It’s About Time
In his book The Order of Time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli says that time is a mental process happening in the space between memory and anticipation. Time feels real to people. But it doesn’t even exist, according to quantum physics.
It’s “a collective act of introspection and narrative, record-keeping and expectation, that’s based on our relationship to prior events and the sense that happenings are impending”. It is this tale that gives us our sense of self as well, a feeling that many neuroscientists, mystics, and physicists argue is a mass delusion.
Time is an emotional and psychological experience, mostly something that happens now in our head. You knew it all along, right?
That’s why time travel is impossible. You cannot travel a road not there.Or, more correctly, time travel is possible if you can learn to truly unlock and re enter your memories, as did Christopher Reeves in Somewhere In Time or to robustly conjure what the future, which also does not exist, might hold.
Time travel, per se, can only be the conveyance of focused intellect and one person may not have sufficient processing power to boldly go where no man has gone (before) as well as revisit, in immersive replay, his own memory of the world. And to accomplish that Total Recall, might be an unbearable experience, to relive moments with the concurrent knowledge of what comes next, the sudden fatal car crash, the heartbreaking betrayal, the crushing defeat or humiliating embarrassment. There’s likely damn good reasons our memories soften and fade.
And, of course, tripping back into the “past” would take you to a world unto yourself, since no two people’s recollections will be the same originally or surviving our own distortions and revisions. You could not interact with other people in the experience beyond what they recorded the first time. There is no new answer or reason revealed for why she did that to you or why you were bluntly and coldly dismissed. You cannot prevent the gunshot or catch the falling baby. What’s done, quite literally, is done. You could only subject yourself, possibly, to re-experiencing exactly what transpired before.
In other words, in my mind anyway, you CAN go home but only in your head and the future is whatever your wish it to be. At least until it proves to be otherwise as the brilliant Chesley Bonestell discovered.
Science now tells us that not only does time not exist, but neither does space. Indeed they say, there are only Transformations. Even something so immutable as a stone is undergoing transformation and will eventually, as it always has, morph to basic elements or incorporation into some different composition.
Thus, we can never die. Like hydrogen and oxygen, we drift apart, combine, transition from gas to liquid to, very briefly, plasma and then to a ‘solid’ here on the planet Earth. Then, we transform again.
None of this explains the consciousness except to imply its reality as evidenced by the maintenance of memory and anticipation. Despite my respect for the conclusions of the great scientists of our age, I tend to think that the only thing that really exists is not Transformation but Consciousness. Without it, could there be any of the other? Consciousness is perhaps, It. We fly through our reality show, our memories and our projections of what will come. We experience this boot camp of Life, then fly on through whatever is next, and on and on.
Corinthians says these three things shall remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. Faith may fade, hope can be dashed but Love Never Ends. It is the super propellant of our consciousness that enables us to fly on. Without love you are nothing, in the purest sense. With it, you cannot die.
Will yoube reunited with your little dog, mother, father and those that have gone before? Of course, since their consciousness never left and neither will yours.