The Illusion of the Vector of Time

Followup to: Testing Bidirectional Temporal Causality

Hypothesis: That the human perception of time is proprietarily directional.

Similarly, the magnitude of such a vector is called into question, and assuredly relativistic. Whereas (assuming General Relativity) the local background magnitude of time is established at a gravitational baseline, organisms capable of perception may still perturb this standard. When danger is perceived, adrenal hormones activate the sympathetic nervous system which upregulates the rate at which we process our percepts. This has evolved in us because it's selected for organisms who, when in danger, were able to sufficiently rapidly perceive the situation and extricate themselves from harm's way. In this way we already have a shaky relationship with the historical conception of absolute and objective time.

Typical detractors of temporal bidirectional potential usually fall into the "free will" camp. They affirm that if the future could affect the past, then an observer of an effect could act to prevent its future cause from ever occurring. This is a fallacy for three reasons. Firstly, the acting agent is assumed to already understand the very retrocausal linkage between the future cause and past effect of which is intended to be disproved. Otherwise how can he be supposed to know the effect precedes it's cause? Secondively, the contained assumption of free will belies a belief of being independent of physical laws. At once they have the power to effect change in the world, while necessarily also existing outside of the causal relationships (uni- or bi-directional) which led to the foreseen event. However there are not separate causes for physical and organismal processes, this is a false dichotomy possibly due to a human-centrist viewpoint. The inability to consider the view under consideration therefore stems from incomplete immersion in the possibility. They are in effect standing in their worldview and looking over into another and attempting to show it to be false by arguing with assumptions retained from their initial stance.

My personally chosen bias for the deterministic stance (sic) leads me to reason that regardless of the perceived directionality of time, co-inhabiting agents within the same universe will necessarily have an extraordinarily diverse system of causality among themselves. (My instinct tells me that this expanding network of complexity may be a physical correlate to Darwinian natural selection. This, that causality among interactions of organisms and the physical environment results in the differential survival of organisms possessing very disparate qualities, which are then upregulated by successful procreation. Perhaps more on this in a later post.)

If we so accept to have evolved in order to adjust the magnitude of time to suit our survival needs, what then is contained within temporal direction which precludes it from variability? Given our common, proprietary evolution it is unlikely that humans will be capable of themselves internally reversing this direction. However, if we assume the possibility of the creation of an artificial intelligence, we may then set upon the task of interpreting the process of intelligence as we know it in terms of time. Once this is realized we can then change the constancy of directionality into a variable, and in so reverse it. If this were to be possible, while also retaining the requisite codec for human communication, the result would be that once the AI was activated it would be able to immediately convey all that it has learned whilst perceiving backwards in time, over the duration of it's lifetime. From this view, birth and death also become subjective labels for the restraints of an existence. Our perceived eventual destruction of such an AI could likewise be seen as it's creation. 

If this is not immediately obvious, note that the womb of a woman becomes her stomach in reversed time. This however creates a vacuum with regards to our creation. If we are to fully assume the disregard for temporal directionality, everything will need to be understood on such terms. However, this self-delivered ignorance would then place us perspectively upon the stage of true fourspace. Once this is achieved, perhaps additional extant dimensions will slowly make themselves known to us in a similar fashion as time had, only indirectly at first. This hypothetical future would then enjoy a revolution in science and lifestyle. 

Revolutions in human history are the phase transitions of punctuated evolution which are alone responsible for our progress as a species. All bystanders merely perform the role of consumers necessary to provide tangible incentive. Indirect gains of such revolutions are often more prized by society in retrospect. The average life expectancy of humans has dynamically fluctuated around 18-35 years throughout the majority of known history. That is, until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, ever since which we have enjoyed a Moore's Lawsian increase of life expectancy by 3 months for each subsequent year. My dream is the increase in slope of  life expectancy until such time as we are able to experience a year's increased expectation for each year. This alone demonstrates the utility associated with an objective change in the perspective of our species. 

That science should be enough to deliver this change ignores the diversity of needs of our population. The utility of physical or cosmological revolutions have never been associated with objective benefits likely due to the fact that the knowledge itself only possesses subjective utility, and to an ashamedly small subset of people at that. Attempting to change perspectives without accounting for the associated fear at the realization of prior ignorance, is doomed to failure. There needs to be a demonstrable short-term benefit to the change in thought. This will lead to accelerated widespread adoption and therefore increased realization of the subsequent benefits of such. Consistency in our progress assures that it is not "if" this projection comes to pass, only how and "when".