What could it mean to have "memories" of the thermodynamic future?

Question

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Editing as the original question seemed generic, ambiguous and susceptible to being misconstrued for pseudoscience (astrology,etc) --- Essentially what I am saying is this : a) If you face an object, let the light reflected off it enter your eyes and form a memory; Or b) You picture an object in your head, reverse this imagination ('future memory') and emit the corresponding light (as when you will see the object) Then what's the real difference between these two and why can't the imagination be called a "memory" of the thermodynamic future? Perhaps the reason we don't remember the (thermodynamic) future is because we don't have reversible memories which radiate photons on being forgotten?

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The 2nd law of thermodynamics is correctly cited as the reason for us not having memories of the future. But it may seem at first glance that even if we were to decrease local entropy around us, we wouldn’t start remembering future events. Why is that so and is there a way we could in fact remember the future?

Answer 1

I have memories of the future all the time. I call them "anticipations". Just like my memories of the past, they are mental visions that are entirely caused by the current state of my brain. Just like my memories of the past, they are imperfect visions of real events that are located elsewhere on my worldline. Sometimes they feel more accurate than they actually are.

It seems clear that there can be no difference in kind between a memory and an anticipation, because each is a (presumably Bayesian) estimate of something that we are not currently observing, taking as input nothing more than the information currently available to us (including everything that's going on in our brains). And the sorts of inferences we draw are presumably based on running the laws of physics backward or forward from that set of current information.

Most of the time (but certainly not always), there's a lot more uncertainty about my anticipations than there is about my memories. That's not a difference in kind but a difference in degree, which is presumably explainable by the second law of thermodynamics.

There's room for a lot more detail in that big picture (including details about the exact circumstances in which we should expect memories/anticipations to be more or less accurate) but once you accept that your mental state must depend only on the current physical state of your brain, you are pretty much committed to a story in which memories and anticipations are exactly the same kind of thing.

Answer 2

Harvey Brown talks about an entropic gradient as all that is needed for life, not necessarily one from low to high. And I presume these life forms can have memories. So at least philosophy of physics wise, the second law is not why we can't remember or experience the future. With the above at most you could say is memories require an arrow of time, not necessarily the second (low to high).

This is not even getting into how we perceive time.

Answer 3

What would it mean to have future memories? If you remembered seeing a bipedal aardvark i.e. if you imagined that you will be seeing one tomorrow and then you saw the exact same creature the next day, it would not have been a future memory. It'd be only a coincidence. A genuine memory should be created by the event that the former is of. In the case of the aardvark the photons from the mammal are not responsible for your memory but simply impinge upon an already existing memory. So, a true future memory would be one that is linked to the event (and can be recalled).

To devise a way to create this link we need to reverse the steps in the formation of past memories, at least most of them. Starting from the past,

1. You have a memory of seeing an aardvark. (the light corresponding to the creature could have come from anywhere, not necessarily the aardvark in flesh)
2. You can recall seeing an aardvark. (we will not reverse this process)
3. You forget seeing an aardvark. (memory creation reversed)
4. The memory reversal leads to impulses traveling down your optic nerves. (reversed)
5. Those impulses get converted to light which is emitted from your eyes in a pattern which is the exact reverse of receiving photons from an aardvark. (reversed)

This memory is an actual memory because it cannot exist independently of the information that is now outside of your brain. Also it is a future memory because if you point from the future then the information corresponding to your memory does enter your eyes from outside.

This memory may not look like a 'complete' memory as there may not even be an aardvark when we emit the light. But that is because of the thermodynamic arrow of time. It would be incredibly harder to make an arrangement where there was an aardvark whose skin our photons fell on and then combined with dissipated heat and took off again as sunlight.

Also, recalling has to be done in the normal direction because if we do this too in reverse then we could as well consider the past as the future and say we have future memories. It must make sense to beings with time-asymmetric working memory activity.

So, you can remember the future with reversible (long term) memories and senses but at an entropic cost to the universe. The more past-like you want your future memory to be the higher the cost soars.