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Originally Posted by randolph
Hey Tracy! Very good, profound, are you a physicist? 
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Yup
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Originally Posted by Tread
2nd law of thermodynamics? No. If it would be able to perceive the future it would be fine to remember it with this law.
You mean Causality. The effect (memory) can't happen before the case (the experience) happens.
Memories are always showing the past, never the present or future.
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I mean that there is nothing that physically prevents the chemical reactions that encode memories from happening in reverse time, except for the 2nd law of thermo. For example, it's
possible for freak sound, tremors and temperature fluctuations to travel through the air and floor to propel thousands of bits of egg shell and egg goop in the right direction with enough force to come together perfectly into an egg shell and form atomic bonds to become a solid egg. And the momentum of this fusion could propel the egg up to a counter top where it smoothly rolls across the counter. It is astronomically improbable though. Same with chemical reactions that encode memories. They are physically able to record the future, but it is astronomically improbable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by randolph
A quote from weburbia.com.
"To keep things simple, let's start by considering just classical Newtonian mechanics. The form which the laws of physics take is crucial to our understanding of causality.....
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Indeed, the continual increase of entropy is intimately linked to our perception of causality. Entropy is a measure of disorder in a system and defines an arrow of time which can be linked to the psychological arrow....
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Yup, that's what I'm saying.
Quote:
Originally Posted by randolph
There is, however, a catch. The second law of thermodynamics is inexplicable in terms of the underlying laws of physics which, as far as we know, are reversible.
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It's not inexplicable. Entropy, or disorder, always increases. This is because there are vastly more disordered states than ordered states, so it is more probable for a system to become more disordered. Whenever it appears that something becomes more ordered, like when a star collapses into a beautifully symmetric neutron star, it always ends up causing more disorder elsewhere, so the net change is more entropy.