Is There a Common-Denominator Temporal Interval? The Gelug Prasangika Position
We were speaking about the issue of a common denominator. Is there an actual temporal interval, somehow like a blank screen, that’s the basis for labeling by different persons with many different labels? We saw that in Chittamatra, according to Tsongkhapa’s earlier interpretation, conventionally there is, but on the deepest level, or ultimately, there isn’t. In his later interpretation of Chittamatra, Tsongkhapa said that both conventionally and ultimately, or on the deepest level, there is no such thing as a common denominator.
What about Prasangika? Gelug Prasangika agrees with Tsongkhapa’s later interpretation of Chittamatra – that there’s no common-denominator clay pot or year 2006, either from the viewpoint of conventional truth or deepest truth, experienced by two different persons either at different locations or traveling at different speeds. However, the Prasangika understanding of this is quite different from the Chittamatra one.
From the point of view of appearances, Prasangika agrees with Chittamatra – that the appearance of something like the clay pot or the year 2006 depends on the mind that cognizes the appearance. There’s not some sort of set, fixed appearance that everybody is seeing together from the side of the object. The reason for this, from the Prasangika point of view, is that there is no findable referent thing on the side of a validly knowable object that corresponds to the names or labels for it. This is the understanding of the absence of self-established existence, or inherent existence, from the point of view of Prasangika.
If you recall, what establishes the existence of something? Well, it is merely what the name or the concept of it refers to, on the basis for labeling. However – and this is the point here – although the word or concept refers to something (btags-chos), there’s no referent thing (btags-don) itself sitting on the side of the object that can be found that corresponds to the word and that has defining characteristics with the power to establish its existence. The word refers to something, but there’s nothing that corresponds exactly to the word.
I’m just doing this briefly here because this isn’t a course on voidness. When we think of words and concepts, these are like entries in a dictionary in which something falls, categories of an entry in a dictionary, like table or orange or red or good or bad, or something like that. What does that imply? It implies that there are actually things out there that exist in the box of red or orange or green or blue and so on. Although we can use these concepts and categories convention and words to refer to things (“Okay, what color is that?” “That shirt is red”), it’s not that there is such a thing as red there on the side of the color spectrum – that somehow on the color spectrum there are two bars which say, “This side is red. The other side is orange,” or things like that.
Of course, it’s the same thing with time. Somebody brought up the example of a new year. Well, this is totally arbitrary. Again, this gets into a weird viewpoint. Let’s say if we take an interval of a lifetime, it isn’t that there are set boundaries in it that say one year, two years, three years and so on. We have these words that are a convenient way of referring to intervals. For example, “How old are you?” “Well, I am five years old,” or fifty years old, whatever it is. Well, what kind of year are we measuring it to start with? We have a mental continuum. Does that mental continuum have little bars on it, and on one side, it is this year, and on the other side, it’s that year?
Tibetans count birthdays and age very differently: it’s how many calendar years you’re alive in. If, for example, you’re born in December of our calendar, the last month of the year, you are alive for one month of that year, so that’s your first year. Then, as soon as it turns the next month, which is the first month of the next year, you’re two years old, because you’ve been alive in two calendar years. It may only be that you’re alive for three weeks, but you’re two years old.
This indicates the arbitrariness of how we actually measure things. It’s not referring to something set and fixed – these words and concepts, year and so on – on the side of the object. Nevertheless, these words refer to something. Well, there is a year – we’ve lived for a year, however it might be defined – but what that year means is established purely from the mind by mental labeling. Basically, there is no common-denominator year that is somehow a referent of the word year. We all use the word year, and it refers to a year, and we all understand it, those of us who follow the same convention, but it’s not a referent thing existing somewhere, like on a timeline or whatever. Overall, that’s the Prasangika point of view.
Thus, the year 2006 experienced by the person traveling at a faster speed and the year 2006 experienced by the slower speed person are neither the same nor different. They’re neither one nor many. Then, we get into the whole Prasangika analysis: My 2006 and your 2006 in the starship, are they the same year 2006, or are they two different years 2006? Actually, they’re neither of those. In other words, is there a truly existent findable year 2006? Are they the same findable year 2006, or are they two totally different findable years 2006? It’s neither of them because there’s no such thing as a truly existent findable year 2006.
Unlike Chittamatra, Prasangika does assert that there are external objects, which means validly knowable objects, such as a clay pot and the year 2006, that have a different natal source and a different essential nature from the natal source and essential nature of the cognitions of them. The year 2006 does have its own basis in terms of the events that have happened since… What is it? Is it from the birth of Christ or the death of Christ that it’s measured?
From the birth. Plus the calendar has changed.
They had solar days in that time, and the hours were counted differently. Aside from all of that, it’s 2006 years from that event (and now we’re in the 2007th). It has, though, its external source, as it’s not just coming from a seed of karma – in terms of our being aware of what year it is. Prasangika says that, but nothing findable.
Also, Gelug Prasangika asserts that the existence of a clay pot or the year 2006 can’t be established from the side of a common-denominator defining characteristic on the side of the clay pot or the year 2006. Remember that was what Chittamatra was saying, that there is some findable defining characteristic on the side of the object that would make a common denominator, even if it’s in everybody’s cognition. Prasangika says no – and we’ve discussed this before. Defining characteristics, after all, are made up by concepts in a dictionary, by people who decide what is a table, what is a year and so on. They’re certainly not on the side of the object.
An easy example is color. Somebody just decides that from this point in the spectrum to that point in the spectrum, we’re going to give it a name, and we’ll call that “red.” We’ll call it “orange” if it’s one little wavelength less, or more, whatever it is. Defining characteristics likewise are just mentally labeled. They’re not findable on the side of the object, so we couldn’t have a common denominator established by a common defining characteristic findable on the side of the object.
The existence of an interval of time, such as the year 2006, is established only in terms of what a valid mental label for it refers to, whether there’s just one valid mental label or many valid labels, and whether the many valid labels are labeled by one individual or many different individuals. Remember that a valid label, like a clock day, is established by a convention. Thus, for it to be a valid label, there has to be:
- A convention that is agreed. For example, we all have this convention of a clock day of 24 hours.
- It’s not contradicted by others validly measuring and labeling the same label in terms of conventional truth. Everybody else who is looking at a clock and working in this convention of 24 times the hand goes around the clock – or some quartz crystal vibrates, or something similar – and that we’re going to have the convention of calling that a day. This is not contradicted by other people who look at their clock.
