npub1dt…4hgu0 on Nostr: Was thinking about time and how we know whether one event preceded or followed ...

Was thinking about time and how we know whether one event preceded or followed another. Like there’s nothing axiomatic about the words on this screen succeeding my typing them. I could dictate them and type them afterwords for the hell of it.

But in some cases we know what came first and what came second, for example, a whole egg and a splattered one. The whole egg MUST precede the splattered one. The splattered one can never reassemble into the whole. That’s because the splattered egg is more disordered (has more entropy) and the arrow of time is essentially increasing entropy.

But biological systems in some ways undercut that because while it’s trivial to grasp the whole egg came before the splattered one, it’s hard to say whether it came before the chicken.