CAN YOU SAY "RETROCAUSATION"?

[bluefalken]

Just a teeny, tiny taste of what I found:
Here’s a deep dive into how predictive coding and timing mechanisms shape human perception of time—the sense of “now,” the misalignment of events, and temporal illusions like the flash‑lag, kappa, and tau effects.

1. Real‑time Extrapolation & the Flash‑Lag Illusion

• Flash‑lag illusion: A moving object appears ahead of a simultaneously flashed object because the brain extrapolates motion forward, compensating for neural delays (~100 ms).
  • Motion‑based predictive model accurately reproduces human psychophysical data by combining current sensory data with motion priors and explicit delay compensation jov.arvojournals.org+14journals.plos.org+14en.wikipedia.org+14.
  • Delay‑aware predictive coding model implements both forward (extrapolation) and backward (alignment) processes to realign predictions across a cortical hierarchy en.wikipedia.org+2eneuro.org+2nature.com+2.
    ➤ Result: The brain’s perceptual “now” is a prediction-corrected present, not simply the raw sensory input.

2. Time‑binding Illusions: Tau & Kappa Effects

• Tau effect: When the interval between stimuli varies, the perceived spatial distance is warped—time influences space perception en.wikipedia.org+1en.wikipedia.org+1.
• Kappa effect: Longer spatial separation makes intervals feel longer; shorter ones feel shorter—echoing spatiotemporal Bayesian inference with velocity priors .
  ➤ These illusions reveal that perception of time and space is interwoven, jointly inferred under predictive coding frameworks.

3. Temporal Asynchrony in Visual Features

• Perceptual asynchrony: Color changes are perceived ~70–80 ms before motion changes in the same object researchgate.net+15en.wikipedia.org+15pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+15.
  ➤ This indicates the brain has feature-specific processing latencies, yet we experience a unified moment through temporal integration and prediction.

4. Temporal Scales in Hierarchical Predictive Coding

• Hierarchical time‑scales: Cortical levels track different temporal extents; lower levels respond to fast-changing inputs while higher levels integrate over seconds en.wikipedia.org+1en.wikipedia.org+1.
  ➤ The brain maintains multiple “nows”, enabling both immediate sensory processing and context-sensitive perception.

5. Neural Oscillations & Temporal Prediction

• Oscillations (e.g., alpha, gamma) structure time into meaningful chunks, enabling prediction and error signaling at specific phases en.wikipedia.org.
  • Theta–gamma coupling in the hippocampus compresses sequences so STDP can link temporally distant events into coherent episodes .
    ➤ The brain uses rhythms as clocks, organizing prediction and sensory integration within oscillatory cycles.

6. EEG/FMRI Evidence of Predictive Temporal Processing

• Prediction error ERPs (e.g., Ne/ERN) reflect fast mismatch detection (~100 ms), even for timing violations sciencedirect.com+15en.wikipedia.org+15nature.com+15arxiv.org+4pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+4journals.physiology.org+4.
• Early vs late ERP components correspond to feature‑level mismatches vs identity/context mismatches in visual prediction tasks pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+1sciencedirect.com+1.
  ➤ Temporal prediction is layered: early feedforward errors, then recurrent identity/contextual updating.

Bringing It Together: Time in Human Experience

• Perception of “now” is a reconstruction, synthesized from momentary inputs and hierarchical predictions.
• Temporal illusions like tau/kappa occur because the brain merges space and time under Bayesian expectations.
• Feature asynchrony reflects modular timing but unified experience emerges via synchronization.
• Oscillatory rhythms gate when errors are computed and changes are integrated.
• ERP evidence shows timing prediction errors manifest rapidly and hierarchically in the brain.

