How does does the present remember the order of the past?

I guess its because some stupid people record what vpeople say and put it in like a book or notebook and send it out pulically so that everyone can see. Another thing is, maybe YOU copied it from a persons original form of something and then is like combined with the original form of whatever you copied and is then sent out to the world and is remebered.

@astrix24 No.. haha…

Are you asking about the arrow of time?

yes, I didn’t know I was, but yes I am…

Great question. I have no idea what the answer is at present. Which means, I suppose, that the past hasn’t put a memory in place for me to access. If I could teleport the memories of a suitable answer to this question into my head, I’d surely recall them onto the fluther screen for you but they just don’t happen to exist… yet.

This is an open question in physics. I can’t find the article, but I saw one potential solution saying that in fact, time goes both ways, but because of entropy, we only remember the “past.”

I would be something if i could remember the future.

entropy hrmmm….

I’m not quite certain what you mean. To me, this sounds like, “If you stack a bunch of bricks into a pyramid, how do the ones on the bottom remember to stay there?”. I’m not sure there’s a conscious memory here. It’s more like inertia – they stay in place (or motion) until acted on by another force.

Inanimate objects don’t have a memory, they just obey the laws of physics. Like what @laureth is suggesting. But I bet you knew that. ;)

@laureth @HTDC I think the question is more, “why is the past relevant in determining the future.” You can saw “laws of physics” but that just pushes the question to “why do the laws of physics work that way.”

Since time and space are the same thing(they act the same way)you could also ask why do objects remain in space.My answer to this is that if they would disappear without any trace it would be against the energy conservation law.So why wouldn’t be the same answer for the time too?You consume energy to type the words,if they would disappear without any trace than you would have destroyed energy and this is not allowed

@Christian95 I see how objects are staying put. But something still “feels” strange about experiencing that.

I suppose that this question is about time. I want a better model for an example than typing. If I set a pebble on a headstone, then it sits there. Every second I watch it, it sits there after it was placed. But what I see, intuitively, is that the action of me placing it, is still in existence somehow. It is still happening in the past. The action of me putting that rock there, is still occurring in the past. I would call this memory.

I think the is past recorded somehow. By the time I send my answer it will be the past, but for
a split second it will be your future until you read it than it’s the past, but it will still be on the server, therefore the past is now embedded. I think…

“Still happening” would be present tense, to use grammar as a way to reason. “Happened” would be past tense, as in “You set the pebble on the headstone.” The act of setting it is past, not present.

I realize that grammar is a weird way to look at it, but maybe that helps?

@Christian95 Can you explain more? How did you get energy in here?

@antimatter How do you mean “for a split second it will be in your future?” Also, for your answer, yes its recorded in the server, but how does that work for the pebble on the stone?

@laureth How about if he says “still in effect”?

@laureth I am trying to use a language that was not meant to be used this way to explain what I mean. At point A I am setting a pebble atop a head stone, At point B I am observing the pebble in its set position, pregnant with it’s being set by me at point A (which I posit is an occurring present) so witnessed by the reality at point B.

@roundsquare It’s incredible to think that we could see into the future if our brains allowed it. That’s if you believe the future has already existed like I do.

Nobody understands even the basic mechanism of human memory—is it in synapses, RNA, protein complexes, or something else? Is it fundamentally structural, chemical, or electrical? Research hints at all of these things but nobody’s got the big picture yet.

As your question suggests, even the simplest cognitive tasks require short-term memory. Long-term memory (stuff you’ll still remember next week) occurs after short-term memories undergo a process of consolidation—whatever that means!

Even our sense of consciousness and awareness of the passage of time is a deep mystery at the neuro-scientific level. Great question! Sorry to have no answers.

@gasman you think this is something that is happening in us then, rather than outside us?

Yes, inside us for the actual experience. Are you suggesting predestiny—that the future is already cast and we are somehow compelled to go through the motions with free will being only an illusion? There are people who believe that, but I’m an Occam’s razor kind of guy—I’ll stick with: ‘The future is contingent on the past’. Things are as they seem.

