Dear Dr. Pitkänen,
thank you for your very patient reply to my post.
re:
--------------
I am not surprised that this vision does not open with the first reading!
--------------
it's been an interesting experience reading the posts here. some wonderful stuff, but i'm experiencing it as a bit like being in an international bazaar in a foreign country with a couple of dozen different languages to contend with while i have only a few phrases from a couple of them and am having difficulty finding my way back to where i left my car. then there's the dialects...
re:
--------------
The problem which remained unsatisfactorily understood as I wrote the essay was the answer to the question what mechanism causes the shifting of the quantum superpositions of space-time surfaces to the direction of the geometric past of 8-D imbedding space, and how this relates to the localization of the contents of sensory experience to the future boundary of the causal diamond (double light-cone). One possibility is that the arrow results as a mathematical necessity. The alternative possibility, which I did not consider, is that consciousness is involved in an essential manner: the arrow of time is a consequence of intentional action as p-adic considerations encouraged to consider. A possible answer to the question how this comes out came some time after the posting of the essay.
---------------
thank you. well. there may be an additional consideration. the basic premise of the directionality of time may be much more significantly an artifact of perceptual conditioning than anyone yet suspects. there are other cultures which have differing perceptions of time, don't necessarily see it as something quite so linear as the western cultural tradition.
how deceptive perception can be... there's a famous experiment where people were given eye glasses fitted with lenses which inverted the image their eyes received. within a very short time of wearing the glasses, the images were processed differently, images were perceived right-side up. upon removing the glasses at the end of the experiment, normal vision presented an upside-down world to conscious awareness during another brief period of adjustment.
the perception of time's arrow could largely be a pragmatic perceptual artifact. it could be simply that the perception is useful. by the time impressions reach conscious awareness, they're several times removed from the source of the stimulus of those perceptions, run through a lot of filters and been processed into a 'meaningful' coherent presentation to awareness.
i'd mentioned gravity in my first post to you. looking at a radically different interpretation possibility. i've heard the primary characteristic of gravity is that it imparts acceleration. the convention is to consider this acceleration as an attraction of mass to mass. but if you consider gravity in the context of inertia and acceleration, weight becomes an inertial resistance against a gravitational acceleration vector, highly counterintuitively, outward from earth [picture standing in an elevator in space. it accelerates downward, in the direction of your feet. inertia would press you against the ceiling. if the elevator accelerates upward, it feels much like standing on earth]. the only way this image of outward acceleration resulting in being drawn inward makes any sense to me is if this is occurring in what we would call 'backward time'. ouch. gravity repels; mass becomes, less an inherent quality, more a function of gravitational acceleration of matter backward in time. temporal direction becomes highly relative (sort of like the stock market lately). perhaps someone here will be so kind as to straighten out my thinking on this. such a case would suggest a significant impact on our perception of a temporal directional arrow, and any 'big bang' couldn't actually be said to have happened yet, somewhere off in a future we would never reach, racing away from backward in time.
how we think of things is actually likely extraordinarily colored by perceptual conventions.
re:
----------------
Recall that I identify causal diamonds (CDs) are correlates for selves, conscious entities. Conscious entities are also curious entities and they want to learn what space-time sheets look like outside the CD (that is in the geometric future above the upper boundary and in the geometric past of lower boundary of CD). To learn this they generate intentionally quantum jumps shifting the quantum superposition of space-time sheets to either geometric future or past.
-----------------
you might find another paper here, by Thomas Ray, 'Time Counts', of interest (http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/274). if i'm understanding both his work and yours correctly, it would seem to fit right in here.
re:
-----------
Also the distribution of sub-CDs serving as correlates for mental images tends to be concentrated near the upper (or lower) boundary of CD since news arrive from there. Hence the contents of sensory and also other kinds of experiences tend to be located to a narrow interval of geometric time.
-----------
i suspect the localization to a narrow interval may be a function of velocity. from an experiential level, at one time i was involved in a very regular formal meditation practice in which a bell was rung to signal changes in activities. on occasion, i would hear the bell begin to ring a little prior to it being struck. it would have a soft ascending tone, zzzzzzzzzzzt! leading up to the 'ting!' i don't believe that it was a matter of the bell actually beginning to ring before it was struck. nor do i have the impression this peculiar phenomenon was an hallucination. hallucinations are not known for being terribly consistent. the impression i have is that the quietude of the situation expanded the perceptual 'now' to include a slightly larger moment, including the 'future' ringing of the bell. if one could construct an audio recording device which injected absolutely no movement into the system, it may be possible to replicate or even expand the effect.
judging from general human activity, many of us appear desperate to inject as much activity into the system as possible, to reduce that 'narrow interval of geometric time' to as close to a pinpoint as we can.
i'm not at all sure about exactly where news arrives from, or when. there's a question there. i've been looking at the data from psi research. how do you account for precognition?
re:
----------
Conscious entities are also curious entities and they want to learn
----------
yep. even if i have no idea why that should be. :-)
thanks again for your response.
matt kolasinski