Logoi and Logos

 

‘ΟΙ ΛΟΓΓΟΙ ΚΑΙ ‘Ο ΛΟΓΟΣ

You can call a stone any name you please.

It still will skip across the water’s surface

until it stops and sinks into a place

where all names are finally the same.

On The (Possible) Impossibility of Time Traven

 

Time travel is a recurring theme in science fiction and an appealing idea. There seems to be some support for the idea that we could, at some point, move in time in the same way that we move in space, time being the fourth dimension after the three spatial dimensions. I sometimes read that we already travel through time, but in only one direction, forward, and then only at established paces. The relativity of time to spatial movement, moreover, means that those established paces can vary. If I am in a speeding space ship and you are on earth, we will age at different rates and what will be present or future for one of us can be past for another.

It seems to me, though, that the idea that we travel forward in time is an illusion created by memory. My earliest clear recollection, for example, is of climbing up on a windowsill and falling out into rose bushes when, according to location and circumstances, I must have been about three years of age. In passing, I’ll note that most of my distinct memories in life involve mishaps. You could attribute this to the fact these are the sorts of things that leave impressions or to the fact that I am an accident-prone klutz. Both of these are probably true.

My memory of falling out of the window gives me the impression that I was on a windowsill at one point and that I have gradually moved forward to this point, at which I am sitting in front of a computer hoping that I don’t fall out of my chair. But the “I” at the computer is not the same “I” that fell into the rose bushes, in the same way that a tree is not a seed or a sapling. There is no disjunction of identity in either case, but in both cases what came later emerged from what came earlier and what came later cannot coexist with what came earlier. A tree cannot also be a seed and a sapling.

If I were to go back through the decades to when I was three years old, I would be three years old, not my present advance age observing myself as a toddler. To go back one hundred years would be to go back to a time when I did exist, so I would not have existed in the year 1923. I exist in a time that I did not exist. We don’t just walk through time. We are products of time.

I think this has some interesting implications for the concept of an eternal return. Let us say, for example, that the forward movement of time is a result of a universe expanding from forces of repulsion in an inconceivably densely packed unity. Eventually, the forces of repulsion would grow so weak that the universe would begin to contract and time would run in reverse. But if it is the same time running in reverse that previously ran forward, then the same events would be repeated in reverse order. I would be a man of some years and experience and then a three year old. But because I would be the same developmental series backward, as well as forward, I would be experiencing time as moving from past to future, even though someone outside the universe would see it as running from future to past.

If the universe contracted again to the initial point and repulsion caused another “big bang,” then the question would be whether the expansion would follow the exact same trajectory, or would change in some ways. In the first case, there would be no difference for me between my living through events once and my living through those same events a million times. In the second case, whatever would exist would be different from what exists now, including me, if I could considered as existing at all. Of course, this is all speculation. But the speculations all suggest the same thing: we are prisoners of time and there is no excape.