[ExI] Problem with time travel WAS Faster than light??

Jeff Davis jrd1415 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 3 02:01:18 UTC 2011


Mike, I wanted to thank you for your thoughtful reply to my post, and
to apologize for not responding until now.  The wife and I left Canada
for Baja on the first of Oct, were on the road for three weeks, and
then two more unpacking, setting up, and settling in for the winter
"season".  I only today got caught up enough to finish reading your
post.

I'm still digesting it.

I want to add the following to perhaps clarify my original remarks.

Summarizing my original post: There is no "river of time" upon which
one might travel upstream, ie back in time.  The "river of time" is a
mental construct, appending fore and aft to the reality of the "now"
the abstractions of future and past.  Meanwhile, this erroneous meme
of the existence of "bulk" time is the near universally-held view, no
doubt because life has duration, which "bulks up" the narrative of
memory, and with it the notion of time.

If one disposes of the notion of the "river of time", and with it the
notion of traveling "up-river" -- because the river doesn't exist --
the challenge of "going back in time" becomes completely
different,...and quite daunting.  Because -- starting from scratch --
"going back in time" really means achieving the "condition of being"
in a universe with a "now" state corresponding to some desired
previous "now" state of one's "native" universe..  To do this, you
either have to "reset" the parametric values of every single bit of
the universe -- except yourself, of course -- to correspond to what
they were at the desired moment in the past -- drag the whole friggin'
universe back with you -- or you have to create or find, and then
insert yourself into, an entirely new universe with those values.
Or...(insert favorite alternative methodology here)?

The notion of "time travel" is way common, yet I have never
encountered a treatment that formulates the issue in this manner or
deals with these objections/challenges.

Help me out here.  What am I doing wrong?

(Clears space on mantlepiece for Nobel prize for Extreme Geniuosness.
 Wonders how much of the €1.15 million will remain after paying Carmen
Diaz for "personal services".)

Best, Jeff Davis

                   "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
                                                     Ray Charles


On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 23:21:13 UTC
Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com>
wrote:

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Jeff Davis <jrd1415 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm only just starting to think along these lines.  If anyone wants to
> jump in, have at it.  Even if only to tell me not to give up my day
> job.

I follow your visualization ( i think )

It seems obvious that in a 4d spacetime that there is no inherent
reason for any dimension to be perceived any particular way.  It's
even simpler to imagine an arbitrary plane (2d) subsection of a 3d
space.  The flatlanders experience their "northward" direction at a
right angle to the next adjacent cube-face's 'parallel world' version
of a 'northward' direction.  From our experience outside this 3d
space, we can see these cube faces as separate lower-dimensional
existences with some orientation or relationship to each other.  The
inhabitants of each plane, while being mathematical genius of simple
geometry have barely scratched the surface (sorry) of topological
thinking.  Edwin Abbot Abbot's "Flatlanders" does this concept much
more justice that I have space (and time!) to relate here (and now).

I also imagine the HereNow moment you describe as the only reality is
the center of the universe (or A universe).  There is no reason there
should be a "smooth" progression from one point to another.  Our
awareness of moment-to-moment might be recorded as a sequence of
odd-numbered coordinates, prime-numbered coordinates, or some
oscillation function with no discernible pattern at all.  The
perception of a history of moments may be contained in the HereNow
moment itself and any observance of a next moment already contains
some vector of the perception of history and future.  I imagine the
nodal point of a soundwave (for example) being instantaneously silent,
but actually being a unique combination of potentially hundreds of
individual waves that happen to be in-phase with each other.  Maybe
the next- moment has a signature of its being some consistency with a
particular carrier [wave] we experienced in the previous- moment.  If
I had any artistic ability, I imagine a picture would convey this idea
much better than the wrongness of words.

I'd like to continue this visualization into an example of a spacetime
foam, but I have to go to class.  If this thread is still alive next
time I check email, I'll continue.  :)




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list