Illusions of Traveling Through Time

The time traveler is a term linked to an individual whose soul is capable of perceiving its being through multiple different time periods through the illusory understanding of a separation between past, present, and future. If this being is to travel to the past or future in connection to a period where the self is existent; this can be considered as to be the same person, both harnessing the same soul, the same self. David Lewis attempts to explain these cases of time travel using a logically consistent framework, one attempting to explain while lacking contradiction. He states the time traveler does require a personal identity, that the one arriving in time is the same as the one who had departed. This claim would quire a causal continuity of causal loops; the notion where events of the past and future are interconnected and create a chain of existence(Lewis 1986).

If Lewis’ argument of this continuity held valid, then the same soul could be existing within a singular time, limitlessly, although its experience could alter the state prior to which one had originally departed from. Let us take for example the situation of a man traveling back to himself in time as a young boy to warn himself that if he doesn’t finish his University degree, he will be very unhappy with his job in the future. This man holds psychological continuity with being a further developed version of his past self, yet is able to alter the experience of the present self by shifting the perception of the past self. These selves remain connected, and thus, if the man convinces his younger self to attend school, then this loop shall shift in the sense that the present man is now perceiving an existence of which he went to University and has acquired his desired career. It is more the question of; will this man have the awareness of shaping his present perception through the alteration of these events, or is there an instantaneous shift in which would lead him to only remember his past of going to University to create his present career? Could he remember a young adulthood in which we did not go to University anymore? Is there still an existing self part of his whole that is perceiving his life unfulfilled?

The time traveler term holds constraints to real world physics such as the Grandfather Paradox in which a being travels to the past preventing their own birth through hindering the connections of ancestors. While this notion has scientific limitations in that it would seem evidently impossible to cause such an event, according to the belief of these causal loops, one could easily erase this vessel, because ultimately they are not erasing the soul, only the conduit for the soul to perceive in such a way. The being that goes back in time to prevent their grandparents from meeting has now ceased certain biological offspring, as such the soul may then be inhabiting a different form of consciousness in varying positions or presentations. Based on the previous suggestions, would they be able to now remember the time of which they existed based on their grandparents, and parents, creating them as originally? Given the nature of our universe, it is unwise to hold this form of time travel impossible because we lack the proper evidence, as much we attain certain knowing of truth in our reality could be proven severely different to what we presently accept and judge this theory upon.

In this discussion it is also relevant to include what time travel is, and the nature of time itself. Through the construction and comprehension of our reality we have applied structural systems of time which adhere to our understanding of how our universe works. Our acceptance of time is one faulty as fideism, as there is lacking evidence to support the reason for why we have the clocks and calendars we do. To say it is 11:05 am is as one were to say there is one God and he has a long white beard and old wise green eyes. Time itself is illusory as the segregation of past, present, and future is impossible. If one is said to have traveled to the past; have they actually traveled anywhere, or are they simply perceiving an experience through a present link existing negligent of this construct? To say they have gone to a past time, is to say they have removed themself from the present time, but how could they not exist in the present or future if they exist in the past? If nothing is temporal, then does time actually exist(McTaggart 1908)?

If one is to close their eyes and think of a memory as a child, fully saturating their senses in this remembrance, truly feeling as if they are there-have they time traveled? If one ponders upon themself in five years from now, vividly creating a potential landscape of the potential future-have they time traveled? If our construct of time is merely an imagined lens in which the human limits its understanding of the nature of the universe, then the contradictions to ‘traveling’ through this concept of time are implausible.

Time understood as an illusion, and the comprehension of shifting experience through playing with this aspect of human experience could then be a much more common part of our existence than we are aware of. Perhaps we are always traveling through time, yet incapable of fully processing these shifts as our common knowledge of its makeup is refraining us to do so. Perhaps we are always traveling through time, yet as we make these changes are unable to remember doing so. If time is understood to be an illusory concept, then there is no past, present, or future, and there is no time traveler. If this is the case, how are we to examine that the current thoughts we have towards our past or future, are ultimately shaping exactly what is before us now?

Bibliography

Lewis, David. "The Paradoxes of Time Travel." In Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

McTaggart, J.M.E. "The Unreality of Time." Mind 17, no. 68 (1908): 457-474.