A Kind of Magic

"The bell that rings inside your mind
Is challenging the doors of time."

Yesterday I amused myself (okay, distracted myself) by creating a story. In keeping with the scholarly (cough) purposes of this blog, I'll edit out all the juicy details about the protagonist - Simon, the physicist. And just so no one confuses this with a fully-formed theory about the way things really are, we'll say that Simon lived on Hypothetical World Gamma-12 (HWG-12).

Let's talk a little bit about physics on HWG-12...

Time on HWG-12 was defined by consistency, and deviations from it. To be more specific, time on this world had no direction on its own; rather, it was arbitrarily defined in units that reflected nothing other than the rate at which the field mechanics that gave rise to consciousness were able to process change. This made a kind of sense to Simon, who recognized that without consistency and change, what would we know about time?

Few knew this great secret about time - that its passage was entirely relative to the rate at which consciousness processed a change in state. You see, quantum physics on HWG-12 was much the same as it is on our world... The inhabitants of HWG-12, though only able to observe matter on their world in a single state, had, by experimenting with photons, deduced the existence of a greater state of matter, which they had dubbed 'the smear'.

As it turns out, the subjective passage of time on HWG-12 was nothing other than the bias that each instance of state selection introduced into the system that gave rise to consciousness.

(Consciousness on HWG-12 was recognized as a kind of interface with the smear, and once the inhabitants of HWG-12 came to peace with the idea that they were something less than the center of everything, they could more objectively examine the mechanisms that gave rise to their experiences of consciousness.)

This influence of one particular field configuration upon the others, this bias introduced by a single subjective moment in time, this differential that was perpetuated somehow and reflected back in other moments of consciousness, was not dependent upon time as subjectively experienced by the inhabitants of HWG-12. From their subjective perspective, time moved in a single direction. (Well, most of the time.)

(It's worth noting that this subjective experience of time's arrow did not mesh with what they had deduced about the mechanics of the smear.)

Yet occasionally this bias, which was modified with each instance of state selection, could also be deduced from subjective experience to be moving backward in time from the subjective future...

Which led to questions...

Why does the preponderance of experience reflect a single subjective arrow of time?

If time's arrow reflected nothing other than a bias in 'future' state selection, what, if any, other biases existed, and how could they be manipulated?

Simon was intrigued...