Time travel

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Krem

Well-Known Member
#1
I will not go through the physical difficulties of time travel, or anything to do with how one could travel through time. I'm going to go through the theories, paradoxes, and why they can/'t be used.

1. Seeing the future and changing it. This will nullify itself, since if you see the future, and then that future does not come to pass, you did not see the future.
2. Going to the past to change the 'now'. This would open up the possibility of preventing you from going to the past in the first place, by, for an example, killing your parent. Simply because that could happen, traveling back can not.
3. Seeing the past would be possible, there's nothing to stop that other than technology.
4. Going to the future. You could, but you could not return. The then-future would be the now, and thus the then-now would be come the past.
5. Seeing the future and changing it, or going to the past to change the now, pt.2. Another possibility is the 'Predestination paradox'. In your effort to change what will come later, you cause it to happen. This is rather weak, though, for you can't really cause your own birth by burning down your grandparents' house. Although Ka would mess up your plan, and your mother/father would survive it, and meet your other parent through the event.
6. Technology/information transfer between times. A scientist is working on a time-machine, when his future self comes to him, and tells him how to build his own time machine. The scientist goes ahead, and makes his machine. To test it, he goes back in time and teaches himself how to make the machine. You might ask where the information came from in the first place, but I'd say that's incorrect. It didn't. His future self got it from his future self's future self, and so on. It didn't come from anywhere, exactly. It's similar to the machines built by/for Skynet, in the Terminator series. Skynet was created using bits of a Terminator Skynet had itself built years later.

Remember children, what will happen will happen, and will not happen in any other way. What has happened happened, and would not have happened in any other way. What you do, what you have done, what you will do, was decided at the Big Bang. Cause and effect. Brains are made of the same particles as everything else, and they follow the same laws. If you know the brain, and you know the chemical, you know what will happen when that chemical is released into the brain. Free will is an illusion, your emotions can be measured, created, stopped; manipulated. Your senses can be, too.
 

johnnysays

Well-Known Member
#2
Maybe this is the past, present and future, all wrapped in one.

Why would I say that? Because i've been led to believe that the universe is entangled at the quantum level. Entanglement has been found to be across space AND time. So what if all of time and space is the same thing, experienced from different points of view?

Maybe entanglement is just another example of our continued transformation into 4th dimensional beings? The better we can clearly remember the past and predict the future the more 4th dimensional we will become.
 
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Krem

Well-Known Member
#3
Except we don't remember the past.

"continued transformation into 4th dimensional beings" What? Have you been watching alot of science fiction recently, dear? :)
 

Ziggy

Antiquitie's Friend
#4
Going off topic for a moment...

Brains are made of the same particles as everything else, and they follow the same laws... Free will is an illusion
Ok, let's say I'm on walking down the street and I need to use a toilet, I could just take a leak on the street, however I live in a society where people around me might object, so I decide to wait until I get home. However walking home I see a public toilet which I use.

I can't see how the above scenario is determined by the movement of particles and I have no free will. Yes there is cause and effect but this is a delayed effect depending upon both my culture and environment. So if we can choose how much we wish to delay an effect there must be an element of free will?

If we look at the quantum world, everything seems chaotic and unpredictable. But at a different scale of reality, we say that all these particles behave in a predictable way, to say that this further leads to an element of chaos and unpredictability in what we call free will doesn't seem unreasonable to me. (and it carries on as all of the chaotic behaviour of individuals starts become predictable when you view them as larger groups within bigger time scales)

Anyway back to the subject of time travel...

I agree with everything you said, I think most people do don't they?
 
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Krem

Well-Known Member
#5
A) You did not consider both options. It has been hard-wired into you to not piss on the streets. The idea doesn't even register as plausible. Even if you tried, you most likely couldn't.
B) I can't explain each and every little effect. But I can explain that every emotion, every urge, every desire, every need, likes, dislikes, opinions, and so on, are caused, ultimately, by chemicals (Nurture can cause chemical reactions, don't even try.). These chemicals are made by particles. When a chemical interacts with another chemical, or anything else (Example: brain.) there's no maybe. It will act as it will act. (The only reason it's unpredictable is because we'd not know every factor which has an effect. Same reason why we say flipping a coin or rolling a dice is random- It's not. Many factors come to play, and it would be a monstrous task to calculate it all, but once you have, you'll find out that it would land heads-up.)
C) QP doesn't explain 'free will'. The uncertainty principle doesn't really count, since this is not about knowing, but about being. We can't know all the factors, according to UP, but they're still there. We can calculate that at X time, a particle is Y likely to be at Z place. This is irrelevant to the current discussion, since we're/I'm talking about that it's all particles, and particles have a set behaviour.

You did not decide anything- You as a whole do not exist. We're all a bunch of cells which are made of bunch of atoms which are made of bunch of protons and neutrons, which are made of a few quarks each, and so on. Think of us, as persons, as a software which has no solid database. Similar to how Skynet was suposed to be- It existed within every machine, and did not physically exist itself. Except Skynet directly controlled its parts, while we can't control most of ours.
Oh, and before anyone says emotions make us human, thus we have free will etc., if you were given a shot of [Hormone], you'd behave in a predictable manner.

Now, to make this semi-long post on-topic, most people don't think about it. It's the same reason many people believe in psychics, ghosts, magic, and such. They don't give it valid thought. Those that do, but still believe, use fallacies. (It's incredible how logical some of them seem, even though they're wrong. Reccomended reading for everyone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misconceptions It's like QI, but without the humour.)
 
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