- Finally, it’s not contradicted by others validly measuring and labeling the same label in terms of the deepest truth. Somebody says, “It’s a truly existent day,” and then, “This was an inauspicious day,” or “This was a terrible day” – which we can get if we become superstitious with astrology and so on (“This is going to be a bad day: a black cat crossed my path,” this type of stuff). Then, it’s contradicted by somebody that sees validly the deepest truth, that things don’t exist that way.
The validity of a label is established by these three criteria and not by there being some findable defining characteristic, common to everybody who perceives it, on the side of the object. Again, validity is established from the side of the mind, not from the side of the object. Okay?
That’s a very quick summary of the Prasangika position, something that, in other courses, we’ve spent years on. It’s just to touch a little bit on this topic and the question, if there is a common denominator in terms of “Well, is there really a year? Further, does everybody experience the same thing? What do we experience?”
Are there any questions on that?
So the Chittamatra school says there’s a common denominator, and the Madhyamaka school says no?
It’s not quite that simple. In Chittamatra – as we saw, there are two views of it just in Tsongkhapa’s works. Both views of Chittamatra say that ultimately, from the deepest point of view, there isn’t a common denominator that comes from some external source. However, one view says there is conventionally a common denominator, and one view says that there isn’t. One says there’s a common denominator because in everybody’s cognition of a year, or of something, there’s the same findable defining characteristic on the side of the object. The other view says that that doesn’t mean that it’s a common denominator, because it’s in different cognitions. One view will accept that there’s a common denominator on a conventional level, and the other won’t. Nonetheless, both say on the deepest level there isn’t a common denominator. That’s Chittamatra.
The Gelugpa Prasangika (which is different from non-Gelugpa Prasangika) within Madhyamaka will agree with the second Chittamatra view – that from those two points of view, conventional and deepest point of view, there isn’t a common denominator. However, their reason for it is different.
There are many, many different opinions, depending on the school of Buddhist philosophical positions. Vaibhashika says there are common denominators, for example, and then they explain them in their four different assertions. There are a lot of different possible explanations. As I explained before, it makes one think, and one needs to analyze if this could be true or not true? Can one be a way of starting to understand something? For example, our previous example about what’s the relationship between milk that changes into yogurt and the yogurt that changes into cheese. Is there something that maintains the identity of the substance? Are they totally the same? They can’t, though, be totally the same. Are there two completely different things? Then, how can they be related? How does a cause-and-effect relationship hold? This is a very important issue in Buddhist understanding and Buddhist philosophy – how is the relationship between cause and effect maintained? However, this is not an easy question to answer.
Why is a causal event leading to a result? What connects them if there’s nothing solid connecting the two? Remember in the Indian Nyaya system, the non-Buddhist system, they had truly existent connectors, like little sticks connecting two balls. Well, Buddhism doesn’t say that. Is there, then, something that connects them? How are they connected? Why should this result come from that cause? The analysis of time as being an imputation phenomenon on the interval between cause and effect is related to this issue of what establishes the connection between the cessation of the cause and the arising of the effect.
This is, of course, extremely relevant to our path to liberation and enlightenment. We’re doing various actions now as a cause to somehow bring about liberation and enlightenment. Or even just in terms of avoiding destructive actions bringing about happiness. Well, how can that work? What’s the connection? How is the connection there? What is this time interval? Do we have to wait for a million eons before any happiness comes from this? Will we accrue interest? Will it get bigger the longer we wait? Is that time interval fixed? Is it shorter? What is that time interval? These are all questions that are relevant to the spiritual path, not just irrelevant philosophical speculations.
Time According to Western Science
Now, let's invite Dr. Jorge Numata to give the scientific discussion of time.
Introduction
Dr. Numata: I want to talk to you a little bit about the scientific views on time, like the different theories and the relevant models that exist in science where time has come up as an important variable and what we can learn from these views.
First of all, hidden assumptions always hinder our progress, at least in science. There are a lot of little assumptions and unconscious biases that we have that can impede our progress and understanding. This is, I think, also the case with spiritual progress – either doctrinally based or automatically arising biases and wrong assumptions hinder our progress on the path.
For example, this is a very popular picture from Stephen Hawking (holds up and points to picture). He loves to use this picture in talks about how some people might view the world as being flat and being placed upon millions and millions of successive turtles. What’s holding the next turtle? Another turtle under it. This is probably a wrong assumption about the way the world exists. However, we wouldn’t automatically think this. We would have to be taught that turtles hold the world.
The relevant fields that can say something to us about the nature of time in science are:
- Relativity theory. This is probably the most important one. It tells us there is no such thing as simultaneity or a universal present time or a now.
- The mechanical laws of science, including quantum mechanics and Newtonian mechanics, and so on.
Basically, the mechanical laws are time-symmetric. This means that they’re applicable in both time directions. The basic laws of interaction, energy and forces are not time-asymmetric: they do not give an arrow of time; they do not tell us in which direction time goes forward. However, entropy and thermodynamics do have an arrow of time or provide a directionality to time. I’ll also be talking about entropy.
Lastly, just a brief mention about circadian rhythms or biological clocks. How do our bodies – also plants, bacteria, animal bodies and human bodies – keep time? How do they keep track of time?
Dr. Berzin: Please give an example of a mechanical law that would work in both directions of time.
For example, Newton’s third law: Any action causes a reaction of the same magnitude. It’s time-reversible. It works if we’re going from the past into the future or on the way back. It’s exactly equivalent, and so is most of quantum mechanics and Maxwell’s laws of electricity and electromagnetism. All of them are time-symmetric, which is interesting because they don’t really tell us in which direction time goes.
Time Is the Rate of Change of Something
Does time flow? Because we always intuitively, probably even automatically arising, have this idea that time flows – this feeling that we’re standing still, and there’s this river of time flowing. However, time within science is defined as the rate of change of something.
I’ll give you an example of the definition of velocity, which is just the derivative of the position of a particle with respect to time (this means the rate of change) – this is probably the only equation I’ll use in this talk, so don’t get scared. In this case, time is not going anywhere. Time is not moving; it’s simply a variable that helps us define the rate of change.
If we wanted to ask how fast time flows, we would get a nonsensical answer. How many seconds per second? That doesn’t make any sense. Thus, we can’t really say that time flows. There is no speed of the flow of time. Time is what we define as the rate of change.