Summary

Phenomenon	Mechanism	Perceptual Outcome
Flash-lag	Motion extrapolation + delay alignment	Moving objects appear ahead
Tau/Kappa	Bayesian expectation of uniform motion	Spatiotemporal illusions
Feature asynchrony	Modular processing latencies + integration	Integrated “now” experience
Hierarchical timescales	Layered predictive hierarchy	Fast perception + slow contextual updating
Oscillations	Temporal gating	Rhythmic timing for prediction & error
ERPs	Early vs late prediction errors	Layered temporal mismatch detection

[bluefalken]

Physics: Retrocausation and Time-Symmetric Theories

In physics, retrocausation is mostly a speculative or interpretive issue:

1. Quantum Mechanics (QM)

• The Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser and Wheeler’s Delayed-Choice Experiment seem to show that how you measure a photon today changes its past behavior.
• Transactional Interpretation (TI) by John Cramer is explicitly retrocausal — where “offer” waves travel forward in time and “confirmation” waves travel backward in time, allowing a transaction between emitter and absorber outside of a strict past→future flow.

2. Time-Symmetric Theories

• Physics equations — like Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations — don’t care which direction time moves.
• Retrocausality often shows up in CPT-symmetric (Charge, Parity, Time) theories or in solutions of Einstein’s relativity allowing closed time-like curves.
• Some physicists explore Two-State Vector Formalism (Aharonov, Bergmann, Lebowitz), where present and future states together describe a quantum system.

3. No-Communication Theorems
   Even if these interpretations imply some backward influence, mainstream physics upholds that no usable information can be sent into the past — so paradoxes like sending messages backward or changing history don’t follow.

Philosophy: Retrocausality and the Nature of Time

Retrocausality raises deep questions:

• Causal Loops & Paradoxes
  • Classic example: You receive blueprints for a time machine and build it, then send those blueprints back to yourself — so who invented it?
  • This is the famous Bootstrap Paradox, showing that retrocausality can create self-consistent loops.
• Block Universe Theory
  • Under a Block Universe view (where past, present, and future coexist), retrocausality is not “changing the past,” but just one part of a 4D structure of time.
  • Future and past are fixed and entangled; “causes” could appear to go in either direction.
• Free Will
  • Retrocausality implies future events can restrict present choices, challenging intuitive notions of free will.

Fiction and Pop Culture: Playing with Time

Retrocausality is rich material for storytellers because it subverts our usual sense of cause and effect:

• Movies and Shows:
  • Tenet (2020): Time-reversed people and objects flow backward through cause-and-effect.
  • Arrival (2016): Learning an alien language that allows you to experience time nonlinearly — knowledge from the future shapes present decisions.
  • Dark (Netflix series): Multi-generational causal loops and characters being their own ancestors.
• Literature:
  • Philip K. Richard and Robert Heinlein wrote stories built on closed causal loops, like Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies—” where a character is their own parent.

Impact on Our Understanding of Time

At its most profound level, retrocausality:

• Suggests time might not be a simple one-way street.
• Makes us wonder if our concept of now is an illusion.
• Encourages physicists to explore whether cause and effect are emergent properties of a deeper, time-symmetric reality.

Interesting Conclusions

Retrocausality is a mathematical possibility in physics interpretations, but not an accepted feature of everyday life.

Even if retrocausality exists at some quantum level, it probably cannot send usable information into the past due to quantum randomness.

Philosophically, it supports block-universe views — that past, present, and future might exist all at once — challenging our intuitive sense of time.

One could go even deeper into one particular aspect — like the math of transactional interpretations, thought experiments (e.g. Novikov self-consistency principle).

[bluefalken]

1. Time as a Coordinate (Traditional Physics)

Context:
In Newtonian mechanics, time is an absolute parameter: a uniform background ticking along the same for everyone — a scalar number you can read on a clock. Even after Einstein, time is mostly treated as a dimension in 4D spacetime:
(x,y,z,ct),
(x,y,z,ct),

which we package into a 4-vector xμxμ. This is where time’s scalar-ness comes in: it’s just one coordinate, distinguished by its minus sign in the metric ds2=−c2dt2+dx2+dy2+dz2ds2=−c2dt2+dx2+dy2+dz2.

