How to remember the future with reversible memories and bioluminescent patches

Unlike us the laws of the universe don’t make a distinction between the past and the future. Time can be thought of as flowing backwards as easily — but perhaps not as intuitively — as it is thought of as moving forwards. Which means that in fact it doesn’t flow at all. Like a movie reel all the frames exist simultaneously. The credits are already there even though you have just started watching the movie. Like the past the future is set in stone. We perceive time as flowing forwards because we remember only the past at any given moment. This is called the psychological arrow of time. Our sense of the flow of time is a neurological illusion conjured by the law of entropy and Darwinian evolution. In fact, just like free lunches, free wills don’t exist. Neo was always going to take the red pill. With the exact same motion of the hands, the exact same contractions of his esophagus and so on. You could also say he regurgitated the pill and put it on Morpheus’s hand. In fact, all his actions are events which exist “simultaneously” and without a preferred direction. Do read the block universe theory.

The question which then gets thrown around is “why don’t people remember the future?”. If time is essentially static and without a preferred direction, then what stops us from having memories of the future like we have of the past? If we remember what has happened after it has happened, then we should remember what will happen before it happens. But we don’t. For example, nobody remembered the 2020 pandemic in 2018. And the answer is of course the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Which says that the total entropy of an isolated system in the “future” tends to be more than that in the “past”. This being the thermodynamic arrow of time. But could a brain be designed in such a way that it remembers the future?

First, a definition of a biological memory and then how we can create an organism which remembers the future. We will speak of only visual memory in this article to keep things simple.

What is a memory?

A memory in general is an arrangement of matter in a well-defined body (like a human being) helping us “relive” past events. Memories are patterns of atoms created by information incoming from the outside world. Like an electronic storage system.

Let’s say a person faced a violet colored circle which then gave off its violet photons which struck their two retinas, stimulated their two optic nerves, caused signals to flow and ultimately caused a few nerve cells to position themselves in a certain fashion. This is a memory because it can be used to recreate the sensation when signals from your optic nerves reached your brain and it points to an actual event (of incoming light) in the past.

So, a biological memory is the arrangement of a group of neurons which when fired together produce roughly the same electrical signals which were produced by the outside information responsible for the memory.

What it can mean to remember the future

Assume that one Saturday night you dreamt seeing the lottery results on your TV on the next day’s (Sunday) morning. You have the memory and your brain can run it to let you watch in your head the winning number flash on your TV screen whenever you wish. So far so good.

The next day if you see on your TV that the same number has been drawn in the lottery would it mean that you remembered the future? No. It’s because your memory was not created by that event. It is not linked to that event in any way. What happened was a coincidence and not you remembering the future.

Then let’s try to see how a valid future memory could form by rewinding the process of memory creation ->

1. You have a memory of a violet circle in the form of neural connections. Let it be that the memory was formed by your imagination and you have never seen a violet circle before. Maybe you formed that memory by combining the memories of a violet triangle and a green circle that you have seen in the past.

2. You can recall this violet circle in your head when you want to. Recalling happens when your long-term memory creates the same electrical signals which were created by the entry of outside light.

3. After some time, the memory is reversed (forgotten) sending impulses down the optic nerves.

4. The retinas emit some light to the outside world.

5. The violet photons may then get imprinted on a photographic plate forming a violet circle.

The memory is a valid memory of the future because this memory points to outside information entering (leaving) your eyes.

It is important that the future memory is reversed because otherwise it will not be a memory of the future. In case of past memories, say you have a memory of a violet circle from Saturday and then you see an identical violet circle the next day (Sunday) in identical circumstances so that the Sunday event doesn’t create any new memory. So, the memory you have on Monday would be the memory of Saturday and not of Sunday. Similarly, if you retain your future memory after radiating away those photons then it is not the memory of that event. This however is not done to prevent you from altering the future. You could very well copy your future memory to a new area of your brain and then forget the original memory.

Also recall of future memories must happen in the normal manner. If recall too happens in reverse, then we could as well call the past the future and claim that we have future memories. We are forward moving beings and so backward forming memories should make sense to us.

Soothsayer squids

If there were a squid with a reversible memory and two bioluminescent patches (and of course two eyes) on its rubbery skin, then it could remember the future. It sees a blown-up pufferfish and forms a memory which distorts into one of a leather soccer ball. The squid then reverses (forgets) the memory giving off light from the two patches which briefly reflects off a whitish patch of a coral reef much to perhaps the amusement of a wandering octopus.

Why the future memory is not as neat as the past one

This sort of future memory may look contrived and problematic at the first glance. First, a shark could just hammer the head of our mantic mollusc into calamari and prevent it from materializing its memory. Second, the memory looks limited to the extent of what the squid itself can do. The former doesn’t seem to be linked to real objects. The squid would certainly not remember any young clownfish in the area getting captured by some scuba divers in the future!

For the first case, if that happens then it would simply have been a false memory of the future. We have false memories of the past all the time which were created from synaptic activity and which do not point to any real outside information. So, it makes sense that we could have similar false future memories which do not point to any real outside information.

For the second case we need to understand that when we remember seeing something, we just remember the photons given off by it. There really isn’t any definite information about for instance what may be inside that object. And whenever future memories are reversed the resulting photons would eventually find their way on the surface of some object. That is quite real. You could still argue that remembering having seen a violet ball is not quite the same as flashing some violet light on a yellow ball. Let’s say you saw a yellow ball in the past and stored the memory. If we reverse this, we have the memory getting destroyed and yellow photons getting radiated by your retinas onto the ball. Was it a chance that the ball you shone your light on was also yellow? No, because in emitting the yellow light you are reducing the entropy of the universe when going back in time, a process which obeys the 2nd law of thermodynamics. To do the same thing in future with your ‘violet’ memories you will have to get an ‘inverse’ violet ball which absorbs your violet light and combines it with dissipated heat to give off white light. This is possible but hard to do because entropy can’t decrease like that unless the total entropy of the universe increases. Think of an AC which cools a room thereby reducing its entropy but warms the outside leading to an overall rise in the entropy of the universe.

So, the more “real” you want your future memory to be the more you will have to invest in decreasing the entropy of the system around yourself at the expense of increasing the entropy of the rest of the universe.

Conclusion

The statement — “If we remember what has happened after it has happened then we should remember what will happen before it happens”

can perhaps be more pertinently asked as ->

If we can memorize what has happened after it has happened, then we should be able to forget what will happen before it happens.

So perhaps the correct question would be why we don’t forget the future. The answer is we can but it’s not worth it given that entropy can only increase in the future direction. It’s easier to work along the thermodynamic arrow of time. Remembering the future would hardly have any evolutionary dividends. After all you can’t eat the antelope you projected on your cave wall with your bioluminescent patches.