Throughout history, there have been several standards of time used. First, we used the celestial motions. Right now we tend to use atomic vibrations because they’re more reliable than the motions of planets. They are not absolute – that’s not the point (there is no such thing as absolute time) – but they are quite reliable and a good source of time within their frame of reference. I’ll be explaining a bit more what frame of reference means.
“Is there time before the Big Bang?” is a common question. Stephen Hawking always answers that it doesn’t make sense to ask this. The reason is simply that time and space are very intricately interwoven; we can’t separate time from space. At the moment of the creation of this universe, the time of this universe, the processes going on in this universe, were also born. It doesn’t mean that there was nothing before the Big Bang. It just means that the time of that matter and energy were also born at the time of the Big Bang, in a way of speaking. They’re completely interwoven with it. It cannot be separated.
Time and Relativity
The first version of relativity was basically given by Galileo. He proposed a thought experiment (which we could actually do in practice). I’m just going to read it out loud: He proposed that we shut ourselves up with a friend in the main cabin below the decks on some large ship, and have with us some flies, butterflies and other small flying animals. Also, hang up a bowl that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it. Then, have the ship proceed at any speed we like, so long as the motion is uniform (meaning no acceleration) and not fluctuating this or that way (meaning no acceleration also on either side). It’s just a constant speed. The droplets will fall into the vessel beneath without dropping toward the stern – so the water will not seem like it’s going backward – although while the drops are in the air, the ship runs many spans. The butterflies and flies will continue their flights indifferently toward every side; nor will it ever happen that they’re concentrated toward the stern (meaning the back of the ship) as if tired out from keeping up with the course of the ship. This is a quote from Galileo which was reproduced in a book by Roger Penrose called The Road to Reality (2005).
This is one of the first versions of relativity. Of course, it doesn’t include the relativity of time, but it’s already the relativity of frames of reference. There is no privilege to the velocity frame of reference. If we have nothing to indicate what velocity we’re going at (for example, being over the crust of the earth and moving at a constant speed), we cannot tell that the earth is moving at a certain velocity.
Just one more picture from a book by Stephen Hawking, where we can see two people playing ping-pong. First, we cannot see that they’re inside a train. From the point of view of an observer inside that’s just looking at the people playing ping-pong and moving at the same speed as them, this observer could say that the ball is moving at ten miles per hour. However, an observer outside the train who sees these people playing ping-pong are actually moving with the train at 90 miles per hour. This observer outside the train will see that the ping-pong ball is moving at 100 miles per hour. This is another form of the relativity of speed.
Going back to Galileo, just one comment. When Galileo first heard of this idea that the earth rotates around the sun, because he understood exactly this relativity of movement, he had no problem with it. He thought it’s perfectly normal that we don’t feel this velocity.
There is a certain difference in the speed of the observer that’s there. So, of course, you can have different frames of reference from which you view it, how you interpret it, for example. You view the ball as moving relative to the moving train, or you view the ball as moving relative to the ground, but still, the relative velocities are there. But is there a common denominator, the ping-pong ball traveling at 10 miles an hour which is seen by both the people in the train and the person outside (who, to their point of view, it’s moving at 100 miles an hour)?
In this case, in this level of physics, we would say yes. However, we would also have to say that all the observers are correct; none of them is wrong. Each one, from their own frame of reference, is correct in saying that the ball is either going at 10 or at 100 miles an hour. From the point of view of the ball...
Would you say that the ball is going at 10, and so the person outside the train has to add to that basic 10 another 90 of the train?
We could say that. Nonetheless, the ball, from its own point of view, inside the ball, can also say, “I’m going at 0 miles per hour, these people inside the train are moving at 10 miles per hour, and the people outside are moving at 100.” All of those assertions are correct. The point is that none of the points of view is privileged; none of them is better than the other ones.
There is yet another frame of reference, which is the whole earth, or a spaceship outside the earth looking at this train and the little ping-pong ball. That would also not be a privileged frame of reference. There is no privileged frame of reference that’s really absolute. All of them are right.
It's not the case that the basis for the movement is there, but then we have different points of view about the same thing. This is not the case. For example, if you’re running towards me, I’m running towards you, and she’s watching us; each one of us is going to see different velocities of the whole situation. I’m going to see that she’s standing still and that you’re running to me at twice the speed of what I think my speed is. Am I more right than you? Further, you would see that my speed is different from what I think because you’re also running towards me. There is not like one basic movement that is correct and then it’s watched and interpreted differently by different observers. It’s not like that.
So, it’s not that there is a large chessboard of space-time that is the absolute measure of position and speed, and things like that, and everybody on that board that’s moving at a different speed observes something different, but what the chessboard says is truer, is privileged. That gets into the whole Chittamatra thing, because how would you know what the chessboard says? There would have to be somebody looking at it.
Another way of calling this chessboard would be that it’s like a screen. It’s not that the reality is like a projection screen which has very definite points and then things move on it. It’s not like that. If we ask, “Is this point in space the same as this point in space at the next second?” We cannot really say this. Because, for example, while we were speaking, this point of the earth has moved a few kilometers since we last mentioned this point. Also, the whole solar system as such is also moving. These movements in space do not occur within a fixed grid or within a fixed projection screen that we could use as an absolute reference.
Does that mean that these miles per hour, 10 or 100, are only created by the mind, and there’s no reference point to it?
I would say no because it’s not only by the mind; it’s also dependent on our relative relationship to that object and our relative speed to that object. We can’t even say that the ball is moving, because if we were sitting on the ball, the ball wouldn’t be moving; everything else would be moving. All of these statements are all equal. That’s the point. It gets more complicated now with the twin paradox.
Also, when we use the units miles per hour, an hour isn’t passing, and the ball isn’t moving ten miles. We’re only talking about a short period of time. That’s also a projection – that if it were to move like that for an hour, it would go ten miles. I mean, you have to define an hour, and you have to define miles.
Yes, also in that sense, it’s relative.
The Special Theory of Relativity
Now, I’m going on to a deeper level of relativity. This is basically the level that Einstein discovered with his special theory of relativity (which is not really the deepest point of view, but it’s deeper than what Galileo and Newton understood). One of the consequences of Einstein’s special theory of relativity is the so-called twin paradox, which is not really a paradox but actually something that would happen if we were to try this experiment.
The experiment is: We have twin brothers, and one of them goes into a spaceship, and this spaceship can travel at, let’s say, 80% of the speed of light. Suppose he spent some years, measured in his time, let’s say, two years in his time – in his internal clock and his mechanical clock, Then, if he were to come back to the earth, he would see that his twin brother is a lot older. The space traveler would be younger than his twin brother.
