All I did yesterday was work on The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I drew a picture and wrote something to explain this certain idea I have about how we might get a deterministic universe despite the wifty, come-drink-the-Koolaid mystery-mongering of quantum mechanics. But what the bleep do I know?
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I’d like to suggest that maybe there really is only our one sheet of spacetime, that this sheet obeys a deterministic reversible Physics Rule akin to a reversible CA. Let’s suppose for now that one can in fact slice our spacetime into spacelike sheets. In this case, we can use the Physics Rule to derive all of our spacetime, past and future, from any one spacelike sheet. So in order to “explain” our universe, we only need to explain one single spacelike sheet. The picture below shows where I’m heading with this.
Figure 2.23: A Physics and a Metaphysics to Explain All of Spacetime.
In this picture we think of there being two distinct CA rules, a Physics Rule and a Metaphysics Rule. The vertical plane represents our spacetime, and the line across its middle represents a spacelike “sheet.” The Physics Rule is a reversible CA that grows the spacelike sheet upwards and downwards to fill out the entire past and future of spacetime. And the Metaphysics Rule accounts for the contents of that spacelike sheet. The Metaphysics Rule is not reversible; it grows sideways across paratime, turning some simple seed into the pattern found in the singled-out spacelike sheet.
In order to explain one particular spacelike slice of spacetime, we invoke a Metaphysics Rule which is like a CA that grows the space pattern from some presumably simple seed. When I speak of this metaphysical growth as occurring in paratime, I need only mean that it’s logically prior to the existence of our spacetime. We don’t actually have to think of the growth as being something that’s experientially happening.
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Got it? Good. Quiz on Monday.