When you say, “Every single thing we do is recorded and lurched into the present…” I’m not sure I agree. I could spend a week putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but it takes just a few seconds to put it back in the box and undo all the work. It’s no longer ‘recorded’ in a concerete physical sense, even if I have a photograph to prove that once was. That’s the second law of thermodynamics at work.

While you’re tapping your keyboard, your computer could suddenly break and the record of those keystrokes is lost. This is how actions in the physical world usually work. It is only by the peculiar mechanism of a computer that a ‘record’ is formed in the first place.

And when we die, all of our life’s experiences, abilities, memories—all traces of ‘self’—simply melt away in the first few minutes after brain death.

The universe itself, of course, will continue to exist independently after I die. Surely there’s an external reality not dependent on mere thoughts in my head. To think otherwise would be an extreme form of solipsism.

@Ltryptophan, I believe I understand what you are asking, except that I would like you to clarify this part:

At point A I am setting a pebble atop a head stone, At point B I am observing the pebble in its set position, pregnant with it’s being set by me at point A (which I posit is an occurring present) so witnessed by the reality at point B.

“Pregnant with” says that the fullness of its future is in it but has not yet occurred. Wouldn’t the pebble be said to be pregnant with its future position before you touched it?—that is, at point A-1? And then when you set it on the headstone, that future is realized. Now, when you observe it, its past is in it (your moving it).

Yes, inside us for the actual experience. Are you suggesting predestiny—that the future is already cast and we are somehow compelled to go through the motions with free will being only an illusion? There are people who believe that, but I’m an Occam’s razor kind of guy—I’ll stick with: ‘The future is contingent on the past’. Things are as they seem.

When you say, “Every single thing we do is recorded and lurched into the present…” I’m not sure I agree. I could spend a week putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but it takes just a few seconds to put it back in the box and undo all the work. It’s no longer ‘recorded’ in a concerete physical sense, even if I have a photograph to prove that once was. That’s the second law of thermodynamics at work.

While you’re tapping your keyboard, your computer could suddenly break and the record of those keystrokes is lost. This is how actions in the physical world usually work. It is only by the peculiar mechanism of a computer that a ‘record’ is formed in the first place.

And when we die, all of our life’s experiences, abilities, memories—all traces of ‘self’—simply melt away in the first few minutes after brain death.

The universe itself, of course, will continue to exist after I die. Surely there’s an external reality not dependent on mere thoughts in my head. To think otherwise would be an extreme form of solipsism.

@gasman, I am not saying anything for sure. I am saying that the past is playing a role in the present. Regardless of how, but how? I believe so far we heard the suggestion that an object at rest remains at rest as a possible conclusion and I think it is a fine attempt. I think that is true, but I think it does not go to the question somehow…

My question is how can the object come into its current rest, without some evident “happening” placement Ow, that hurt the brain. This happening that affixes it in its place is the memory I was mentioning. Don’t get hung up on memory as I don’t think it is a memory storage system, anymore than magnets know that they attract metal.

Jeruba is just now getting to my next avenue at finding an answer. Is my question really how can consciousness know motion at any point? The stone is moving at some point and coming to its rest. At B I witness only its rest, which suggests, since we know that empirically pebbles are geologic formations that do not occur on head stones, it has travelled. That “travel” I suggest is not gone, or the pebble would not hold its place. Is it motion then that is baffling me to the point I cannot directly address how motion would play a role in a sedentary objects current location.

@Jeruba to go sideways I think with this….the fullness of its future…

I think this may hint at it. The pebble when it was still a part of a large rock, had a future. It’s future was absolutely certain to come. What that future was I would say was possibly unknown, as long as any creature with a decision maker was hanging around anywhere in the whole universe. But the fact that it had a future was never in doubt. I will leave the God conjectures out of this, and say that there is no universe possible without a creature that has a decision maker, since this universe has at least one, and whatever is must be influenced if it makes any decision, and it has.

