Is Time Travel Possible? Here is the Answer
The “Grandfather Paradox” is a common refutation of the possibility of traveling back in time. It goes like this:
Imagine you build a time machine. You then travel back through the years to meet your grandfather. And you kill him before he produces any children. Thus, you would not have been born, and you could not build the time machine. You can’t change history by writing fiction.
This refutation stands on assumptions that all of us live by. However, some scientists investigating “reality” have different ideas about what is possible. If you care to entertain ground shaking notions suggested by the results of Nobel Prize winning laboratory discoveries, you might change your mind about “time travel.” Here are the jarring conclusions of one scientist, William Bray, who has a way to unwind the Grandfather Paradox.
Bray makes some new key assumptions to resolve the issue:
- The real “you” is not your physical body.
- Who your genetic grandfather is known to be is not the sum total of his “reality” identity.
- Both you and grandpa exist only as creatures of “consciousness.”
- Grandpa’s bodily death, is not the end of him.
- The paradox setup casts reality in terms of linear time.
- Time travel back to earlier instances doesn’t follow the trail laid out in history; rather it steps into an earlier moment and charts a new trail to the present. Reality for both grandpa and grandson continues on in other “versions.”
- The trail of “historical recorded experience” is simply perception with the help of indoctrination.
[This is like the mystery of the sock that the washing machine ate--you know, the sock I am certain I put in the wash. Did the washing machine—or some other force—cause the disappearance; or did I fail to put the sock in the machine. I have no evidence except my fallible memory. As a historian I balk at saying this, but what actually happened at a particular historic moment is in the biased eye of the participant. How can we now or ever know what “really” happened? Another way to say it is to question whether my wife feels loved by me in the exact “real” way that I feel love toward her? Who can know—she, or I?]
- I make my past, my present, and my future by my conscious intent at each instant. Time is symmetric—-meaning all three tenses interrelate, simultaneously.
- The attempt to slice time into smaller pieces until you get to “the present” is an exercise in infinite regression--you never get to the bottom line. Finite as separate from infinite is impossible; infinity subsumes it. Finite only exists in my imagination.
The above is what I draw from William Bray. Following are my comments as I feel the warmth of the light he shines on the matter.
My “present” is but what I am “conscious” of, and my consciousness owns the patent. This is just like God. I am a subset of an infinite God-consciousness. God is my Dad; we are family. The past that I “know” is the accumulated “reports” that are seamless parts of my timeless (infinite) consciousness playground. The soundness of the reports depends on the quality of my memory and the indoctrination from my environment.
My genetic grandpa doesn’t need to worry, he is already dead. While both of us were living contemporaneously, it was too late to kill him to prevent my birth. If time machines could transport me now, back to say 1910 (before my father was born), the “I” that faces off with gramps would be who I “think” I am now, not who Grandpa dreamed he might have as a grandson some day. All intervening events coagulated with whatever materials were available for use by the necessary consciousness participators. If “I” could not be the descendant of a man who died childless, the “I” that I am now would have found another route to my current “present.”
My body is only a receptacle for interrelated consciousness streams. If I were to step out of my time machine and effectively kill grandpa, he would play out as a boulder in the stream around which “my” consciousness would divert on its way to float my particular body-boat that is bobbing about today. Water (or “consciousness”) finds its level. Some jokingly tell me I am a case of “arrested leveling out,” so to speak. But don’t worry, time as infinity is on my side; who gives two hoots about my body?
The view from this re-viewed paradigm has some powerful implications both historically and theologically. Our calendars are based on Jesus’ life on earth. Didn’t he come to us in a “time machine” so to speak?
Doug Good
Imagine you build a time machine. You then travel back through the years to meet your grandfather. And you kill him before he produces any children. Thus, you would not have been born, and you could not build the time machine. You can’t change history by writing fiction.
This refutation stands on assumptions that all of us live by. However, some scientists investigating “reality” have different ideas about what is possible. If you care to entertain ground shaking notions suggested by the results of Nobel Prize winning laboratory discoveries, you might change your mind about “time travel.” Here are the jarring conclusions of one scientist, William Bray, who has a way to unwind the Grandfather Paradox.
Bray makes some new key assumptions to resolve the issue:
- The real “you” is not your physical body.
- Who your genetic grandfather is known to be is not the sum total of his “reality” identity.
- Both you and grandpa exist only as creatures of “consciousness.”
- Grandpa’s bodily death, is not the end of him.
- The paradox setup casts reality in terms of linear time.
- Time travel back to earlier instances doesn’t follow the trail laid out in history; rather it steps into an earlier moment and charts a new trail to the present. Reality for both grandpa and grandson continues on in other “versions.”
- The trail of “historical recorded experience” is simply perception with the help of indoctrination.
[This is like the mystery of the sock that the washing machine ate--you know, the sock I am certain I put in the wash. Did the washing machine—or some other force—cause the disappearance; or did I fail to put the sock in the machine. I have no evidence except my fallible memory. As a historian I balk at saying this, but what actually happened at a particular historic moment is in the biased eye of the participant. How can we now or ever know what “really” happened? Another way to say it is to question whether my wife feels loved by me in the exact “real” way that I feel love toward her? Who can know—she, or I?]
- I make my past, my present, and my future by my conscious intent at each instant. Time is symmetric—-meaning all three tenses interrelate, simultaneously.
- The attempt to slice time into smaller pieces until you get to “the present” is an exercise in infinite regression--you never get to the bottom line. Finite as separate from infinite is impossible; infinity subsumes it. Finite only exists in my imagination.
The above is what I draw from William Bray. Following are my comments as I feel the warmth of the light he shines on the matter.
My “present” is but what I am “conscious” of, and my consciousness owns the patent. This is just like God. I am a subset of an infinite God-consciousness. God is my Dad; we are family. The past that I “know” is the accumulated “reports” that are seamless parts of my timeless (infinite) consciousness playground. The soundness of the reports depends on the quality of my memory and the indoctrination from my environment.
My genetic grandpa doesn’t need to worry, he is already dead. While both of us were living contemporaneously, it was too late to kill him to prevent my birth. If time machines could transport me now, back to say 1910 (before my father was born), the “I” that faces off with gramps would be who I “think” I am now, not who Grandpa dreamed he might have as a grandson some day. All intervening events coagulated with whatever materials were available for use by the necessary consciousness participators. If “I” could not be the descendant of a man who died childless, the “I” that I am now would have found another route to my current “present.”
My body is only a receptacle for interrelated consciousness streams. If I were to step out of my time machine and effectively kill grandpa, he would play out as a boulder in the stream around which “my” consciousness would divert on its way to float my particular body-boat that is bobbing about today. Water (or “consciousness”) finds its level. Some jokingly tell me I am a case of “arrested leveling out,” so to speak. But don’t worry, time as infinity is on my side; who gives two hoots about my body?
The view from this re-viewed paradigm has some powerful implications both historically and theologically. Our calendars are based on Jesus’ life on earth. Didn’t he come to us in a “time machine” so to speak?
Doug Good
Labels: Consciousness, Finiteness, Grandfather Paradox, Infinity, Jesus and Time, Linear time, Time travel
posted by Doug at
6:59 PM
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