I've been wanting to publish stuff here for a while, and this just happened to be convenient, so... here it is. Lately I have done a ton of musing on the subject of time and how we experience it. Much of this post has crystallized from my idle pondering after having recently re-watched the cult classic movie Primer.
Time
I think the main objection I have, personally, to the notion
of “time travel” is that it is not accessible enough – which is really to say,
the current mental frameworks (at least that I have access to) don’t lead
anywhere useful in that department. We get paradoxes, or multiple-universe
questions, and generally it is impossible to do actual falsifiable research at
all.
So I want to start simpler, just to see where our footing is,
and we can go from there.
The first thing I want is not time travel but time visibility.
Clearly this is actually a very well-understood field: we have history, which records
information for later assessment. We have archaeology, which seeks to
understand the past via careful inference and re-discovery of truth that may
not have been explicitly recorded. And of course there are many ways to communicate
through time; we leave messages for the future constantly.
A voicemail is a message to a future recipient. All “mail,”
really, is about communicating in some way, and the implication is always that
the communication plays out towards the
future. Someday someone will get this message, this reminder, this string
tied on my little finger, this time capsule buried in the back yard.
Talking to the future (or the practical present) is effortless
to us. We do it all the time.
And if we can shake loose from the objectivist prison
briefly, humanity has a long and incredibly rich legacy of talking to the past.
These things are generally considered the domain of the
spiritual – séances, voodoo, ritual magic. Many traditions regard it as taboo
to commune with the dead; and many others do not. People describe dreams,
visions, and conversations with others long gone. Sometimes these meetings
occur unbidden (by the living, at least) and sometimes the participants are explicitly
summoned.
Like any conversation or meeting, these fit into universal patterns of
human experience. Some are chance. Accidental. Some are desperately sought
after. Even creative minds trapped in the mire of “rationalist” western
thinking cannot help but dream of the possibilities.
We still distinguish between what “science” can do and what
would be mocked or scorned as “magical.” But the wise of every era have warned
against staying locked in our mental ways. Perhaps the only wall remaining in
this prison is that our technology is not yet sufficiently advanced.
And perhaps, just maybe, it’s plenty.
What if we’re all just waiting for someone to sit around,
bored and curious on a Saturday morning, to take a look at what they can find
lying around… and make of it something more?