This phenomenon occurs because when traveling at speeds very close to the speed of light, time slows down, so time passes slower. Does that mean that the person inside the ship feels that everything is slowed down? It’s not like that. It has nothing to do with that. For the person inside the ship, he looks at his watch and everything goes on as usual. It’s just when we talk about the relative perception of the person traveling at the very low speed on earth and the person traveling at the speed of light and when we look at the relationship between them, this is when relativity comes in. Relative to the brother who stayed on earth, the clock and all the biological processes of the traveling twin brother were slowed down.
One important point is that the velocity of the earth is actually very low. I mean, one tends to think that the earth is moving very quickly in space. However, in relationship to the speed of light, it’s very slow. Relativistic effects do not become so important at that speed. We could say that the speed of the earth traveling in space is very low compared to the speed of light.
The Dalai Lama in his book The Universe in a Single Atom – which I definitely recommend – when he mentions the twin paradox, says that it reminds him a lot of Asanga and how he went to Maitreya’s pure land to receive some of the most important Mahayana teachings. Asanga’s perception was that the time that passed was the time needed to have tea, but when he came back to earth to share the teachings, actually 50 years had passed. The Dalai Lama says it reminds him a lot of this twin paradox that results from Einstein’s special relativity theory.
This is, however, not only a thought experiment; this kind of lengthening or slowing down of time can be carried out experimentally. In the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland, we can achieve speeds very close to the speed of light, but we cannot really accelerate an astronaut at that speed, only very small particles. However, there are some subatomic particles that have very, very small lives or half-lives. That means that whenever they’re generated, they disintegrate very quickly. Let’s say, we have a subatomic particle whose life is one millisecond. When we accelerate it very close to the speed of light, observing as an experimenter on the floor of CERN, moving at a very low speed relative to that particle, we will see that that particle has a very much longer lifetime. This is a consequence of relativity theory. If we were sitting inside that little particle, we would see that the lifetime of the particle is still one millisecond. However, from the point of view of the slow-moving experimentalist, it’ll have a very long lifetime. It’s kind of like an experimental validation of the theory of relativity.
Relativity theory always implies two frames of reference. Relativity theory says nothing about the speed of clocks within one single frame of reference. If both of us are moving at the same speed, relativity theory doesn’t tell us what time it is or how fast time moves. It does nothing like that. It’s only in relation to two observers moving at different speeds.
Another consequence of relativity theory is that all observers measure the same speed of light – we could say this is a constant – which is close to 300,000 kilometers per second.
Is it exactly 300,000?
No, it’s 299 blahblahblah thousand kilometers per second. It actually has no decimal points because the meter was defined in a way that the speed of light would be a number without decimal points. It was actually defined to be that. The definition of the meter is no longer a piece of wood, but it’s defined to make the speed of light a special number.
Which did they know first, the speed of light or the length of a meter?
The speed of light. They redefined the length of a meter so that it would be close to what was used as a meter before. There are old and new meters. It’s an example of mental labeling and conventions. It's like redefining an hour, a minute, or a second by using atomic vibrations. That’s the same thing.
When traveling at speeds close to the speed of light, time slows down and also space contracts.
There's a quote from Einstein from 1949: “Today everyone knows that all attempts to clarify this paradox satisfactorily…” – the paradox of the twins, or the paradox of simultaneity – “were condemned to failure as long as the axiom of the absolute character of time, or of simultaneity, was rooted unrecognized in the unconscious. To recognize clearly this axiom and its arbitrary character already implies the essentials of the solution of the problem.” Basically, he’s saying that our automatically arising feeling that there is simultaneity and that we can define absolute simultaneity, this unconscious assumption turned out to be a block to progress.
I’m just going to give an example with three observers of what this would look like numerically. In this example:
- We have people at a mission-control center on Earth.
- We also have an astronaut on Mars, in a space station, and he has agreed to eat lunch exactly at 12 p.m. and then sends a signal to Earth saying, “I ate lunch,” and then the folks back on Earth will say, “Oh, he ate lunch.” They want to know exactly at what time he did. The radio signal will take 20 minutes to get to Earth because the distance between the Earth and Mars is 20 light-minutes.
- Additionally, there is a spaceship traveling at 80% of the speed of light which is moving from the left of the Earth; it’s going to pass Earth, and it’s going to go all the way to Mars. Then, it’s also going to watch the sequence of events.
Let’s first only look at what’s happening on Earth (Earth and Mars are moving at different speeds, but compared to the speed of light, their speed difference doesn’t play a role in this).
- The first event that happens before noon is that the people on Earth and Mars exchange light signals and they measure the distance between them; they determine it to be 20 light-minutes, and they synchronize their clocks.
- At 12 p.m., the people at mission control on Earth think, “Okay, surely the astronaut on Mars has begun to eat lunch,” and then they prepare to wait 20 minutes to receive the radio signal.
- The spaceship is traveling from the Earth towards Mars. The people on Earth know what velocity the spaceship is traveling, so the people on Earth deduce that at 12:11, so 11 minutes afterward, the ship surely must have encountered the signal that they will receive a few moments later.
- At 12:20, effectively, the signal from Mars arrives at Earth, and the people on Earth know that the astronaut has eaten lunch at 12:00 (because the signal arrived at 12:20). Now, they know that noon on Mars is the same as noon on Earth.
- Then, at 12:25 the ship arrives at Mars.
The whole point in this analysis is that because these two planets are moving at almost the same speed, they can actually synchronize their clocks, and they can actually recognize events in a similar timeframe.
However, if this whole situation is seen from the ship traveling at 80% of the speed of light:
- The first effect that this has is a contraction of space. The ship measures the distance between Earth and Mars and determines it to be 12 light-minutes – not 20 light-minutes but 12. Space is contracting because the ship is traveling at such a high speed.
- At exactly 12 p.m., the ship passes the Earth. The person in the spaceship thinks, “Oh, because I synchronized my clock with the Earth, the Martian must be eating lunch right now.”
- At 12:07, the signal arrives in the ship, and the person in the ship says, “Okay, the person on Mars must have eaten lunch early.” It’s only 12:07, according to the time on the spaceship, so that means that he must have eaten lunch before noon.
- At 12:15, Mars arrives at the ship – the ship arrives at Mars, or Mars arrives at the ship (it’s actually equivalent) – the rocket man and the Martian notice that their two clocks are out of synch, and they disagree about who is right. Actually, both are right.
- At 12:33 (the spaceship’s time), the signal arrives at Earth.
