Disclaimer: these are just my own views on the matter. I won’t pretend these are true or even make sense.
This post is a bit of a development of an idea that came to me one day while I was in bed and pondering about our inability to remember the future. As someone who works with AIs, I’m interested in consciousness and of course I have my hot takes in the subject.
The arrow of time
The “arrow of time” is a concept in physics (and to some extent, philosophy) as to why time seems to have a one-way flow or direction, and thus, we humans perceive a “now”, remember a “past”, and can influence a “future”.
Seemingly, time moves in a single direction, like an arrow. This is further justified by the “thermodinamic arrow”, in which the famous second Law of thermodynamics proposes that entropy always increases and thus, this forces an assymetry in time.
Then there’s General Relativity, that essentially tells us that space and time are not separate things: there’s spacetime and nothing else. Plus, time is just another dimension (like up and down, forward and backward) and therefore the Universe is a “block”: everything already exists and we just perceive a part of it.
The illusion of time
If time is just another dimension, then our perception of time is but an illusion. However, this is not in conflict with the “arrow” of time.
Let us imagine a hill, one we can perfectly see the top, its slope and the bottom. Also, imagine we have a rare pair of legs that are extremely weak for uphill walking and can only take steps in the direction of the slope. The spatial dimensions are just dimensions still, but because our strange legs, we are unable to walk uphill; every step we take is irreversible.
Moreover, imagine our neck is also really stiff and mounted backwards, so we can only see the path we have already walked! This is our relation with time: it is a dimension, but one we are unable to experience as the others.
But the fact that there is a “temporal slope” in spacetime doesn’t explain the illusion completely, at least not in my view. In particular, the idea that we cannot “remember” the future is unexplained by this. We could have a sense of now and still be able to perceive what lies ahead of us, especially if we could perform “backwards cognition”.
In this “backward mode” we would have our cognition happen from the end of our consciousness (death) to the beggining – perhaps our first memories at 2 years old, or maybe week 24 of gestation when the brain structures needed for consciousness form. If we were able to experience our lifes forward and backward, any illusion of time or free will would melt. Our entire life would be a continuum of “nows” we could experience simultaneously (sadly, human language is so loaded with temporal expressions that it’s hard to put into words what I mean). Why? Because we could go backwards in our computation.
But wait, there’s more! What if this apparent “thermodynamic arrow of time” was just a result of our mode of cognition!? The idea that some states precede others is not in conflict with an illusionary time. In other words, the spacetime block may have a particular form in which certain structures must be in a particular relation to others, but this in no way means that time, itself, exists.
There’s only the arrow of computation (or consciousness)
Let’s assume for a moment that our brain is basically a computer, that is: there’s no magic (nor any relevant quantum effects) going on in the brain and that one day a digital (or maybe a digital-analog) computer will be able to perform any function our brain does.
Let’s also call “consciousness” the event of this computation experiencing itself (we could also call it meta-cognition).
We have empirical evidence that our cognition is not able to go backwards. Because of this, we have the notion of past, present and future and the foolish illusion of “time” being something that exists. If you think “memories” is experiencing the past, think again: memories are simply incomplete, stored sparks of information we hallucinate going forward in time and generate on-demand. This is also why false memories can happen and why they are undistinguishable from real ones.
Our cognition happens on matter (neurons). This matter has the thermodinamic property of all matter: in spacetime parlance, some states must be in a precise relative position with respect others. Because of the thermodinamic irreversibility of cognition, meta-cognition (consciousness) is unable to go backwards.
In fact, I call it the arrow of computation because that’s what really differentiates past from present and from future: if our cognition was able somehow to go back and forth to any point, we wouldn’t be able to tell these 3 temporal classes apart. Thermodynamics would just be a slope to us.
Hence, to me, there’s only the “arrow of conciousness” (or computation). We can only experience consciousness in one direction, and that conditions everything else!