I find that the debate over time travel along with the corresponding implications upon the definition of self and my mind is mind-boggling. I have wondered about the grandfather paradox, and causal loops since I was a child. I think every human has an innate infatuation with the idea of being able to travel to the past and see oneself as a child, or one’s parents before one existed. I think that every human is curious about the future, and innately, one wonders if it is possible to travel forward and see oneself, or get the winning lottery numbers. However, my mind would travel the route of these paradoxes, not yet knowing that these paradoxes had academic names.
One of the qualities in the movie, Predestination, that I found to be most disturbing was the idea of being able to be alive, but to have killed myself in the past. Predestination avoids the grandfather paradox and causal loop in this manner. Possibly, the movie prescribes to the notion of inexplicability. The notion of inexplicability is discussed by Smith, for the argument is that causal loops are not as we understand them; we cannot understand them. Therefore, the grandfather paradox is a product of our limited understanding, as well.
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"Reflections on Self and Mind: Who am I?".
I suppose, somewhere deep down, as a child having these thoughts about the impossibility of time travel, I was also reaffirming my own existence with these thoughts. I was thinking, and therefore I was…it has occurred to me that these thoughts that I have currently are built upon my previous thoughts and experiences. One paradox that I find with time travel, is that one’s thoughts would be different if one’s experiences were different. So, in the example of going back in time to tell myself how to build a time machine, I am confused about when the inception for the idea would actually take place.
This paradox, I believe, is closest to the idea of something from nothing. Where does my idea of time travel and knowledge how to do it come from? I cannot generate my own knowledge, and if I tell myself how to build a time machine in my childhood, then I am a different person than one who grows up, learns to build a time machine and travels backwards to tell myself. If I could diagram the way I envision this time travel, it is like a cherry stem; the stem is the moment that I do not know about time travel, and the cherry is the continuing cycle of knowing about time travel. Therefore, I ask from what being does the stem grow?
When I think about time travel, my mind hurts a little; the paradox is too great. However, there is some magnetic draw that keeps me, and I think nearly everyone as well, thinking about time travel and its possible implications. The magnetism of time travel makes me think that it is possible because we are hard wired to consider it. I have always thought that when we die, if there is an afterlife where we all meet up, the only salient question that anyone in the afterlife will have is “When did you live?”. It is not critical where we have lived, but only when we lived. Time is an ultimate destination. Possibly time is an undiscovered frequency and once we discover it, riding the frequency will be natural. If this is the case, then it is already happening. I am both frustrated and delighted that my mind cannot wrap itself around this paradox of time travel and the self.