The clock discrepancies demonstrate that there is no universal present moment.
We cannot say that there is a universal present moment. What for some seems to be a present, for others it’s either the past or the future. This is one of the consequences. My present can be someone else’s past and a third person’s future if all three are moving relative to each other. All moments are equally valid. There is no privileged present moment as such. However, one has to say that, according to these laws and the limits of how fast information can travel (which is the speed of light), causality has to be maintained. No matter how weird these time discrepancies and clock differences look, causality, the activity of cause and effect, is maintained.
However, some scientists conclude from this picture of time that, because there is no privileged present moment, we can talk about a “block time” or a fixed timescape that we’re simply sliding into – that everything is already determined back into the past and forward into the future. Everything’s already completely set.
Before you get into this discussion of block time, if time is integrally related to the speed of light, and causality is integrally related to the speed of light, what about causality and dark matter (which doesn’t reflect light, and so there’s no information going on)? Dark matter and dark energy supposedly make up ninety-something percent of the universe. We’re not talking about black holes, where causality doesn’t seem to work, but what about most of the universe? Does that mean there’s no causality if there’s no light or speed of light with which you would reckon time?
Well, first of all, the speed of light is like an upper limit to the speed that anything can travel, any kind of information transfer, any kind of interaction. The speed of light is not limited to light. For example, electrons or any kind of particle also cannot travel faster than the speed of light, the same with the speed of any kind of interaction. Dark matter, even though it cannot be directly seen, still interacts with the rest of matter – for example, through gravity. The fact that it still interacts means that it’s still bound by the laws of causality, and the speed of interaction would still apply.
I think the problem that I’m having here is that there seems to be not a very clear differentiation between time and information about time.
That’s actually how time is defined in physics because we have these problems with relative reference frames. Heisenberg writes that the future is everything that we could possibly know about but haven’t known about; the past is everything that we can know about, where the laws of physics wouldn’t prevent us from knowing that; the present is anything in between, which might be a timespan.
In fact, time – past, present and future – is very much integrally related to mind and knowing, as Buddhism would say.
However, material processes also experience the same kind of time dilation. Also, that’s why when we accelerate a subatomic particle, it also perceives the same kind of time dilation.
The problem is that also causality itself cannot be faster than the speed of light. Why? That’s the way it is. This is an important point because we cannot exchange information faster than the speed of light. This is why there is this connection between time and information.
Quantum Mechanics
Let’s take the example of two photons which were previously entangled but are sent in opposite polarizations when one is observed – or in the case of electrons, when we measure the spin of one, the spin of the other particle is completely determined. This happens at a speed that is greater than the speed of light. However, we cannot transmit information through this medium. It would be great, but we can’t.
Then, how do we talk about time in that context?
The thing is that this collapse of the wave function or this collapse of superimposed states – of up-and-down spin, for example, when we just get up or down – automatically causes the other particle to also collapse at the same time.
In no time?
In no time, it just collapses. However, we cannot use this to transmit information.
What if you have two spaceships moving in opposite directions, and you have entangled photons that are entangled with each other? Why couldn’t they use the states of these entangled photons to send a signal (for example, to tell the other spaceship to turn back when they see the signal)?
The problem is that in order to even read the signal, we have to make the wave function collapse. First, we have both photons coexisting in two states at the same time. If we’re talking about photons, then we have to talk about polarization, not spin. Thus, we’re talking about the polarization. There are two states of polarization, say zero and one for photons, and while the particles are entangled, they coexist. It’s also the case if they’re entangled, no matter how far apart they are. For instance, if we make one of them collapse by measuring it – we measure and ask the particle, “Are you in a zero or in a one state?” If we ask that, then it will immediately collapse either to one or zero with a 50% probability. Automatically, when we do that, the other entangled photon will collapse to the opposite state (if this was one, the other will be zero). The problem is that if we measure it, we make it collapse, and we make it acquire the opposite state. What information can we transmit with this?
Can you somehow choose the states that you want to collapse it in?
There’s the problem. We cannot choose the state. It doesn’t have to be 50% likely which one will be chosen. It can be other probabilities. However, we cannot choose this. This is one part of quantum mechanics; it’s stochastic, which means there is a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
What about an experiment where you have two of these particles, one of them is in a zero state, the other is in a one state. The way to send a signal from afar is to change the state of the first particle, and then the other one will change automatically, and then you’ll have a signal.
The problem is that we cannot do this unless they’re entangled, and they stop being entangled once we measure them for the first time; we only get one chance to change them at the same time. Remember, we said one of them was in a zero state. We can’t know this unless we already measured it, and if we’ve already measured it, we collapse the wave function, which means that they are not entangled anymore, and they will not do this nice trick anymore.
What it comes down to is how is there a connection between the two when they must have traveled miles and miles. When one wave function collapses, how does the wave function light-years away know that it should collapse in this way or another?
Nobody knows what this connection is. Nobody understands this. It’s not known how these particles know about each other, or why they collapse simultaneously and into opposite states.
One of the wildest interpretations is the so-called many-worlds interpretation, or the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, which basically says that when we have a situation like this, the universe splits into all possibilities. A universe is generated automatically (a world leaf I think it’s called), where the first particle collapses to zero and the other to one, and another universe leaf is formed where the opposite happens. The thing is that this interpretation agrees very nicely with a lot of the properties of quantum mechanics – in some cases, better than the Copenhagen interpretation, which is like the old-school interpretation.
Which is?
Basically, the active act of measuring something, whether by a consciousness or by an unconscious interacting particle, causes the wave function to collapse. It’s a causal thing. However, there is no known mechanism for why it should cause it to collapse. This has never been explained.
This is very interesting if we correlate this now with Buddhist theory, let’s say in a Chittamatra sense, which is that observing something establishes that it exists; it doesn’t cause it to exist. The same thing as we were saying in terms of mental labeling in Prasangika. Mental labeling doesn’t create it, but it establishes its existence as this or that.
Also, what is interesting is when you say that two things occur simultaneously, that’s time because simultaneous is also from a point of view of time.
In the Buddhist teachings, we were talking about how time is the interval between the experience of a cause and the experience of an effect, and so we’re talking about experience here. Whereas from the Western point of view, you’re talking about information that is transmitted which would allow you to have an experience at two different… well, you can’t say it’s at two different times, but which would allow you to experience a cause and experience an effect.
