Hi Nathan,
You’re precisely right that the issue of “not remembering the future” is entropy-related, and it’s just as true for machines as it is for humans. I’m fine with taking humans out of the equation.
And given this connection, I suppose it doesn’t make sense to imagine time-reversing the direction one remembers things without also time-reversing where the low-entropy sources lie. So I guess I shouldn’t be parsing up the analysis into separate “subjective” and “objective” aspects: they both should always go together. If low-entropy sources lay in both the future and the past then we could remember them both.
That’s useful. One of the cases that was confusing me was signaling between agents with opposite arrows of time (even though years ago I published a science fiction story about this 🙂 ). But in such a case, any interaction would essentially provide both agents with low-entropy sources in both directions, so neither of them would be restricted to “remembering” in just one direction. I think that insight solves the biggest problems I was encountering, so thanks!
But I still wish I could make sense of signaling on a micro-scale, fine-grained, below the level at which one could make entropy-related arguments. Sure, there are no agents at that level to send or receive signals, but this mismatch makes it hard to see how the no-signaling issue fits together with my low-level ontological models. Any further insight you have on this would be much appreciated…
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