Time Travel

Published on November 8, 2004 By Capi Crimini In Pure Technology

When we talk about time travel, we're inevitably going to have to start with the concepts of time and of travel.

Tackling time... let's first observe that when we're talking about time travel, we're talking about moving the self through time and so it's obviously subjective time we're talking about (not objective). Next, observe that subjective time is always in the now -- it's only present, it's not past or future. (The now contains records of the past, but the subjective self is always in the present. See the "Is there time in the mind?" thread.)

What about travel? Travel, to me, seems to boil down to the changing of scenery. (Considering Einstein can tell us there is no objective motion, it can't be motion that forms the basis of what travel is about.)

Putting these ideas together, what we have so far is time travel as being the act of changing the scenery of subjective reality. Since this could just as easily refer to going for a drive, we're going to want to be more specific and say that it's about changing the scenery to be certain specifications designated by dates. A time line is like a map, but instead of saying "if you want to reach these landmarks go west for 50 miles" it says "if you want to reach these landmarks go to the past for 50 years." Just as miles are a measure of travel through space, years are a measure of travel through time. The trip made in miles consists of constant gradual changing of the scenery to move from one specific state of affairs (your starting point) to another (your destination). The trip made in years is no different, except for the obvious fact that we're being driven along it as the passenger (going forward in time) instead of driving. However, if we could drive the time machine, then to go to the past we would simply drive the direction of causal events in the opposite direction for the specified distance until we reach the landmark (year in history) we want. Note, however, that we don't change everything as we go back -- we don't send our own self's events in the opposite direction, because we want to be there to observe.

Reminding ourselves once again that subjective time is always the present, here's what our action of time travel really boils down to: we're rearranging our universe into the pattern it was a certain distance back (which, if you're a determinist, you can deduce the looks of based on the present), with the minor difference of placing our self in it. In other words, we're creating a near-replica, perfect except for the addition of the self.

To "time travel" to a specific point in the past is to set the pattern of the universe to be as it was at that point identified by the date. Set the system back to a specific description associated with a particular date label, and that's time travel... except for the tiny insignificant change in the system of there now being you, the observer, added to the system.

Note how by seeing time travel as the change of the physical description of the universe which exists in the ever-present "now" of subjective time, we seem to be free from the paradoxes people are always complaining about with time travel. If you kill your grandfather, for example, you won't cease to exist because you're already a part of the system that is the now. (And to travel back to the future, that's just to reorder things and even if you find you nobody knows you in the future that just means you've created a sort of alternate universe... but you still exist.)

Of course, it's not like anyone can reorder the entire universe into a specific pattern at will. I think it can be said to work for thought experiments though, despite not being anything that could be done by a non-omnipotent being.

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