Why this is insufficient:

Treating time this way doesn’t tell us what time is, only how it enters equations.

Time is not an observable like a field — you never measure "the time field at a point"; you measure the evolution of other things over time.

2. Time Crystals — Time as a Temporal Lattice

Concept:
Time crystals were first proposed theoretically by Frank Wilczek (2012). A time crystal is a quantum system that exhibits spontaneous periodicity in its ground-state behavior, breaking continuous time-translation symmetry into a discrete one — like a lattice structure repeating itself in time.

Key insight:
Imagine the atoms in a conventional crystal repeating in space:

atom — atom — atom — atom — …

Time crystals repeat in time:

state(t) → state(t + T) → state(t + 2T) …

Implications:
Time crystals show that periodic order — normally thought of in space — can emerge in the time domain too.
Although these don’t necessarily imply time is “made of atoms,” they do make time look less like a continuous parameter and more like a discrete or semi-regular structure under some conditions.

Current Status:
Real-time crystals have been observed in driven quantum systems (e.g. in trapped ions and NV centers).
This is still condensed-matter physics — but it has spurred thought about discrete temporal order.
3. Causal Set Theory — Time as a Graph/Lattice of Relations

Concept:
In causal set theory (Rafael Sorkin and others), spacetime is fundamentally discrete. Instead of smooth spacetime:

Every “point” is an event, an element in a set.

The only structure is the causal order (a≺ba≺b) telling you which event can influence which.

Key insight:
Time is not an independent coordinate, it is an emergent feature of the partial order of events.
If you take the graph of this causal order and sprinkle it into Minkowski space, you get an approximation to smooth spacetime — but fundamentally it looks like a random Poisson lattice.

Implications for time:

Time is neither scalar nor vector, but the ordering structure itself — a combinatorial or algebraic object.

Continuity is lost; temporal flow is emergent.

The closest analogy to a lattice/quasi-crystal here is that these causal sets can have discrete structure without periodicity.

4. Loop Quantum Gravity & Spin Networks — Time Emerges from Networks

Concept:
Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) suggests that space is made of discrete chunks — “quanta of area and volume,” represented as nodes and links in a spin network.
Time evolution happens via “spin foams,” where one spin network morphs into another.

Implications for time:

Time is not a fundamental coordinate; it's a parameter that describes transitions between one quantum state of geometry and the next.

The structure is more like a graph evolving in discrete steps, like a cellular automaton — again suggesting something like a lattice, but one governed by combinatorics, not a continuous flow.

5. Emergent Time from Quantum Entanglement

Concept:
A radical idea — pushed by people like Don Page and William Wootters — is that time might emerge from entanglement correlations within a global quantum state.
In some versions:

The universe is one huge, stationary quantum state.

What we call “time” is the way subsystems perceive correlations with the rest of the state.

Implications for time as a lattice/quasi-crystal:

Time isn’t a coordinate or a continuous parameter at all.

It’s more like an informational pattern — a web of correlations that unfolds like a quasi-crystalline structure (ordered but not periodic) across the quantum state.

6. Time as a Quasi-Crystal?

Quasi-crystals:

Ordered, but not periodic — they repeat according to non-repeating symmetries (e.g. Penrose tilings in 2D).

If some deeper theory of spacetime is governed by such non-repeating symmetries (e.g. E8 lattice projections into lower dimensions, which some unification theories invoke), then time could also come in quasi-repeating structures, not perfectly periodic nor perfectly continuous.

Why this might matter:
In some cutting-edge work:

The E8 lattice projected into 4D yields a pattern that looks “almost periodic,” and some authors (e.g. Garrett Lisi's “Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” though very speculative) play with this idea.

Temporal quasi-crystals have already been demonstrated in periodically driven quantum systems — essentially showing that temporal order can be complex and non-repeating, like a Penrose tiling in time.

7. Philosophical Implications — Time as Relation, Not Thing

Leibniz famously argued time is a relation between events, not a thing.

