Coming up on July 23

Sabine's take on free will makes me more aware of how our current actions and choices to some degree set us up for success or failure, so being proactive is a good way to go. I'm finding that a bit of a struggle but if I want to be like the people I admire, gotta go and do stuff and eat good food, etc.. I suppose if we take Einstein's statement as life advice, it's a reminder that there are things outside of our control but we still have agency in how many things turn out.

Interesting re. Smolin, please share what else you dig up, if you don't mind. I don't think organised religion and religious faith is all bad, it's that too many people abuse scripture for their own ends or don't know enough to have a good context for their beliefs. I found that the Christian shebang fell apart the more I learned about people and their lives, and finding out how our minds work. (Turns out that preservation of familiarity, and of our supposed comfort and safety does a lot of backseat driving, rather than Satan and temptation and sin, and so forth.)

Yeah, organized religion, yuck. In the 10 minutes I spent poking around the internet this morning, given a deterministic universe with time reversibility, the interpretation you describe is common. I saw something from Lee Smolin about some processes which are irreversible and therefore might disprove or significantly modify the block universe interpretation. I'd be talking out of my ass about it now, but in a couple days I'll be better educated and can make some cogent discussion then. There was a conference at Perimeter Institute in 2016 about this topic and I will see if Sabine has anything in the Backreaction archives.

@Tracey: 'That Guy Again' - BONUS double shot!

The only way I could get my head around Hossenfelderian Superdeterminism with No Free Will, which to me looks similar to Einstein's statement was by envisioning everything happening in a block Universe with our experiences of life being cones that reached a certain limited distance into our and our contemporaries' experiences of life, and it still made much more sense than 'God has a purpose for you, He knows what it is even if you don't', and 'you ended up with your life because of stuff you thought and did that you don't actually remember and the same for your next lives'. I put more stock in Hossenfelder tbh, wish I knew about that way of thinking years ago.

IF @SABINE DOESN'T ACTUALLY SAY 'That guy, again!', I WILL BE VERY mildly disappointed.

I've been suffering "that guy again" withdrawal symptoms these last few weeks -- this is a much needed video for my sanity.

Great. "That guy" again. ;)

Elahrairah

Einstein once wrote in a letter that "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Did Einstein really think the passage of time was an illusion? Or, rather, the real question is does Stefan have an obscure book in which Einstein's view on the matter is stated clearly? :-)