The Psychological Arrow

"It is rather difficult to talk about human memory because we don't know how the brain works in detail. We do, however, know all about how computer memories work. I shall therefore discuss the psychological arrow of time for computers. I think it is reasonable to assume that the arrow for computers is the same as that for humans. If it were not, one could make a killing on the stock exchange by having a computer that would remember tomorrow's prices.

A computer memory is basically some device that can be in either one of two states. An example would be a superconducting loop of wire. If there is an electric current flowing in the loop, it will continue to flow because there is no resistance. On the other hand, it there is no current, the loop will continue without a current. One can label the two states of the memory 'one' and 'zero'.

Before an item is recorded in the memory, the memory is in a disordered state with equal probabilities for one and zero. After the memory interacts with the system to be remembered, it will definitely be in one state or the other, according to the state of the system. Thus, the memory passes from a disordered state to an ordered one. However, in order to make sure that the memory is in the right state, it is necessary to use a certain amount of energy. This energy is dissipated as heat and increases the amount of disorder in the universe. One can show that this increase of disorder is greater than the increase in the order of the memory. Thus, when a computer records an item in memory, the total amount of disorder in the universe goes up.

The direction of time in which a computer remembers the past is the same as that in which disorder increases. This means that our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is determined by the thermodynamic arrow of time. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can't have a safer bet than that."

Abstract

Some researchers believe that the psychological or consciousness arrow of time is a consequence of the thermodynamic arrow. Some don’t. As for many issues in this area, the disagreement revolves about fundamental and undebatable assumptions. As a contribution to this standoff I consider the extent to which a computer presumably governed by nothing more than the thermodynamic arrow can be said to possess a psychological arrow. My contention is that the parallels are sufficiently strong as to leave little room for an independent psychological arrow. Reservations are nevertheless expressed on the complete objectivity of the thermodynamic arrow.

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Computations are accompanied by dissipation, so much so that one of the principal issues for Intel’s Itanium chip is its power consumption [17]. More fundamentally, Landauer [18, 19] has shown that computation requires irreversible processes and heat generation. From the standpoint of our two-state systems (where those “two” states are macrostates), the system will typically enter a new macrostate in a microstate with relatively high energy. Dropping to a lower energy of the same macrostate produces heat energy and allows the system to “forget” its recent arrival and be indistinguishable from a system that had been in this state indefinitely. This represents a loss of information.