Then, of course, the question is (and this came up in our discussion of the existence of external phenomena or not): Is the information coming from an external causal event, like a person eating on Mars, and then we know the result of that later on (so there’s a time interval)? Is the information coming from our own mental continuum? Where is this information coming from? But it’s this whole idea of information. Whatever that information is, the information is encoded in light? Or what is the information? That’s a difficult question, and perhaps you can answer that from informatics. Science is also dealing with the question of: What’s the connection between cause and effect? Is it an information connection? What is it?
Information is whatever allows us to reduce the uncertainty and refine our understanding, to refine our guess.
What type of phenomenon is it? Is it a form of physical matter? Is it a way of being aware of something? Is it neither? Is it a static fact? Is it affected by things? Where would you put it in the Buddhist classification scheme of knowable phenomena?
It would probably be a non-static phenomenon. No, it would probably be static.
I don’t know. I’m asking you.
I’m not sure. I never thought about it.
If it’s static, how can it move at the speed of light? How does information come from an object to us? Before you know the information, how could you say that the information has left its source? For example, a star a billion light-years away – that information left that star, we receive it now, and you somehow infer that it left there a billion years ago. Well, did it really leave there a billion years ago? Was it information then?
Well, information is an abstract term. I mean, even if we use it just conventionally and say, “I’ve received information,” or something like that, or we have “essential information,” then information is an abstraction that might be made on the basis of different carriers. For example, we could have a CD, or an old-fashioned record or whatever, as the carrier that carries information about music, and we can reproduce it.
But you need a physical basis for the information, don't you?
The physical basis is not the same as the information, which would be an abstraction imputable on that, I think. If we think about it, also the information received depends on whether we know how to decode it. It not only depends on the message; it also depends on how we decode it. Nonetheless, there can be more information than we know how to decode.
When a Buddha teaches and everybody hears it in their own language, is it that the Buddha’s giving common-denominator information, and everybody then decodes it according to their own conceptual framework?
Difficult. I don’t know. Can we say that ultimately information is a cognitive category, like a fact, so it doesn’t make sense independently of a cognitive reference for it?
If it’s a category, it's static and so can’t be heard. Isn't the static information a cause for hearing it? If information is a static fact, is it created?
Well, we have to differentiate here. The mental event that’s cognizing the category, that would be created, but not the contents, the cognitive content, which would be a category, would be static.
The information doesn’t get changed? Can information get distorted?
Sure.
I must say, information is a very difficult concept to fit within the Buddhist framework, this concept of information.
However, it’s gaining a lot of preponderance in the scientific view (in a way, even more than matter and energy). It’s something to consider.
In any case, time seems to be, from a Western point of view, very much tied up with information, and information implies a relationship with a mind – what does it inform? It informs a mind. If there were no minds, could there be information?
A plant, for example, gives its genetic information through seeds to the next generation. From the Buddhist point of view, that’s not a mind there.
Well, the molecular structure of a crystal or a snowflake or stuff like that, that’s information?
It’s a form, a form of information. It’s both the carrier and the message, in a way.
Now, we are confusing a pattern with information. Is it information if it’s never known?
No, because information is what reduces uncertainty, and it has to be transmitted. There has to be a source and a receptor, and the receptor’s uncertainty is reduced.
Take the example of a crystal. We can have a bowl full of water below zero degrees, and if it’s very still, it doesn’t freeze. However, if we add just a drop of ice, just a small piece of crystal of ice, it will immediately crystallize. It’s a kind of information about the structure that ice should have.
Then, information doesn’t have to inform a mind.
Right. Western science is concerned mostly with external objects, and Buddhism concerns itself mostly with sentient beings and the mind. However, there is definitely a relationship and a transfer of information from one external object to another.
But relativity all has to do with observers, doesn’t it?
They don’t have to be minds, though. They can be two cesium atoms.
They can be two cesium atoms, but it would be irrelevant unless somebody looked at the so-called information from the cesium atoms. How would you know?
Physics speaks about the vanishing of uncertainty when it speaks of quantum leaps. We have an interaction, and that interaction allows us to know more, so it changes our view of the thing, and only that can be described in the formulas. Physics describes what could be known about something in a certain setting, not the thing independently of that, because we can know more than we know if there is more to the thing that we could know.
What about these entangled particles? Isn’t it that when you observe them, then it’s one or the other – it’s either zero or one?
Until we observe them, they are superimposed.
Where’s the information? Where’s the information that it’s zero or one?
It still has not been decided.
Is there uncertain information? Your observation of it makes it certain, so it makes it information?
Yes.
Then, is there time?
It’s also a difficult issue because it’s not possible to unite quantum mechanics and relativity. I mean, a moment ago, we were criticizing the idea of simultaneity, and right now we have no problem with the simultaneity of two particles collapsing at the same time, no? This problem also arises because there is no theory of quantum gravity.
What if those particles were traveling at different speeds? What makes two particles entangled?
Two particles become entangled in the physical process of them being created, them being generated.
Will they always be traveling at the same speed?
Not necessarily. We could even contain one and make it stationary, and the other one could travel in a fiber optic for miles and miles. This has been done actually.
Then, simultaneity really wouldn’t work.
The problem is that normal processes that can’t be explained without quantum mechanics really can’t perpetuate themselves through space at a speed faster than light, and here we have some sort of strange connection that is not limited by the speed of light.
It's "spooky action" at a distance. Einstein was very much put off by quantum mechanics because this exactly undermines the thing that he found in relativity. In a way, it undermines causality because then we don’t have this neat chain of causation where one thing will trigger the next, and that triggers the next. However, we cannot transmit information through this. It points to a connectedness that is not limited to the normal causality, which is limited by the speed of light. We get two different partial theories which, until now, haven’t been combined because nobody has been able to completely remove the contradictions.
Anyway, let’s go on.
Okay, we made a little jump to quantum mechanics now, and this is actually good because I had not really devoted much time to it here. I’ll tell you in a second why I didn’t devote so much.
Past, Present and Future in Western Science
What’s next in the Buddhist presentation is past, present and future – are they simultaneous or what?
Some scientists conclude from this fact of spooky action that there is no privileged present moment and where past, present and future are just as real or just as much a fantasy as each other. If we have no privileged present moment, then we could conclude that time is a kind of timescape – in the way that we could speak about a landscape – in which we can move forward or backward. Experience is only movement in these four dimensions, but actually, it’s that everything is already preset, in a way, and we’re only moving forward in this direction. I think this interpretation is not very good if we take causality into consideration, but some scientists hold this view.
