Well, according to some at the BBC. From Philip Ball:
Only a handful of physicists and philosophers have embraced retrocausality. Most consider backwards causality “too high a price to swallow”, says Wharton.
But he feels that we only resist this idea because we are not used to seeing it in daily life.
“The view that the past does not depend on the future is largely anthropocentric,” says Wharton. “We should take apparent backwards causation more seriously than we usually do. Our intuition has been wrong before, and this time symmetry on quantum scales is a reason to think we could be wrong again.”
If time’s arrow is not quite as one-way as it seems, that raises one last question: why do we perceive it as always pointing one way? Why should the “psychological arrow of time” be aligned with the physical ones?More.
If only it were true.
See also: Arrow of time points to missing dark matter
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of related note:
You can see a little better explanation of the “delayed-choice entanglement swapping” experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video:
Quantum Mechanics imitating Laplace’s French accent,
Also of note:
Also of related interest:
Question: Isn’t retro-causality kind of small potatoes for quantum mechanics compared to reality not even existing until it is measured?
Physicists have sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering.
There once was a man named Dwight,
Who could travel much faster than light.
He left one day in an Einsteinian way,
And returned on the previous night.
-Q
It is interesting to note that if there were absolutely no way for our minds to reach back into the past and effect it in some way and that the past actually did have absolute control over the future, i.e. determinism, then the free will of our mind, as held by theists, would be dead.
Yet, as partially referenced at post 1, according to quantum mechanics, we are not such victims of the past, i.e. deterministic automatons, as materialists would presuppose in their ‘past controls the future’ deterministic view of reality:
Interestingly, due to advances in quantum mechanics, the materialist is now forced to claim that our free will choices, instead of being ‘randomly’ determined by the material particles of our brain as atheists had originally claimed, is now forced to claim that our ‘illusory’ free will choices were somehow ‘superdetermined’ all the way back at the Big Bang:
Thus, either free will is real as is claimed by Theists, or there is no truly ‘undetermined’ randomness worth speaking about since the Big Bang.
Either way, since ‘undetermined’ randomness plays a major role in Darwinian thought, this development in quantum mechanics, supporting the Theist’s contention for free will, certainly does not bode well for materialists who want to believe they are automatons with no real free will or even no real consciousness.
Supplemental note:
Reference BA77 #1
Reference Matthew 18:18
The more science discovers, the more we understand what we’ve already been told.
semi OT: