Being v. Becoming, Pt. 9: Is Time Travel Possible? And How Much Does It Cost?

So, how does it feel to be a time traveler?

Not sure? Well, let's recap. While not necessarily theoretically impossible, I've shown that it's damned hard to give a complete answer to the simple question, 'where are you now?' because you're travelling through three-dimensional space at mindbogglingly unbelievable speeds. And that doesn't even account for the time element involved—which itself, many believe, is emergent and thus has its own sort of velocity.

So, you are travelling through this four-dimensional spacetime thing along your own personal world line, the sequential path of personal human events that just is your history and your experience. Logically, of course, you can't reflect on the entirety of your personal history and experience until all the events that make up your world line are complete.

(That's, of course, that Gödelian principle once again, but in a relevant, meaningful sort of way. Am I saying there's no 'meaning' to life? Isn't that the question philosophy is supposed to answer? Well, more like it, philosophy is supposed to help us formulate the right questions and try to imagine what a good answer might look like. And in this instance, from the logical point of view, the question of the 'meaning of life' can only be answered from outside of life, from a 'meta-life' vantage point if you will. I.e., Only after it has been completed can the full meaning of a life (or all lives) be truly reflected upon. From the vantage of death or extinction. In fact, Whitehead's and Hartshorne's theology explicitly address this issue.)

From a purely physics point of view, your world line should be determinate. Predestined, as the theologians might say. Other external spacetime events impact it, other world lines intertwine with it, and other things interact with it, all in theoretically predictable ways given the laws of causality. If, with perfect knowledge we could analyze and identify all those factors, we could pretty much predict or lay out the course of your, or anyone else's, world line. (But we don't have such perfect knowledge, you might object. True. In metaphysics, however, part of the game is to imagine whether there is a possible world in which such knowledge, and thus such an answer, could be had.) This is a materialist, reductionist formulation. And just because your world line might be predictable doesn't mean it has meaning!

Whitehead (arrrggghh! not him again), by contrast, seems to make room for some degree of self-determination. Freedom of the will, as those same theologians might say. And what makes you free according to him? Feelings, nothing more than feelings. (Of course, for Whitehead 'feelings' has a special definition, but, summarily, it's a species of prehension.) Feelings are internal judgments which accept or reject (where possible) these interacting, intertwining, impactful events acting upon you on your world line journey through spacetime. His is an idealist, though non-reductionist materialism.

So, yes. Time travel is not only possible, it is inevitable. You are doing it right now. And now. And now. It is the basis of becoming. It is what becoming is. And becoming is the ground of Reality.

And what is the cost of travelling through spacetime, the cost of becoming? What is the cost of feeling? This is an easy one, readily observable from within our conscious experience: The degradation of the vehicle doing the travelling, i.e., the deterioration of your physical body.

Différance

Sameness: e pluribus unum. From the many, one. This is the project of the Enlightenment. Reason —> Empire.

It seems, in the battle between faith and reason, reason has led us into the same sort of political cul de sac that faith led us into earlier; there is a tendency in the political arts toward totalitarianism, whether it is faith-based or rational.

Into this breach steps a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida. He wrote a virtually unreadable paper called "Differance". With an 'a'. The gist of it is a challenge to these constructivist programs.

Others, of course, picked up the flaws in this totalizing tendency of Western thought beginning with Gödel's "On Formally Undecidable Propositions" and picking up with Wittgenstein's own self-critical Philosophical Investigations. How you get from a critique of the completeness of axiom-driven mathematical systems (Gödel) and a critique of linguistic philosophy in terms of "language games" and "forms of life" (Wittgenstein) to the fractiousness of deconstructionism and from there to any kind of statement about Western wisdom and contemporary politics is beyond the scope of a simple blog post.

The point is these are the origins of what is often called 'post-modernism' in academics: that is, the breakdown of totalizing systems and the emphasis on interest-based critiques such as Marxism (classism), feminism, racialism, queer theory, Freudian analysis, etc.

Bottom line: The situation we find ourselves in, nowadays, is more a celebration of differences, than of our sameness. Out of the many, MANY. Not unity, but diversity.