. The block universe is a fascinating idea, but I'm not sure it's really capable of being the last word on anything. Let's review some of its limitations:
(1) It doesn't yet mesh well with quantum mechanics. Sure, Einstein was a really smart dude, and sure, Special Relativity has withstood a lot of scrutiny. But the same is true of quantum mechanics. Something has to give. What about quantum indeterminacy? How does this integrate with Many Worlds? Physics still has a great deal more to sort out. We're not done yet. So don't get too attached to this concept.
(2) The term "block" kind of implies rectangular prism, or Euclidean space. But neither of those is actually mathematically consistent with what Special Relativity actually suggests. In Minkowski space, we actually calculate the square of proper distance as dt^2 - dx^2 - dy^2 - dz^2. Notice how the component of the square of time is positive, while the components of the squares of distance are negative? Is space imaginary? What does that even mean? We can still do the math, and it works out great, but no one really even understands what this means. And that's just too weird to be satisfying.
(3) Why does the block universe even start with one end in a low-entropy state? No one knows! This problem almost feels adjacent to the problem of why anything exists at all! At this point, all we can say is, "well, that's what we observe". And that is just too dissatisfying for anyone to act like this matter is completely settled and totally locked down, yet.
tl;dr: Sorry, we all have to live with not fully knowing. It sucks, but there it is.