Biological Time Travelling
August 24th 2010 15:06
The problem of time travelling puts up the difficulty that our biological bodies may not be able to retrocede, neither advance ahead of time, in their physical nature. As a matter of fact, all biological beings are born, grow and progress in age, then die, in a regular and predictable route. It’s unthinkable to consider our age going backwards making us younger or us dying first and being born last. Based on our daily experience of the world we live in, this is all absurd.
Yet, if you accept the possibility of time travelling, you would probably have to accept such absurd propositions above. If you get into a time machine just out of the latest sci-fi movie and travel twenty years backwards, assuming that you are now forty, wouldn’t you have to be twenty by the time you arrive in the past scene? Why would everything change around you as you travel into the past and why would your biological age not change as well. After all, twenty years ago your age was twenty, wasn’t it?
The question then becomes whether our biology can be twisted and pushed around so as to possibilitate this kind of time travelling gymnastics. But it makes to me sense to consider that if we travel in time our biology should participate in that travelling as well as everything else. This brings up the question of whether time is an agent, something that can act over something else and make it younger or older, progress to death or progress to birth.
If time is an agent and if our biology is apt to be stretched in any direction, then time is like a cinema film: it can be rolled forwards or backwards and each moment in our biological life is recorded in that film which we can just project. If time is an agent, something actually existing, then it must cause things around to act according to its laws. One of the problems that this idea brings could be that the only time we know is the time we live in – the now; we do not know the future which is ahead of us and we lost the past which ceased to be lived. How can we then move into something, future or past, which does not exist now?
As shocking as it may sound, I believe that time simply does not exist. I think that time, as we ordinarily think of it, is just a realisation that something has changed. If we look into our watch and it shows 14:00 hours and later 14:25 hours, it’s this conscience of change in the physical world that leads us to say that time advanced by 25 minutes. If you clap your hands two times you can achieve the same conscience of what time is: the conscience of a sequence of at least two events: the first hand clap and then the second. It’s an illusion to say then that time elapsed between them. Truly, all we have is only the conscience that something changed or that a pattern was made.
But if we choose to think that time exists, that it is an agent and can cause the present to move both into the future or into the past, then we will have also to accept that time would be like a film already made, a work with a beginning and an end, and everything would evolve according to that master script. This brings a problem, which is whether you believe in pre-destination or else in free-will. If you believe in pre-destination then time is a film and its entire story is already written in it and we, though being able to move ahead and backwards in it, cannot do anything to change the story. We would then be stuck with time.
But if you think that we fundamentally have free-will and so we build our now and our tomorrow by the actions we take today, then time is not a told story but is something open, something we can build and change freely. Then time travelling would become a lot more complicated. For some of the problems that would bring you can read my other post “The Problem with Time Travelling”.
Fernando Monteiro
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Yet, if you accept the possibility of time travelling, you would probably have to accept such absurd propositions above. If you get into a time machine just out of the latest sci-fi movie and travel twenty years backwards, assuming that you are now forty, wouldn’t you have to be twenty by the time you arrive in the past scene? Why would everything change around you as you travel into the past and why would your biological age not change as well. After all, twenty years ago your age was twenty, wasn’t it?
The question then becomes whether our biology can be twisted and pushed around so as to possibilitate this kind of time travelling gymnastics. But it makes to me sense to consider that if we travel in time our biology should participate in that travelling as well as everything else. This brings up the question of whether time is an agent, something that can act over something else and make it younger or older, progress to death or progress to birth.
If time is an agent and if our biology is apt to be stretched in any direction, then time is like a cinema film: it can be rolled forwards or backwards and each moment in our biological life is recorded in that film which we can just project. If time is an agent, something actually existing, then it must cause things around to act according to its laws. One of the problems that this idea brings could be that the only time we know is the time we live in – the now; we do not know the future which is ahead of us and we lost the past which ceased to be lived. How can we then move into something, future or past, which does not exist now?
As shocking as it may sound, I believe that time simply does not exist. I think that time, as we ordinarily think of it, is just a realisation that something has changed. If we look into our watch and it shows 14:00 hours and later 14:25 hours, it’s this conscience of change in the physical world that leads us to say that time advanced by 25 minutes. If you clap your hands two times you can achieve the same conscience of what time is: the conscience of a sequence of at least two events: the first hand clap and then the second. It’s an illusion to say then that time elapsed between them. Truly, all we have is only the conscience that something changed or that a pattern was made.
But if we choose to think that time exists, that it is an agent and can cause the present to move both into the future or into the past, then we will have also to accept that time would be like a film already made, a work with a beginning and an end, and everything would evolve according to that master script. This brings a problem, which is whether you believe in pre-destination or else in free-will. If you believe in pre-destination then time is a film and its entire story is already written in it and we, though being able to move ahead and backwards in it, cannot do anything to change the story. We would then be stuck with time.
But if you think that we fundamentally have free-will and so we build our now and our tomorrow by the actions we take today, then time is not a told story but is something open, something we can build and change freely. Then time travelling would become a lot more complicated. For some of the problems that would bring you can read my other post “The Problem with Time Travelling”.
Fernando Monteiro
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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