Unreality of Time (very short form)

The original "Unreality of Time"  piece

Probably responding to my "Unreality of Time" piece, a very sharp guy (anonymous at least for now)  writes: "I wish I had the time to explain why physicists don't take Prigogine seriously, and are right not to do so." (He has good reasons not to respond, and wasn't being snarky).

This is my response (a summary form of my original statement):

My conclusions about Prigogine and the related issues are as follows:

1. His attempt to find irreversibility at a deep level of physics or cosmology was unsuccessful and can be forgotten. But he may be right about the solar system.

2. All life forms exist far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and as such (as life forms) live in an irreversible world, even though their component atoms (and perhaps molecules) do not.

3. For these and other reasons, many of the kinds of predictability and reduction that were being hoped for in science, including the human sciences, can now be known to be impossible, and not just difficult. (Apparently even in trying to predict the future of the solar system).

4. Outside a few specialized fields, the term "impossibility" should include "mere statistical improbability", when the possibility is the reciprocal of a "very large number" -- even if the probability is not zero. I am thinking specifically about the possibility of time-reversal in the actual world we live in.

5. From a philosophical point of view, this means that while physics is in some ways fundamental to biology or history (e.g., mass-energy is conserved), and other key respects it is not. The specifically biological or historical qualities are NOT conserved. The non-conservative aspects can be called "emergent".

6. Somewhere (Wittgenstein?) there's a story of a physicist who, worried that matter is almost entirely empty space, goes around wearing snowshoes so he doesn't fall into the void.  (A parable about misapplying truths at the wrong level.) I think that this is what the "Time is not Real" physicists are doing.

That's all I really want from Prigogine. It would be a bonus, though, if physicists were to use my example of a man ingesting waste and excreting carrots as their standard example of time reversal -- instead of gas molecules leaving the room, or a film run backward showing ripples converging to a center and disappearing. The possibility of the gas molecules leaving the room is very small (VS), though not zero, but the possibility of the metabolism-reversal is at least VS-squared, but probably much smaller than that. (To which the physicist's answer is : "But it's still not zero! It's still statistically possible!")

Note that metabolic reversal requires that the SAME organism which normally digests carrots should run backward and produce fresh carrots from shit, urine, sweat, CO2, and other metabolic waste products (plus sunshine or some other energy source). From a biological point of view, constructing a machine which would do that would  NOT be time reversal; in many respects, that's exactly what a carrot does, and I don't deny the possibility of someday constructing a synthetic carrot (though that seems highly unlikely too.)

I think that what is most at issue here is not scientific fact in any actual area of science, but rather the claim of physics to be metaphysically and ontological fundamental to everything else. My claims is that it in the case of biological and human phenomena, it is not.

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Link to original piece

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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