In this article, I present the possibility of the nonexistence of past and future from the point of the discipline of computer science I bent to my liking, until it cracked somewhat. As usual, if you don’t understand, you shall treat this as a random nonsense which is thrown out of my random mind which is starting to be believed to be caused by a very meticulously crafted quantum fluctuations 15 billion years ago (I don’t seem to be going to believe that in the near future). I don’t claim any kind of wisdom. I don’t claim any kind of knowledge. I don’t claim anything.
Let S be the current state of the Universe; this may be very abstract but let’s say that such state exists. Let f be a function, not necessarily invertible, which maps a state of the Universe to another state of the Universe, that is the thing we call ‘the next state’ or ‘the immediate future’.
For example, let’s say that S contains a man who is hungry, f(S) contains the same man, but who is eating, and f(f(S)) contains the same man, but who is full already. This example is surely an extremely gross oversimplification; the real state of the Universe is much more complex than that.
In this model, the Universe acts as an abstract computer. Its computational power doesn’t need to be huge, however; no matter how fast nature computes, man is designed to feel a second as a second; the speed of our perception of time is independent of how fast nature can compute.
All nature does is store S in its memory, compute f(S), and replace S with f(S), and repeat that for an indeterminate number of times. We can’t even know whether such process is really the truth of how the Universe operates or not, because we are in it and there is a possibility that it is designed to be completely isolated, such in a completely isolated virtual machine; the system inside that virtual machine simply cannot know anything outside that virtual machine. To the system inside that virtual machine, everything outside that virtual machine does not exist, and therefore the inside system cannot perceive, let alone know about, anything outside that virtual machine.
I hope I can write and prove that there exists things which cannot be known after defining ‘to know’, ‘to believe’, ‘knowledge, ‘belief’, and so on, to model the human ‘acquisition’ of knowledge, to prove that this ‘acquisition’ is limited to ‘perception’ (that is human can only know what they can perceive; other that that, all he/she can do is to believe; sometimes, results of inferences are called ‘knowledge’, although they should be classified as ‘assumption’, ‘belief’, ‘convention’, ‘story’, ‘pact’, or ‘agreement’ instead, because they cannot be perceived). By ‘to perceive’, I mean ‘to feel with the (physical) sense’.
When you call somebody a man, it is not because you know that he is a man, nor because you know what a man is. It is because you believe that he is a ‘man’, a word used to refer to every being which looks like the first man you saw after people who came before you made you to believe that such being shall be called ‘man’, and your brain is believed to somehow be able to determine whether something looks like that being or not. Well, this may be somewhat confusing, but the point is that you believe that you believe, and that goes on recursively infinitely.
The past exists in man’s memory. The future exists in man’s imagination. They do not necessarily really exist. They nonexistence are equally possible. Remembering the past doesn’t mean that it exists; it only means that your memory is somehow changed by your past experiences in such a way that you believe that you experienced that past.
If we go on with the way I use the words ‘know’ and ‘believe’, we can say that mathematics is a very large collection of beliefs stacked from several thousand years ago until now, and so is the thing we call science. You know something, but to express that you know that thing, you must turn that knowledge into a belief, and influence other people in such a way that they believe the knowledge you know and believe that you know; they don’t have the knowledge you have; they only believe that the knowledge has been duplicated among you and them. As such, knowledge can’t really be transferred, so ‘knowledge transfer’ is such a misnomer, a meaningless phrase.
We shall not act as if we knew; we don’t really know anything, so there is no need for one to feel arrogant because he/she feels or believes that he/she knows more than others or knows what others don’t know, while in truth that may be not the case.
I wasted your time?
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