The pebble’s past is another matter. Its past is certain and unchanging for us. It is the sheer definition of past. Now as the presents pile onto this pebble it must be locked in a series, with a string attached to it. Like a set of pearls, except there is no gap between pearls. It is a strange image I am getting from this. Indescribable, almost. It is the procession of presents that I see. They are connected, and I can almost see it. And it is not like looking at just one present.

and @Jeruba how did you specify which answer of mine to link to above when you typed this part., thanks

@Ltryptophan, what you are saying now is making me think of the ‘persistence of vision’ effect of motion pictures. You know, of course, that motion pictures consist of a series of still images. Cameras used for movies these days capture 24 frames per second. The smooth motion that we think we see when watching them is an optical illusion: the human eye mixes them in a semblance of what we see when we observe actual movement of objects in space.

In fact the pebble on the stone is just a pebble on a stone. Sure, it got there somehow, but you’d have to go all the way back to the Big Bang (or whatever point of origin you believe in) to trace its entire history in order to account for how it got there. You would at the same time be tracing all the things that brought you there to that moment and motivated you to act in such a way as to affect the position of the pebble. And you’d need to bring in all the terrestrial and cosmic events and conditions that played into that sequence of occurrences. That is a grand challenge and not a matter of isolating a few moments in time.

Rather, the pebble is just there, being a pebble. All the rest takes place in your mind. The movement. The history. The pebble’s relation to the headstone. The pebble’s relation to you. The memory of the pebble. The present perception of the pebble. These are activities of the human mind. That’s all.

Here’s a famous Zen koan (parable):

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, “The flag moves.” The other said, “The wind moves.” They argued back and forth but could not agree. Hui-neng, the sixth Patriarch, said: “Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves.” The two monks were struck with awe.

@Jeruba has given a fine answer that you would offer to a layman. I am no layman, and I need an answer to the big bang if necessary.

Essentially she is saying pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

@Ltryptophan You seem to be hinting at Zeno’s Paradoxes—you know, the arrow can’t move because it is at rest during a succession of instants, etc. This was resolved, to the satisfaction of mathematicians and physicists, over a century ago with the concepts of limits and convergent series.

The experience of consciousness can also be viewed as a succession of instants, but change over time is usually modeled in physical systems as a continuous phenomenon. (This works right down to, but not including, the quantum level.) Physicists speculate that time itself may be quantized at the fantastically brief Planck scale, but how that might even be relevant here isn’t clear.

In the case of memory / consciousness, our brains retain some kind of physical state carrying it forward from one moment to the next—as do computer memory chips by an entirely different mechanism, even though that state might change any time. We perceive a more-or-less continuous flow of events from our external senses and internal thoughts.

The point is, there is no mystery that things can change over time, as long as it’s a big, stable clump of particles like people or rocks. A sufficiently complex system (like people, not rocks) also has the means to faithfully observe and record these changes. Am I getting warmer or colder?

Or does this help: Is Time an Illusion? (Scientific American)

@gasman you are getting warmer. I looked at the paradox which I know. This question is similar in that it talks of motion and an object at rest. It is dissimilar as to what it is trying to ascertain. Whereas that paradox was trying to show that the arrow is motionless, I am not concerned, per se, with whether or not the pebble is in motion. Rather, I am concerned with how the arrow, or the pebble are proceeding, and simultaneously “hiding” their past while at the same time owing their position to it. With the aim of the question being how is the present so ordered that the past is seemingly absent and yet present in its effects.

Limits and convergence will be something that is working to show that the arrow is actually moving. Whereas, I do not contend that the arrow has not seemingly moved, but instead where has its past gone for it to remember where it ought to be!

@Ltryptophan simultaneously “hiding” their past while at the same time owing their position to it. I think a physicist would boil it down to basics this way: If you simultaneously know the position and momentum of each particle, then you can predict the future states of those particles. This is really just another way of formulating Newton’s laws. Of course now we know of limitations imposed by chaos theory, but near-term predictions can in principle still be accurate. “It got us to the Moon.”

But what is the momentum? Mass times velocity. What is velocity? Speed and direction. So if I can specify the momentum of a particle I automatically know where it’s coming from and how fast it’s leaving there. Together with it’s position, this is all the “memory” of past states that it needs. Position and momentum encode the past.

mm hm, and the resting pebble…

Memory may be a scientific mystery, but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics.

