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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Someone else already pointed out the well known counterargument to symmetry below regarding thermodynamics. You typically don't see scrambled eggs become whole again. I think that's pretty hard evidence to overcome.

Granted, I'm not a physicist and I'm sure any physicist working on this totally understands that. Just wanted to point it out.

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If the direction of time is reversed, the eggs become whole again, but your memory of them once being scrambled is reversed, too, so you don't notice anything unusual.

(It's like a rollback of database transaction, where not only the database state, but also the state of everything, including your brain, is getting rolled back)

If the future could affect the past, it suggest that then if time reversed, you would notice something unusual right? Kind of like suggesting there is a side effect in your function (consciousness). Kind of like how today, past events can influence the future like we act differently from learning from mistakes.

So the conscious experience of the person at each time would be exactly the same as our experience. They would feel as if they were moving forward in time.

But is there any evidence of that? Or is it just a thought experiment? I need to read more of the article, but appreciate you giving me some food for thought.

It's a thought experiment, of course. There cannot be any evidence one way or the other, by definition. Any potential evidence is rolled back, too. But then, why are we so sure our current beliefs WRT the arrow ot time are true?

Though there's no hard evidence, but if you think, for example, about the efficiency of evolution - it would be much easier to explain if we assume that the unlimited number of iterations is performed. (This is not the only possible explanation, of course- but this one is overlooked IMO)

I would say that compared with the strange ideas like "multiverse", this one is rather benign :-)

That would suggest a kind of "super timeline" I'd imagine.

The argument is that thermodynamics is simply a statistical phenomenon. Scrambled eggs are due to proteins denaturing (folding in a random way).

Scrambled eggs do actually unscramble spontaneously if you zoom in far enough. The issue is that the rate of scrambling is much higher than the rate of unscrambling so on the whole, you get scrambled eggs.

The amazing thing is that all chemical processes are actually reversible given enough energy and finesse.

Scrambled eggs can become whole again by being consumed by insects, who are then consumed by chickens, who then lay eggs.

The biological processes enabling that sequence can be said to have negative entropy.

Negative entropy (also called negentropy) isn't really a well-defined concept. Instead, better to say that biological processes harvest free energy to maintain order in the face of increasing entropy.

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