My problem with having multiples of me in a given time is one of consciousness. In the past, I was there, and I was me. My consciousness resided in my head. Future me (or present me…) also has my consciousness, which is built on that of past me. I reside in my own head. Now, I go back in time, such that there are two mes. It doesn’t matter whether we meet or not; the time-travelling me is me, with my consciousness, but the past me is me as well, with my consciousness, though without the experiences that future me has. So how is that supposed to work…? The past me isn’t some third-party whom I can observe and interact with as just some random person - it’s me! Since I existed at that time, I must be in my own head. But since I also exist in the form of time-travelling me, my consciousness must reside in my time-travelling self’s head, as well!
In the TV show Lost, they apparently resolved this issue by having the time-traveller’s consciousness travel through time and supplant the past’s version, resulting in a high degree of disorientation as the person’s consciousness moved through time; the body remained in whatever time it was in, but was non-responsive. How have other stories dealt with this issue?
Never mind the problem of conservation of energy (travelling in time effectively adding 200 pounds to the mass of the universe at one point and subtracting it at another).
This stuff drives me crazy when I try to imagine time travel in a single time-line. If you imagine every trip into the past creating a new time-line, it gets rid of all the paradoxes and problems of causality. It always seemed silly to me in time travel stories when characters had to make a conscious decision not to do something in the past that would create a paradox and destroy all of time and space, or something. If the universe lets you do something, it’s not a paradox.
When 5:00 comes and I go home for the day, am I still at the office? If so, does that mean there’s two of me? And if not, isn’t there a gap in my presence at the office?
No, you’re not at the office - you’re at home. There is no gap at the office because you’ve moved your corporeal prescence elsewhere. If that wasn’t the case it would mean that you’d always be everywhere you’ve ever been.
I think the OP missed the point slightly. It’s not that you’d continue to be in the same place after jumping back in time - it’s that you’d already be there when you arrived. By your analogy, it would be more like leaving the office at 8am and arriving home before you left for work…
I thought that what **Chronos ** was saying in his first line was nothing to do with time travel; just going to the office, and then leaving it. Or have I misunderstood?
This is because the past NO LONGER EXISTS, it was destroyed to make the present. that is why the battle of austerlitz will never be fought again, and why a world in which nazi Germany won WWII cannot exist.
The past exists only in one sense-that it provided the raw material for the present.
If time travel were to be possible, why would this not result in an unstable world-one in which everything changes constantly? Each human decision has outcomes which diverge-keep Julius Caesar from assasination, and Albania conquers europe in 1939!
I still don’t see the problem – there are multiple mes in the time where we converge. Each is authentically “me”, although at different subjective times. There’s no contradiction, as long as you realize that “my” consciousness is not unique. If it were, all those Mes would have the same mind and memories. I have no reason to expect that.
Time Travel by having the mind travel into bodies existing in the past has been done before – Jack Chalker did it ages ago in Downtiming, and it was virtually the basis for the series Quantum Leap. Norman Spinrad did a version in which a person could mentally travel to any point in his lifetime after taking a drug, but was trapped within the time span of his or her own life.
[B[NineToTheSky** – my point was that none of these fictional time-ttravellings resermbled achievable Time Travel. There have been a few attempts to use real time travel effects in stories, but they’re few, and not terrifically satisfying.
In the novel, Wells addresses this exact point. He says that because the time traveller is travelling into the future thousands of times faster than the rest of us, he makes virtually no impression on our senses - just as we can’t see a rifle bullet in flight because it’s going too fast in space, we can’t see the time traveller because he’s going too fast through time. Of course, you may not accept this argument, but it’s wrong to suggest that Wells didn’t consider the problem.
I disagree. Following this reasoning we could say that the “future doesn’t exist yet” and therefore time travel to the future must be impossible. This pretty much leaves the present, which is merely a point in time.
Have you ever read Flatland? It describes a two-dimensional world, where three-dimensional beings like us are thought of as gods because we can see through walls, we can see the entire plane (their universe) at once without having to traverse it, our perceived form changes radically as we pass through their plane, we can pluck an item out of the plane into the third dimension and place it back anywhere we choose. If you ponder it, you can imagine how we in three dimensions might perceive a fourth-dimensional omnipotent, omniscient “god.”