I think memory, consciousness, self-awareness, and perception of time are intertwined parts of the same super-phenomenon. For some interesting reading see Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop.

Well, i think that is what @gasman was willing to contribute. Now for my attempt.

I would say that it must have something to do with a fourth or higher dimension that is just outside my grasp. This no-see-um area that connects the present with its past must have the string right out of our sight in the fourth dimension.

So it is sort of like a pie. With our lives being a slice. On the outermost crust is the life we live that seems nice and orderly everything happening in one direction, things like pebbles staying put. Then I would say as you get closer to the center you get a whole new stuff. It is no longer dry and flaky. It is another ring that exists where the things that happen are interconnected to the outer crust and kind of go where they belong, tieing all the crust together. the pie doesn’t work, but…anyway.

Something we can’t see is reaching up out of the past and enforcing the present. It is doing it invisibly. AND it matters!

and beyond any of our fine attempts I think we need a quantum physicist to take a shot. I’ll line one up.

”...magical thinking involves several elements, including a belief in the interconnectedness of all things through forces and powers that transcend both physical and spiritual connections.”
—from The Skeptic’s Dictionary

not that there’s anything wrong with that… :)

Let me find us a QP. channelling oppenheimer

@Ltryptophan Thinking in terms of higher, insensible dimensions has a long and distinguished history in theoretical physics. String theories require 10 or 11 dimensions. I can’t imagine any world, however, where causality is violated, i.e., where the future influences the past. Relativity also puts constraints (presumably) on how quickly influence can be exerted from one location to another.

I can imagine the universe before man or even before life. I don’t see how decision-making is an essential element of existence or change. The pebble moved because a complex organism put it there using the usual forces of nature. It might as well have been the wind.

As for an unseen intelligence somehow pulling the strings—though you can’t prove a negative—I again appeal to Ockham’s razor: It’s far simpler to accept the usual account of how things work (the big bang singularity remaining a central mystery) than it is to invoke an entity more complex than we are to account for all the same outcomes.

Does everything have to happen for a reason? Isn’t that a human-centric view? We H. sapiens have evolved a belief engine (a term coined by Michael Shermer) that makes many people search for connectedness or causality where none may exist.

@Ltryptophan, I beg your pardon? I have no way of knowing in which fields you are a layman and in which a pro. Your profile lists your fields of expertise as “Cooking, Eating.”

I paid you the compliment of taking your question seriously and attempting to contribute to the collective thought on the matter. You seem to have taken exception to that. Very well. I have nothing to add, except to say that I don’t believe “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” is an apt characterization of my remarks.

@Jeruba… I think you gave a fine answer… If you take offense to that…so be it. I did not take exception to anything. I think your attempt was valiant, albeit a bit of a brush under the rug there @ Rather, the pebble is just there, being a pebble. All the rest takes place in your mind. The movement. The history. The pebble’s relation to the headstone. The pebble’s relation to you. The memory of the pebble. The present perception of the pebble. These are activities of the human mind. That’s all.

As was Gasmans, answer a great attempt. But I believe we are all three dabbling in fields we are all laymen in, and thus we will give lay answers. I am on the heels of a quantum physicists to help us out! Fear not, oh easily insulted one.

pardon granted

Now that I have further let my tongue go loose. Let me cleanse my palate with humility. If I was cavalier with Jeruba, it was not with the intention of being cruel, or ungrateful. I see that it might have sounded so to her. I have offered her my apology, and she has accepted. All is set right.

Let it be a good sign of the candor to come.

…..

Physicists use the concept of “causality” to describe how prior events can influence present and future events. Relativity tells us that the flow of information, and hence causality, can not occur faster than the speed of light. Hence, an event can only be influenced by prior events that were close enough that any potential signals from those events have had time to arrive. We call this region the “past light cone”.

-Ira & Kevin
for “Ask an Astrophysicist”

For what its worth this is what astrophysicists had to offer on the subject…