> Combining quantum mechanics and General Relativity is all well and good, but there‘s one key mystery it doesn’t address: why does time only seem to flow in one direction?
Could the problem just be with us? When time flows backwards, we lose the ability to perceive the events that came after the "current" event. As it flows forward again, we have more time in our context window. We are able to perceive only those events that have occurred before the current event.
Time still flows and ebbs, we just lack the ability to sense it just like a cork in a river doesn't feel the water flowing past.
You can happily run physics backwards and forwards, and there's no difference. But assuming that entropy was very low in the distant past is very useful and lets us talk about fascinating things, like what happened last tuesday (or 12 billion years ago)
If you just know the current state of the a system, there isn't really any difference between running time backwards and forwards. Of course, if you know exactly the state of every particle, field, etc, and the past hypothesis is true, running time one way will lead to lowering entropy, and the other way will lead to raising entropy. But if you're a mere mortal and just know the macrostate, either way you run time, the entropy of the system will increase.
there is no flow per se, as it’s a subjective experience. it’s just that our current environment (specifically human environment) is predominantly structured in a way that the past makes an imprint on the present (in terms of biological memory, historical records, etc) and the future generally being unpredictable because we kinda don’t want it to be too predictable (eg you don’t want to be too predictable when a tiger is chasing you for example)
but in other environments (talking about same universe here!) the future is more predictable than here on earth, for example motions of planetary bodies can be predicted way in advance within error bars as in the past, and when you have that kind of relatively symmetrical system, any subjective experiences within those systems would be much less inclined to feel that time flows on way or the other. (of course, the only kind of subjective experiencers we know are made of biological stuff which structurally remembers the past and leaves the future open as form of evolved ability, so this timelessness experience may be harder to imagine for us)
If you consider a person, their brain in particular, flowing backwards in time, the brain becomes a prediction tool. Events-memories (neural connections) appear out of nowhere (from the state of being 'forgotten' in the forward time flow) then completely disappear when the corresponding event happens, annihilating its 'predicting' memory.
The brain does want to predict (in fact I think that's what it's suppose to do), the problem is that the Earth is rather chaotic and unpredictable.
If you subject a brain-like neural network to watch planets and stars orbiting around each other and rewarding it for getting things right, it will likely do quite well.
Not that kind of predict. And this reverse-time brain instantly forgets things it saw for the last time.
Consider a black box. A person opens it, sees a dice with a number, closes it. In our version of the time flow, the person finds out there's a dice and remembers it. In the 'reverse time' persons brain, they would know they would open the black box and know which number they will see. Then they will close it and completely forget what was inside forever.
The past that we have yet to subject to our subjection also is effectively future.
Supplication for unknown outcomes surely already determined in the objective past wrt the present time still makes sense. The Divine Successive Relaxation with physical laws as the substrate, and the choices of human free will, human petition and desire, and Divine Will And Intention as boundary conditions, will solidify objective reality into a coherent whole in Open Theism.
Time still flows and ebbs, we just lack the ability to sense it just like a cork in a river doesn't feel the water flowing past.