Pat Hayes: There is something very peculiar about time....One of the most vivid aspects of our phenomenology is the feeling of there being a present, and our experience as being located in that present. It is always 'now'; but this time will soon be in the past, and a different time will be 'now'.
SH: Yes, quite strange. (There was a very interesting session at Tucson II about Time and Consciousness).
In physics, there is no provision for a flow of time, yet our consciousness seems time-directional. In 4-dimensional spacetime, time is merely one axis, with no favored direction. Neither is there a universal now'. According to relativity, there is no universal time frame. The only apparent truly irreversible event in physics is collapse of the wave function.
I'm currently reading "The Arrow of Time" by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield which I highly recommend. For example, they observe:
An implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that all energy transformations are irreversible, that entropy (randomness, disorder) will inexorably increase till the universe is dead ("heat death of the universe"). Of course heat death in the long run has no relevance to events in the short/medium run. An expanding universe is far from equilibrium. In a system far from equilibrium, perhaps because of a local hot spot like a star in the heavens, rather interesting things are possible, such as life.
The "heat death" view ignores the role of gravity (and black holes). With gravity, the universe will not advance to a uniform distribution of matter envisaged in heat death. Rather, mass will converge; the expanding universe will begin to shrink and eventually collapse. The Big Bang singularity will be followed by a Big Crunch singularity that is equally organized. What will happen with regards to time during the contraction phase? Some scientists speculate that time will flow "backwards". Rivers will flow uphill, light will be emitted by our eyes to be absorbed by distant stars. This implies a reversible, symmetrical time.
Roger Penrose argues against this - maintaining that even during the Big Crunch, entropy would be increasing, the Second Law would still hold, and the direction of time would be preserved. This is because the structures of the Big Bang and Big Crunch singularities are not equivalent. The Big Bang was isotropic, of high organization and low entropy. "But en route to the Big Crunch, imperfections like black holes are created. These congeal into a great mess during the Big Crunch, which boasts a structure as disordered as a fruit cake, and has a correspondingly high entropy." (Coveney and Highfield, p 179). But if this is so, why is there such time asymmetry in the structure of the singularities that ensures a low-entropy Bang, and a high entropy Crunch? Penrose takes this as an indication that a full theory of quantum gravity and spacetime geometry must be time asymmetric. Such a theory would also account for irreversible wave function collapse whenever a significant' amount of spacetime curvature/separation is present in a quantum superposition.
This is another reason why wave function collapse must be involved in consciousness. In our Orch OR model, self-organized collapse creates an instantaneous "now". Sequences of such events create a flow of time. A similar view has been proposed by Jeff Tollaksen (1996), and Avi Elitzur (1996) has also related time and consciousness.
Stuart Hameroff
srh@ccit.arizona.edu
Coveney P, Highfield R (1990) The Arrow of Time. Fawcett Columbine, New York.
Elitzur A (1996) Time and consciousness: The uneasy bearing of relativity theory on the mind-body problem. In: Toward a Science of Consciousness - The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. Eds S Hameroff, A Kaszniak, A Scott. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. pp 543-550
Hameroff S, Penrose R (1996) Orchestrated objective reduction in brain microtubules: A model for consciousness. In Toward a Science of Consciousness - The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. Eds S Hameroff, A Kaszniak, A Scott. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. pp 507-540
Hameroff S, Penrose R (1996) Conscious events as orchestrated space-time selections. JCS 3(1)36-53
Penrose R (1994) Shadows of the Mind. Oxford Press
Tollaksen J 91996) New insights from quantum theory on time, consciousness and reality. In Toward a Science of Consciousness - The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. Eds S Hameroff, A Kaszniak, A Scott. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. pp 551-568
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