LTT: Nick Huggett - The Physics of Memory
Abstract:
Much of the mystery of time arises from the asymmetry of past versus future: not only asymmetries themselves, such as the apparent ‘openness’ of the future and ‘settledness’ of the past, but the ‘passage’ of time – ‘turning’ open future into settled past. In turn, much of the difference between open and settled lies in the knowledge asymmetry: that we know so much more, so much better, about the past than future. In Time and Chance David Albert proposes that the asymmetry arises because knowable particular matters of fact are just those made likely by physical law, given uniform probability over states compatible with the ‘current surveyable condition’ and an asymmetric ‘Past Hypothesis’. This paper presents an ‘Information Gathering and Utilizing System’ as a model of memory, in order to better understand the physical nature of the asymmetry. I will argue that we can in fact know more about the past than Albert’s condition allows.
Based on my paper, “Reading the Past in the Present”, in Loewer, Weslake, and Winsberg (ends) The Probability Map of the Universe.