Modern relational interpretations — like Barbour's timeless configurations of the universe — say there’s no fundamental time; there are just “nows,” and time is our way of ordering them.

Summary Comparison Chart

Here’s a summary chart comparing the different models you’re interested in:
Idea What Time Looks Like Key Implication
Classical/Relativistic Scalar coordinate in a smooth manifold Time is continuous, one-dimensional
Time Crystals Periodic repetition (temporal lattice) Time can show discrete symmetry breaking
Causal Set Theory Partially ordered set (graph/lattice) Time is fundamentally discrete and relational
Spin Networks (LQG) Sequence of discrete graphs (evolving) Time is emergent from quantum geometry
Quantum Entanglement (Page-Wootters) Correlations in a timeless state Time is informational, emerges from correlations
Temporal Quasi-Crystals Aperiodic temporal order Time may exhibit complex repeating patterns
Conclusion — A Synthesis

Your question is on the bleeding edge of foundational physics.
Current mainstream physics treats time as a continuous coordinate, but:

Many serious researchers believe this continuity is an approximation.

Underneath lies something combinatorial, graph-like, or aperiodically ordered — much like a lattice or a quasi-crystal.

That means time might not be “a thing” at all — it could emerge as a pattern from a deeper, discrete or algebraic structure.

Time as a Discrete or Emergent Structure

1. Time as a Scalar in Classical Physics

In classical Newtonian mechanics, time is an absolute scalar parameter. In Einstein’s relativity, time is one coordinate of a four-dimensional spacetime continuum, often treated as a component of a 4-vector. Here, time is smooth, continuous, and flows uniformly.

2. Time Crystals — Temporal Lattices

Time crystals are systems that spontaneously break continuous time-translation symmetry to repeat their state periodically. Frank Wilczek first proposed them, and they have been realized experimentally in driven quantum systems like trapped ions and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. Time crystals suggest that under some conditions, time can have a discrete or periodic order — a kind of temporal lattice.

3. Causal Set Theory — Time as a Graph

Causal set theory posits that spacetime is fundamentally discrete — a set of events with a partial order defining causality. Time emerges as the ordering relation of these events rather than as a continuous coordinate. Causal sets look like a random Poisson lattice at large scales, and temporal intervals correspond to chains of causally linked events.

4. Spin Networks & Spin Foams in Loop Quantum Gravity

Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) models spacetime as a superposition of discrete structures. Space is built from spin networks — graphs with nodes and links — and time is the process of these networks evolving into one another, called a spin foam. Time is thus not a fundamental continuum but emerges from this evolving graph structure.

5. Emergent Time from Quantum Entanglement

The Page-Wootters mechanism explores the idea that time may be an emergent feature of correlations in a stationary global quantum state. In this view, what we call time arises as a relational property between subsystems — effectively making time an informational and entropic construct, rather than a primary variable.

6. Temporal Quasi-Crystals

Some speculative models draw analogies between time and quasicrystals — structures that show order without periodicity. Time could exhibit quasi-repeating patterns governed by mathematical structures like Penrose tiling, potentially arising from higher-dimensional projections. Temporal quasi-crystals, already demonstrated in periodically driven quantum systems, hint that time could possess an aperiodic order.

Conclusion

While mainstream physics treats time as a continuous coordinate, cutting-edge research paints a richer picture. Time might emerge from discrete, graph-like structures, entangled states, or complex patterns that look like temporal lattices or quasi-crystals. This moves time from the status of a mere coordinate to an emergent structure that reflects deeper symmetries — or broken symmetries — in the underlying fabric of reality.

Suggested Reading

• R. Sorkin, Causal Sets: Discrete Gravity
• C. Rovelli, Quantum Gravity
• F. Wilczek, Quantum Time Crystals
• D. Page & W. Wootters, Evolution Without Evolution
• S. Lloyd, Emergent Time from Quantum Mechanics
• Penrose, Tilings and Quasicrystals