[extropy-chat] AAAS conference on retrocausation

[The Avantguardian]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> > > [I'm told that John Cramer announced that
> > > backward signaling of c. 50 microseconds might
> be feasible...]

Welcome back, Damien! :)


> >As for the article, I thought the most meaningful
> statement in it was
> >where it said "this is *incredibly* sloppy", and
> then I realized that
> >must have been written by you.
> 
> Indeed. But the stupid thing is the only public
> report I've been able to find.
> 
> >While it's true that many respected scientists
> would rather not dirty
> >their hands with this kind of thing, almost all of
> them would like to
> >see reliable evidence of such anomolous effects.
> 
> Leave that aside for a moment. What I find extremely
> interesting is 
> that (1) this was an AAAS colloquium, not a Gnostic
> Mass of the OTO, 
> and (2) John Cramer of TI fame now thinks there
> might be retro-causal 
> effects, however brief. 

Hmmm. I do think there may be something to reverse
causation. Some possible future timelines are more
imminent than others and draw events toward them.

The biggest appeal of retrocausation to me is that:

1. It is predicted by the math of physics, not just
classical but QM and GR too.

2. It would go a long way to explaining complexity,
emergence, strange attractors, and spontaneous
ordering. To say that simple underlying heuristics can
give rise to higher order structure in a completely
unpreditcable fashion is not really a mechanism.

To say that certain complex structures are so
negentropically favorable that they can retrocause
their own formation is a slightly more satisfying
explanation for an unexplained phenomenon.

Think of it this way. GR says that time is just
another dimension and the flow of events in space time
is just 4-dimensional geometry. Now all normally
percieved causal event sequences are timelike but
nothing in the math itself prohibits the existense of
space-like events. Since the equivalence principle
states there is no favored coordinate systems or
direction, one should by symmetry be able to say that
there should be nearly as many space-like event
sequences. Of course we will not be able to recognize
the flow of retrocausal events as such, they will just
appear to us as "spooky action at a distance".

Think of it as a geometrical analogy: Does the base of
a triangle "cause" its vertex? Does the vertex "cause"
the base? It would all depend on what coordinate
system you chose and which axis you labelled as
positive time.

  

Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"God doesn't play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein

"Einstein, don't tell God what to do." - Neils Bohr

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