Now extend the concept again to time as a dimension. Suppose that you could step into another dimension of time and see all of time at once (don’t know if this is consistent with any theory of physics). You could be a “god” that sees everything that has ever happened and anything that will ever happen as a single landscape–you can basically see everyone’s worldline. This theory of time is that everything exists immutably and we move through it through the dimension of time.
This theory implies that you can’t change your worldline, the universe is deterministic (which has generally been thrown out the window with the arrival of quantum theory), and free will is an illusion. Time is an illusion, too.
Although mainstream physics no longer accepts absolute determinism, determinism at the macro level may still make sense, and some mainstream physicists suggest time is an illusion. So you can’t go back to the past and change it, because it’s already happened; for that matter you can’t go into the future and change that either, because, from the perspective of a “god” who sees all time at once, the future has already happened too.
I don’t think there’s an issue to deal with. You noted that future-me has different experiences and memories than present-me. This means we have two different consciousnesses. The two consciousnesses are importantly related, but they are not identical. One has properties the other lacks. This means that even in the time travel case, present-my consciousness and future-my consciousness are not the same consciousness. And so there is no reason to think future-my consciousness must “reside” in present-my own head or vice versa. They’re two different consciousnesses, residing in two different heads.
That said, I think a good science fiction (ish) story could be written in which, against all expectations, the issue you’ve raised turns out to be an issue after all. It would be kind of funny. All of a sudden, you find yourself conscious from two points of view, one of which is that of your future self having time-travelled back to the present. There could be some stories written in such a world…
Would this sort of “telepathic co-consciousness” between you and your future self travel instantaneously, or be limited by the speed of light? You could write a story either way…
The most interesting time travel story I have read is The Time Traveler’s Wife. The reason it’s so interesting is that it creates a real story with depth about a couple who meet, and their married lives together (although I haven’t finished it). It completely sidesteps the science behind how one travels through time; the main character has a time travel disorder where he just spontaneously travels backwards in time, then returns to when he came from, like some people sneeze.
Although the story would not exist without the time travel element, the story is not about time travel as such. It creates an interesting story about how he travels backwards and meets his wife-to-be as a child, develops a relationship with here, and eventually her older self meets his younger self, which freaks him out because she knows all about him and his future. (He figured that would happen sooner or later.)
The great thing about this book is that the time travel aspect is so woven into the story that you become habituated to it and there is no sense of, “Look at me! I’m writing about time travel! This is science fiction!” You’re just reading a good novel.
>In addition, it would also mean that, from the moment you arrive in your past, there will be two of you living in the same timeline, each with different experiences. How can that be reconciled?
Obviously, when you’re reunited, the memories that didn’t include time travel are the only ones to persist. That’s the only reason we don’t realize that we actually time travel quite often.
The idea of time travel is a figment of our imagination. We perceive time as some kind of a thing that is flowing by, and can’t resist the notion that, like a flowing river, it could be navigated somehow.
But the idea that time is a thing that flows is just a figment of our misdirected imaginations.
Causality is a very important thing, a monument in the fabric of existence. The most deeply mysterious and nonintuitive things about nature, such as entropy and quantum mechanics and the relativistic propagation of information, and even the fact that matter and energy are both actually made out of information, all hinge together on this. Causality is everything. It’s the only reason the universe can make any kind of sense. It’s the only reason, period.
Time is only the agency that ranks causes before effects. Anything else you can say about time is some more or less direct artifact of that underlying truth.
The human brain is a part of the digestive system. Its function is to keep food flowing toward the mouth, by suckling or by landing job interviews or whatever. The only thing the brain is good for is manipulating cause and effect. The brain notices that effects come from causes, and figures out how to direct the effects by introducing causes. Since the brain has to deal so imtimately with cause and effect and the agency that gives them relative ranks, relative positions, it tends to imagine that agency as a thing to be manipulated to. It wants to take a trip on time, as if time is going someplace.
The brain imagines time is a thing flowing by, only because that’s an evolutionarily convenient way for brains to model time.