I'm glad you bring this up, I've been interested in a discussion on this.
Drescher makes extensive use of the generalized concept of a "wake": in the ball case, a wake is where you can identify which direction is "pastward", i.e., to the direction of minimal inter-particle entanglement. Any mechanism that allows such an identification can be though of as a generalization of the "wake" that happens in the setup.
One such wake is the formation of memories (including memories in a brain), which, like the literal wake, exploit regularities of the environment to "know" the pastward direction, and (also like the wake) necessarily involve localized decrease but global increase of entropy. (edit: original was reversed)
So yes, I agree that Drescher is saying that the interparticle correlations are what determine the subjective feeling of time -- but he's also saying that the subjective feeling (memory formation) necessarily involves a local decrease of entropy and counterbalancing increase somewhere else.
I'm glad you bring this up, I've been interested in a discussion on this.
Unfortunately, I'm probably not the ideal person to carry out this discussion with you. I got my copy of the book through interlibrary-loan and it is due back tomorrow. :-(
Less Wrong is a large community of very smart people with a wide spectrum of expertise, and I think relatively little of that value has been tapped.
Like my post The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, this is meant to be a community-driven post. The first goal is to identify topics the Less Wrong community would like to read more about. The second goal is to encourage Less Wrongers to write on those topics. (Respecting, of course, the implicit and fuzzy guidelines for what should be posted to Less Wrong.)
One problem is that those with expertise on a subject don't necessarily feel competent to write a front-page post on it. If that's the case, please comment here explaining that you might be able to write one of the requested posts, but you'd like a writing collaborator. We'll try to find you one.
Rules
You may either:
or...
I will regularly update the list of suggested Less Wrong posts, ranking them in descending order of votes (like this).
The List So Far (updated 02/11/11)