Scientists have debated time travel however this thread isn’t about the psychics of time travel, paradoxes (Grandfather Paradox) or whether it’s possible or not. It’s more about how the human mind would function being taken back into earlier years.
When I mean time travel, I imagine a scenario where I wake up 3 years earlier in 2013 in an alternate reality. My life is no longer about the events occurring in the present but the ‘present-day’ of 2013. With the exception of my memories and consciousness, every single circumstance is as it was that year in the past and most likely will occur. I know what will take place in the future but no reasonable person believes that. So Snowden leaking NSA secrets, MH370, Trump becoming president, Paris terrorist attacks…
The main question is, would I adjust well living back 3 years ago? Would the stimuli of constant memories overwhelm my brain and cause a mental breakdown soon (PTSD)? Most people tend to have strong memories stimulated by senses (e.g perfume smell of your first date) so when your brain is actually reliving those memories again, would it be unable to correctly process information?
Biggest problem with time loops has always been the way your mind knows what will happen but your body still goes through the same motions. After a very few cycles the mind just shuts down. We will have lost several good agents that wsy.
Just 3 years back. Without any studying I can make money gambling and in the stock market. Knowing some of the events to come will be depressing, thinking I could profit from the situation may counter that, but I’d have a lot of anxiety about not knowing for sure that events will progress as they did the last time I lived through those 3 years. I doubt anything about the situation will affect the brain functioning in terms of sense stimulation though, just the effects on the decision making process of knowing the near term future with some degree of uncertainty.
I suspect it wouldn’t be any different waking up in 2013 than it would be waking up in some different physical location in the present. It might be frustrated getting people to believe you about certain events, if it’s important for some reason. But the fact that you remember things that will (have)happen(ed) in 2015 shouldn’t drive you insane.
In many cases it wouldn’t even be much of an adjustment. I mean other than going to your home (assuming it’s the same one three years ago) and finding another you living there.
Now the one thing that time travel fiction tends to convenient gloss over or handwave away is why when you chance something in the past, your memories don’t change to adjust. The time traveler always seems to be the only one who ever remembers that they stopped Hitler or whatever.
Right, which is why a physical theory of time travel is needed before we can talk about what the psychological effects would be.
Like, if you travel into the past, has everything already happened, and there’s nothing you can do to change the past/future? Even if you try to shoot Hitler, you know you’re going to fail because you didn’t shoot Hitler. You try to stop the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, but accidentally cause it instead. If you invest in Microsoft in 1986, you haven’t changed the past because you’re the guy who always invested in Microsoft in 1986.
Or will things change? You bet a million dollars that the Cubs are going to win the world series in 2016, but due to various flapping butterflies you find to your surprise that the Cubs don’t win the world series this time. You went back in time but your ability to predict the future is very limited, and you find that even things like the weather start to diverge from your remembered future very quickly.
The problem is when this things aren’t handled in fiction in a self-consistent way. Biff Tannen starts betting on sports games in the 50s and becomes a billionaire, and his actions change 1985 into a crapsack world. But his actions have no impact on the sports games that he’s betting on?
Are grandfather paradoxes possible? What happens when you try to kill your grandfather? Will it be impossible for you to succeed, because you didn’t? Or maybe you think you succeed, but it turns out you had been adopted all along. This is the “stable time loop” theory.
Or can you kill your grandfather, and so never exist, and so never go back in time to kill him, and so exist? Maybe there’s an alternating stable time loop that always does or does not exist. Until quantum fluctuations over trillions of iterations create a loop where you don’t kill your grandfather, and this is that time line.
That’s my theory of time travel. Time travel is possible, and you can alter the past. But so many people have altered the past that it’s not stable. But there’s on stable state, a universe where just by chance no one ever invents a time machine before human extinction. And that’s the universe we live in.
As to the OP, if changes are possible, I wouldn’t mind a second chance at things I’ve done wrong in the past. Having a re-do could be one of the best things ever to happen to me.
