[MD] The Anti-entropic Miopic

[Case]

Case,
For your consideration.
Best,
Mark.
 
Scientists have in fact constructed a plausible story of how we become aware
of change, and it makes no use of absolute disappearances and replacements. 
Our universe is described as in a state of very low entropy - great
orderliness - at the Big Bang extremity of its career. Events successively
more distant in time from this point are almost always of greater and
greater disorderliness, rather as cards ordered by suit and rank take on,
almost always, more and more confused arrangements with shuffling. 

[Case]
This part is fine more or less. But notice in his card shuffling example the
"almost always". Shuffling cards is an exercise in probability. There is a
specifiable probability with each shuffle that the cards will into a
completely orderly pattern. Or they might shuffle so that all of the hearts
are together in order but the diamond clubs and spades are disordered. Or
one might contrive something about the deck that influenced the probability
of certain patterns emerging. Like shaving the edges off of the spades so
that the probability of spades being separated for each other is reduced and
spades become inherently more orderly than the other suits.

[More from Leslie]
Now, the general trend towards disorderliness at moments more and more
remote from the Big Bang is parasitised by living systems, brains included,
to increase their own orderliness in useful ways - in the case of brains,
often through orderly transfer of information from moment to moment, as in
the case of memorising and recalling. Such orderly transfer is possible only
in the direction earlier-to-later, this being the direction opposite to the
entropy increase that is being parasitised. - (Leslie. 2003. Infinite Minds.
p. 119)

[Case]
There is a really big gap here between the extreme order of the Big Bang
moving toward disorder and living systems. As the universe moves toward
extreme disorder patterns form, relationships among the patterns occur and
influence further transformations. This would be a bit like shaving the
spades so that certain patterns of relationship have higher probability.
Matter clustering into galaxies for example occurs because of the forces of
gravity and motion. I do not know where Leslie was coming from or going with
this but especially with regards to the nature of memory and entropy here is
this from Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time:

"The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has
established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe.
If you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded
about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have
increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading
the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered
energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat
that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat. This will
increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million million
million million units - or about ten million million million times the
increase in order in your brain - and that's if you remember everything in
this book."