It might be interesting to consider how and whether time is relevant to computation. For example-- does time have an arrow on a computer?
It does, for at least two reasons:
1) Computation physically produces heat and increases entropy.
2) Many operations lose information -- for example XOR's can't be run backwards to reproduce the original inputs.
Does having a time-reversible programming language mean that if you start with the output of a given program, you can run the program backwards and get the input?
This would be useful outside of research. Though, I expect the memory usage will be ridiculous.
In that way everything is trivially "reversible", so this is not a meaningful category. What is meant by reversible operation is that you can get its input from just the output.
Still working through the article, but it reminded me of the presumable fact that everything that happened before the first conscious entity existed in the Universe was essentially instantaneous. Same goes for time's forward direction. Without consciousness, i.e. with a perfect form of stasis, one could time travel to just before the heat death of the Universe in an instant.
John Archibald Wheeler took this idea even further with the PAP, the Participatory Anthropic Principle.
I assume you meant "can't"? I think the parent simply made a poor choice of words, "a perfect form of stasis" fits a lot better than "without consciousness"
I actually assert this! But that is because I say the word "exist" is meaningless without a conscious observer. I would claim that existence requires consciousness and vice versa.
The passage of time is an emergent property of quantum entanglement. Yes, I know that sounds like new-age hooey, but it's actually based on solid science:
“Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”
It might be a stretch, but this seems like a small glimpse of the concept of a time differential ('dt'), a thousand years before the math existed to describe it explicitly.
It does, for at least two reasons: 1) Computation physically produces heat and increases entropy. 2) Many operations lose information -- for example XOR's can't be run backwards to reproduce the original inputs.
People have tried to tackle both issues with reversible computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
Someone even wrote a programming language that was (logically) time-reversible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(time-reversible_computi...