| Assumes same time orientation OpposingArgument1 #113851 Philosopher Huw Price has responded to Maccone's quantum argument by pointing out that it explains one asymmetry by assuming another. It assumes all observers have the same orientation in time. Without this, some observers would remember the past and others the future. |
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+Citations (1)
- CitationsAdd new citationList by: CiterankMapLink[1] Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?
Author: Slezak, Michael
Cited by: Peter Baldwin 7:50 AM 20 July 2011 GMT
Citerank: (1) 112797Quantum argumentIn the cited article Maccone mounts an argument grounded in quantum theory that phenomena in which entropy decreases will not leave any information of their having happened, so that even if they do happen they will never be remembered. This argument does not make use of a computer analogy.1198CE71
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| Excerpt / Summary Huw Price, head of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, thinks Maccone is simply trading one mystery for another.
"The proposal to explain the thermodynamic arrow in terms of the [quantum] effects of observers has an obvious flaw," he says. "It doesn't explain why all observers have the same orientation in time ... Why don't some observers remember what we call the future, and accumulate information towards what we call the past?"
A standard way of explaining why observers like us remember the past is by appealing to thermodynamics – the fact that entropy is increasing. This explanation is unavailable to Maccone since his theory takes that thermodynamic fact to depend on the existence of observers. Such an explanation, for Maccone, would thus be circular.
If Price is right, then Maccone has explained one temporal asymmetry at the expense of creating another that is equally hard to explain.
What's more, Price thinks that Maccone has made a hidden asymmetrical assumption. He argues that the quantum correlations Maccone relies on must be assumed to happen only in one temporal direction and not the other. "But that's just assuming the conclusion he wants to derive."
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