On the other hand, if I’m just a robot going through the exact same motions – that would be about as close to hell as this earth has to offer.
I think for anyone who has experienced a significant personal change such as the start/end of a relationship, a change of home or job, a bereavement, etc in the period since the point we’re jumping back to, it could be quite a wrench adjusting back to the way things were before. That might be disruptive enough to make the individual appear mentally unhinged to those around him or her.
Personally, I’d welcome the opportunity and would hit the ground running - there are a couple of decisions I made in the last 3 years that I would not repeat (even with the unknown consequences of changing them), and there are skills, abilities and insight I have gained in the last 3 years that would be useful to my past self.
I’ve mentally compiled a number of concepts and phrases known only to myself as a means of demonstrating my identity to my younger self should time travel ever become possible.
How many of these does your younger self know? i.e., when did you start compiling this list of identifiers?
For most of us, it’d be pretty easy. There are an awful lot of things that only I know. Go back in time twenty years, and mention any of these, and identity would be proven.
(Or else the doppelganger is also a mind-reader. Y’never know for sure.)
If you’re traveling far enough back in time, surely there would be great fear. Go back a couple of centuries or millennia and you’d easily be locked up, killed, or at the least regarded with intense suspicion by everyone. You couldn’t communicate. There’d be no friends, probably.
Going back a couple of decades might be cool, though.
Proving your identity to your younger self would be easy as pie. Just take a stamp pad and a sheet of paper. (I also would have matching scars and know the stories behind each one of them.)
But if you’re talking a consciousness transfer only, the Replay/Odyssey5 scenario, that’s a different story. Then it gets complicated. I find a confidant, maybe my old college poli/sci prof, convince him of my legitimacy by maybe reciting lines from a brand new (to him) movie that I’ve seen a dozen times.
Then, with his adult status and my much better-than-average memory, we’d be poised to do some serious experimenting. Maybe send an anonymous letter or two. One to Woodward and Bernstein telling them, while they’re at it, to investigate Spiro Agnew too. One to George McGovern alerting him to Tom Eagleton’s mental health issues. Oh, Nixon might still win, but George would probably do better than just taking MA and DC.
I’d probably also do better with the ladies on the second time around the track.
Jet lag, for one thing, unless you could somehow regulate the time of day that your arrival in a different time would occur.
Personally, I enjoy interesting experiences a great deal more if there is someone with me that I can share them with, and recount them later, so I’d be psychologically lonely, unless I could go back in time with a companion.
Accounting for my absence in chronology of departure would be something I’d have to explain to my boss. Do I need a doctor’s note for the time I spend in a different time? Or does time not pass in the present when I am in the past?
Right.
Or even you can get some people to believe you but still your knowledge of how things happened, how technology works etc means you’re not able to change anything (apart from “ripple effect” changes)
I suggest for a way to explore things directly, to set yourself to repeat a schedule of events and activities for a while. Watch the same movies, shows, perform the same list of tasks, eat the same foods.
I suspect that going back in time as you describe, would be similar. I don’t foresee (irony!) problems with mental collapse, simply because of the time shift. If your time traveler is prone to freaking out, then they might freak out about something, but just knowing what’s going to happen by itself, wouldn’t bother most people all that much.
Rewatching a movie you already know, is a good simile, because the second time around, you may see details you missed before, simply because you were watching the main action, and didn’t see the peripheral activities. I would bet on your time traveler coming to different conclusions about some events.
Something most people do without realizing it, AS they are experiencing events real-time, is they mix in their assumptions, hopes, prejudices, and past experiences, into their observations of the moment. Therefore they don't actually experience NOW, all that directly and completely to begin with.
In addition, most people aren’t aware of their own inner dialog, or that no one but them can hear it. Your memories are changed by that dialog as well.
When your time traveler re-experiences the same events they already went through, they might be surprised, and worry that they are actually on an entirely different timeline, because of the differences in their understanding of the events, even though they are not.