Now, I’m going to jump to this factor – I think it’s not very well known – that laws of physics are actually time-reversible. The laws of quantum mechanics are basically Schrödinger’s equations; they’re time-reversible mostly, except for the phenomenon of collapsing wave functions. However, the classical simplifications of Schrödinger’s equations – which are both Newton’s laws of motion and Maxwell’s equations that described electromagnetism – all of them are time-reversible, meaning that if we played a tape of any of these laws in action in the forward and reverse direction, we really couldn’t tell which one is a correct direction.
Could you please give a more specific example? Those of us who don’t have a scientific background don’t really know what you’re referring to.
Yes, it’s coming. The example is a water molecule and what water looks like at a microscopic scale. Water’s a good example because we have the action of all these laws together:
- We have the laws of electromagnetism because water has a positive and a negative partial charge, meaning that it has positively charged hydrogen and slightly negatively charged oxygen.
- Newton’s laws of motion also play a role because water molecules are continuously crashing into one another. Think of water and how that looks at the microscopic level. They are constantly crashing against each other, and so the laws of motion apply.
- Schrödinger’s equations (meaning quantum mechanics) also apply because we have electrons surrounding this molecule. If we want to know about the behavior of the electrons around it, we would have to solve Newton’s equations of motion.
I’m going to show a little movie about the so-called molecular dynamic simulation of water to demonstrate how it’s really hard to tell if these laws are going in the forward or the backward direction. If we have an equilibrium – meaning that the water is at a fixed temperature, say 25 degrees Celsius, and if the water is not undergoing any phase changes, meaning that it’s not evaporating and it’s not freezing – and if the water is left alone in this equilibrium of 25 degrees, and then if we look at the microscopic structure of it, which is dynamic, we can’t really tell if it’s going in the forward or backward direction.
The big part is the oxygen, and the two smaller parts are hydrogens. The waters are interacting with each other following, in this case, the classical Newton’s laws of motion. These yellow things that we’re seeing there are interactions between positive and negative parts, also called hydrogen bonds. Think about it. If I played this in the reverse direction, could we really tell that I’m playing it in the reverse direction? All the little clashes would be played back in the reverse direction, but could we really tell? Sadly, this computer format doesn’t let me play this video backward, which is what I wanted to do, but try to imagine what this looks like when it is played backward.
Time reversibility means that at a very microscopic scale within the equilibrium regime, all of these laws of physics are time-reversible.
To help those who are just reading or listening to this: If you imagine a container filled with ping-pong balls, and you shake it up, and you take a movie of the balls and their interactions as they bounce against each other, and you play that forward and backward, you wouldn’t be able to tell which is the forward one and which one is the backward one.
For example, Newton’s third law of motion, the action and reaction of these molecules, which is definitely active in this computer simulation, is time-reversible.
What makes nature have an arrow of time? What makes us definitely distinguish what is the direction of time? The answer has to do with irreversibility and with a quantity called entropy, which was discovered by Rudolf Clausius in 1865. He lived here in Berlin. Actually, it’s very likely that the concept of entropy was invented in this city. Entropy can be defined for any kind of random event or any kind of event that can have several possible outcomes.
What is entropy?
Entropy is the amount of disorder in a system. For example, ice (frozen water) has much lower entropy than molten water, because in the molten water – in the glass of water – we would have many more possibilities for the water to arrange. In the ice, in the crystal ice, the ice is very tightly packed in a very regular shape, so the entropy of that shape would be a lot lower because it’s a lot more ordered.
Is it measured with numbers and a unit?
Yes, it’s measured with numbers and a unit. In thermodynamics, calories per degree kelvin are the units of entropy. However, entropy has these units only so that they cancel out in a formula called free energy. The main point here is that entropy is only a measure of the multiplicity or the number of possibilities available to a substance. Water has available a lot more possibilities than ice, in that sense.
That would be very relevant to karma and the discussion of karmic tendencies. Does it have a large entropy (it could ripen into many possible forms) or a very low entropy (it could only ripen into one possible result)? You could apply entropy to karma in our Buddhist discussion. That’s very interesting.
Matthieu Ricard suggests that entropy is very similar to the concept of subtle impermanence because the entropy of the universe is rising, is always going up. The disorder of the universe is always increasing. Thus, entropy is similar to this subtle impermanence. Do you know what I mean?
Well, if things are going to a more disordered state, a greater multiplicity of states, that change is happening from moment to moment. Subtle impermanence means that each moment something is going closer to its end, and the cause for the disintegration of something is its creation.
Exactly. That would be another statement for the second law of thermodynamics, in a way. Being made of parts means that they are arranged in a very special way with very low entropy, and because entropy’s always increasing, these parts are becoming disordered and disintegrating, thereby destroying what had been constructed. However, it’s not entropy that’s similar to subtle impermanence. Rather, it’s the second law of thermodynamics – that entropy is always increasing. That’s the one that’s actually similar to subtle impermanence.
What about in terms of the ripening of karma? You do a certain action, and there are many, many possibilities of what it could ripen into. As you progress in terms of your lifespan, or many lifespans, you could do various things that would make it stronger or weaker, etc. However, when it ripens, then it can only be in one state in which it ripens. It’s going from many possibilities to fewer possibilities, so that’s negative entropy.
Yes, but that would also be, in a way, similar to the collapse of a wave function. It has many ways to ripen but it just ripens into one.
How does that fit with entropy, the laws of entropy, that the universe is going to increase the entropy? When things happen, does that mean decreased entropy?
Yes, but the entropy of the matter and energy is always increasing, which means their order is always decreasing. I have not given thought to the mind-stream’s karma and how we could define entropy for it. It would be very interesting.
Well, it would be a very good topic for you to analyze and report back.
Now in this next movie, we can certainly see that something is wrong. First, we have a liquid with mixed colors, and suddenly this liquid starts “un-melting” – doing the reverse of melting – into ice, and it forms ice of different colors, which means it has more order. The colors of the water unmix and they form ice, which is definitely something that we would never see.
The water looked as though it was just one color mixed together to make a blur.
Yes, that's because all the colors at the beginning of the movie were mixed together as a blur, and the color started separating, the ice started reforming, and we definitely recognize this is something that’s impossible.
What is this an example of? increased or decreased entropy?
It's playing backwards from what would actually happen. It would be an example of decreasing entropy, which would be against the second law of thermodynamics. This would never happen.
I see. If that were to happen, it would be a decrease of entropy because it goes to a higher state of being fixed in structure.
