Abstract
Some researchers believe that the psychological or consciousness arrow of time is a consequence of the thermodynamic arrow. Some do not. As for many issues in this area, the disagreement revolves about fundamental and undebatable assumptions. As a contribution to this standoff I consider the extent to which a computer—presumably governed by nothing more than the thermodynamic arrow—can be said to possess a psychological arrow. My contention is that the parallels are sufficiently strong that little room is left for an independent psychological arrow. Reservations are nevertheless expressed on the complete objectivity of the thermodynamic arrow.
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- 1.
In discussing the relation of the thermodynamic and cosmological arrows, these times are taken to be cosmologically remote.
- 2.
In Ref. [7] an arrow was derived from an asymmetric, dissipative perturbation, rather than from proximity to one or another boundary-value-stipulated low entropy state.
- 3.
See for example the New York Times article, “Intel’s Huge Bet Turns Iffy,” by J. Markoff and S. Lohr (Sep. 29, 2002) or the more recent, “Intel Takes The Heat Off Its Chips,” Information Week, Feb. 7, 2005, by A. Ricadela.
- 4.
Lyndon Johnson is said to have unkindly suggested that Gerald Ford was incapable of this bit of multitasking. See the Columbia World of Quotations, no. 22545, Columbia Univ. Press, 1996.
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Acknowledgements
I thank E. Mihóková for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the United States National Science Foundation Grant PHY 00 99471.
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Schulman, L.S. (2014). A Computer’s Arrow of Time. In: Albeverio, S., Blanchard, P. (eds) Direction of Time. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02798-2_22
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