Exactly. The normal course of things is for them to decay and go into a state of higher entropy.
We naturally recognize an arrow of time, so when we see a process like that, of water un-melting, we recognize it as wrong. It’s not because of the laws of quantum mechanics, it’s rather because of entropy, which creates a kind of arrow of time because everything is going into a state where the possibilities are greater. For example, the water on its own goes from this state of very ordered ice into a state of molten water.
What happens when it’s winter and the water turns to ice?
Well, that’s because the general temperature allows for it, but energy is also released into the system, so it’s an equilibrium.
When we put water in an ice cube tray into the freezer, the freezer has to extract energy from the water in order to generate ice. It has to take energy or heat away. However, we have to plug in our freezer in order for it to do that, right? This is because we need more energy to generate that ice than the energy that we get from the ice itself. Because we want to reduce the entropy of that system, we need to put a lot more energy than the little energy that comes out of the ice when it becomes ice. A demonstration that ice actually releases energy when it freezes is that – the reverse operation – when we put it into our drink, it absorbs energy in the process of melting.
The heat convection belt of the whole earth would make some regions colder than others, but that still doesn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics. At certain times of the year, certain regions will be colder.
Can we say that time is a measurement of different states of entropy? I’m trying to stay relevant to our topic.
I think we can say that entropy gives us a natural feeling of which direction time goes – it goes forward, nothing more. It doesn’t tell us the rate of change, because there is no such thing as a rate of change of time; there is no “one second per second.”
Biological Clocks
There’s only one little topic left. Just as the last topic, I wanted to briefly mention that there is such a thing as a biological clock that works inside all of us. All living beings, from bacteria all the way to plants, animals and humans, we actually all have more than one biological clock. I’m not talking about aging. I’m talking about the 24-hour cycles of bodies and all the things that are coupled to it, like the release of hormones and the substances that keep us awake, the states of the brain and so on – all of these are coupled to internal clocks.
Is it a function of there being light?
No, it’s a chemical function by itself. It can become entrained by light, meaning that if we have access to light, our biological clock will synchronize with this light. However, if we’re locked in a room with no light, our cycles will continue to be more or less 24 hours; once we see light again, they will synchronize, so to speak, again with these cycles. Nonetheless, they are not controlled by light.
What about a blind person who doesn’t see light?
Interesting. I don’t know about this. Their biological clocks probably have other cues. I think I have heard that if some part of the optical nerve is damaged – or I don’t know what should be damaged – so that they can’t see visual images, then still, in some cases, it seems to be possible that the information of it being bright or not being bright still affects them through the eyes, although not in a way that is processed as seeing. That also seems to affect people’s feelings of time in some way. However, if our eyes are plucked out, of course, that doesn't happen.
What about the industrial raising of chickens for eggs? They keep chickens in this house with 24 hours of light, and as a result, they give more eggs. However, the eggs are not so good as when there was darkness for the chickens to enjoy.
We are forcing the biological cycles when we keep a chicken 24 hours with light in order for them to produce more eggs. Certainly, we are making these biochemical functions run much faster.
One big development two years ago was that for the first time it was possible to make a biological clock in a test tube, using just three proteins without light, without the influence of light, and have them perform a 24-hour cycle. These are the three proteins that do this, just like a representation we use in molecular biology of the shape of these proteins. We basically need three different proteins and an energy source, which is ATP, and we put those in a test tube, and they perform a 24-hour cycle.
What’s ATP?
ATP is adenosine triphosphate. It’s like the energy source – the major energy currency of plants, animals and humans (well, we are animals). It’s a chemical, and it’s the major energy currency of the body, the most easily tapped energy source. Of the food that we use for gaining energy, a lot of it gets transformed directly into ATP, which is stored in the cells and is ready to be used in any process needed. We just have to break a little chemical bond and use the energy that’s released, with no residue. It’s very clean, so to speak. All the dirty stuff is done in other parts of the metabolism.
We just need three proteins and ATP, and we can reproduce a bacterial biological clock like this.
Why is it 24 hours?
It just works like that. We can change the temperature and the pH – we can change a lot of conditions – and it’s very resilient and keeps to 24-hour cycles.
Also, as I mentioned, we don’t have just one biological clock; as humans, we have more than one biological clock. Different functions are controlled by different biological clocks, but this is not really well understood. The ones that I’ve read about are actually 24-hour clocks which can be entrained, but I don't know if all of them are 24-hour cycles.
Give us an example of things that run according to biological clocks. Sleep, I guess, would be an obvious one. What else?
Mood. Hunger. Going to the toilet. It depends on the person. For instance, what happens when we get jetlag is a good example of how this biological clock needs a reset and needs to be entrained again.
Why is it some people have horrible jetlag and some don’t? I’ve never really experienced jetlag. I travel all the time.
It probably has to do with the biochemical flexibility of that biological clock. It’s probably that different people have evolved different proteins and mechanisms to deal with it. Some of them are easier to reset. However, in a way, a biological or a bacterial clock is not really that different from a mechanical clock in the sense, that it’s subject to the same laws of physics; it would be subject to the same kinds of effects from relativity. It’s no different from a cesium atom being measured. It’s just time, in that sense.
Conclusion
Dr. Numata: Just a brief take-home message: We measure change, but we don’t measure time itself.
Dr. Berzin: Well, Buddhism would agree with that.
Like relativity theory would say that there is no universal present.
Buddhism would agree with that too.
Mechanical laws are time-reversible.
As we said, that has to do basically with the observation of events and not with time itself.
However, through entropy – which is just the tendency towards decay or disorder – we perceive an arrow of time, that time flows in one direction and not in the other one.
How does entropy fit together with cause and effect?
I don’t know. I really don’t know. This is homework.
Think about that. Because this is saying that entropy, the tendency towards decay, gives an arrow of time. However, Buddhism would say there is a certain arrow of time. It isn’t that something that’s already happened is going to happen in the future; it’s not yet happening. It has to do with cause and effect. Thus, there must be a relationship, and that we’d have to think about.
I would think, as you said, there are the various causes, and there are many possibilities of what the result could be, and when it actually reaches the result, that’s the most ordered state. This is a very important principle in terms of cause and effect in Buddhism, and especially in terms of what a Buddha knows when a Buddha knows the future.
We’ll get to that. Does a Buddha just know all the possibilities that could happen? Does a Buddha know the final, lowest entropy state of what actually will happen? These are questions that we have to think about. Does a Buddha know what could happen or what will happen, what will definitely happen?