An Apologist for Time Travel

An Apologist for Time Travel

When i was much younger & attended Sunday School; One of The Arguments for Freewill &/or Autonomy &/or Self-Determination; Which ultimately came down to : 

How can Gawd be both Omnipotent, Knowing with Certainty all Future Events, 

& Still Allow that i am responsible for my Actions with Freewill, 

If those Actions are Set in Future Time for Unambiguous Examination ( ? ! )

The Explanation Provided was that : 

There was no Explanation. Every Religious Treatment of ‘This’ Dilemma has always boiled down to : Gawd is very mysterious, blah blah blah, Nevertheless You are Responsible for your own actions, Eternal Damnation awaits you, Unless you dunk your head in this bucket of water & mutilate your genitals. 

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William Newcomb provides a ‘Paradox’ that addresses this Problem; 

Called; The Newcomb Paradox, or Choosing The Box Paradox.

It consists of :

A ) A Necessarily Hypothetical Circus Showmyn that can See Into The Future.

B ) The Decision made by The ‘Mark’ or ‘Rube’ to believe that The Showmyn can see into The Future, or Not,

C1 ) Two Boxes;

C2a ) One Box that Contains Either No Money

C2b ) Or One Million Dollars

C3 ) A Second Box that Contains One Thousand Dollars.

D ) The Proposal ( Rule of The Game )

E ) The Choice of The Rube.

The Banter consists of this :

The Showman brings out The Two Boxes, which s’he Calls Box A & Box 2.

Box Two contains One Thousand Dollars, & opens it to show everyone that it contains One Thousand Dollars in Crisp, 2 sided, Ten One Hundred Dollar Bills. Everyone Accepts that they really are Real, As why would a Circus Showmyn lie to them. ( ! )

The First Box; Box ( A ) remains closed; As it does it fact really, really contain Either: One Million Dollars in Crisp One Hundred Dollar Bills or No Money at all. 

Whether it is one or The Other has already been determined, & one need only open The Box to Determine which it is. There is no Magic about this Box. It either contains nothing ( No Money ) or Something ( One Million Dollars ). The Amount or lack of it, will not change for The Duration of The Performance. 

The Rube is then given The Choice of Choosing Either; 

Box A or Box 2 or Both Boxes.

There is one Small Caveat to this Choice.

Since The Showmyn has already revealed, or is now revealing, ( if s’he forgot to mention this ) that s’he can see 40_minutes into Future, & placed, or didn’t place, The One Million Dollars into Box A about 30_minutes ago. S’he based The amount of Money Placed in The Box ( A ) on The Knowledge that The Rube would Choose The Box or Boxes that The Rube =Will= Choose in The Next Few Minutes ! 

The Showmyn insists that s’he is never wrong, 

& The Choice that The Rube will make is known by her with absolute Certainty.

  

The Caveat is this; 

If The Rube Chooses Just & Only Box A; 

It does contain ( Already ) The One Million Dollars.

If The Rube Chooses Just Box 2, 

S’he will Certainly Receive The One Thousand Dollars. 

If The Rube Chooses =BOTH= Boxes; A & 2; 

They will receive The One Thousand Dollars in Box 2 only, as Box A Contains Nothing. 

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Which Box or Boxes should The Rube Choose?

Does The Rube believe that The Showmyn: 

A ) ...Is Honestly Representing this Proposal ?

B ) ...Can see into The Future ? 

Does The Rube believe in Determinism ?

The Hypothetical Nature of This ‘Paradox’ requires that The Showmyn can see into The Future. 

If so; Where does this leave Determinism & Freewill ?

Let us allow that The Showmyn can see into The Future; 

Which is so Hypothetical that i don’t see how anyone can rightly consider this Story in any way, shape or form, A reasonable ‘Paradox’. 

i don’t believe in Paradoxes to begin with; As all Paradoxes are Either:

A ) Merely Clever MisUnderstandings; Such as The UnExpected Quiz

B ) or Simply, ( or Convoluted ) Gibberish. 

In The Case of Gibberish; Such as Zeno’s Examinations of Space & Time, The Questions are Presented in a Form such that they may appear to make proper linguistic sense, But don’t or Aren’t. 

They’re just gibberish. Zeno’s Paradoxes may be easily resolved by introducing The idea of ‘HyperTasks’ which are a Description of nothing more complicated ( as such ) as A Mathematical Limited Series; 

Such as ½ + ¼ + ⅛ + 1/n… to Infinity. 

If you add these all up; They will approach a Value of ( 1 ) but never-ever quite get there. 

Not even if you kept adding this series forever & ever, time without end.

Some Interpretations of Infinity allow that Parallel lines meet at Infinity or that this Series will equal a value of One at Infinity. 

That is Wrong. Infinity is Inaccessible, even to Infinity ( ! )

Zeno’s Paradoxes are word puzzles of The same venue. They want you to believe that The Tortoise or Achilles is running towards The finish line, or convergence of ( 1 ), but they are not. 

The way The Puzzle is arranged, they are not running towards a convergence of ( 1 ). 

Zeno has tricked you. He’s tricked a lot of people, so don’t be too disheartened. The Story may sound reasonable, but it just doesn’t make sense. 

It is like an Optical Illusion, with The exception that since we depend upon Vision much more acutely than our reasoning skills, It is easier to ‘accept’ that a Visual Illusion is just ‘Wrong’ in a specified way. With Word puzzles like Zeno’s, It is much harder to turn The Staircase to one side so that we can see that The Staircases don’t line up properly. 

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But getting back to The Showmyn.

The Showmyn can see into The Future. 

i would like to digress one more time to express my own belief that Time Travel is Impossible. It require too much craziness. And i don’t mean Grandfather Paradoxes, which don’t bother me in The Least. 

If Time Travel were Possible & you went back & Murdered your own Grandfather when he was 6 or 7 years old, You would Continue to Exist, & upon returning to your own Present, in The Future, you would then discover that your previously experienced life no longer existed. You would be without a tangible past life. 

Would this mean that i would allow for ‘Parallel’ Time Lines ? 

No. i don’t believe in Time Travel at all, But The ‘Infinite’ Universes ‘Theory’ is one of The Crazinesses that i spoke of earlier. 

And also; i further believe that only possible things are possible, 

So that when anyone speaks of some ‘Impossible’ thing as being ‘Possible’, 

i find that very irritating !

But: ( NO CONTRADICTION or HYPOCRISY coming up here ) 

i do believe that there are ( at least ) two ways of traveling ‘Back in Time’. 

Method A ) 

Given that we are almost certainly living in a Fractional Reality ( Virtual/Matrix Reality )

( !!! )

 

( As for Whether we are living in a Fractional Reality or Not; The Statistical Probability of it being affirmative is based on The Idea that such Reality Simulations will no doubt be available at sometime ( in this reality ) in The Very near future, as Computer Games on handheld devices is nearly at The Level of being indistinguishable from our reality now; The only missing component is that these Games do not yet contain genuinely Sentient Beings that believe that they are Conscious. This should become a ‘Reality’ within 10 years. So— Given that Fractional Realities will be Possible someday; There is no reason to doubt that we are living in one Now, & that there are thousands or billions of simulated realities for every ’Truly Three Dimensional Reality’, Such that The ‘Odds’ are that this Reality is a Matrix like Reality. / Is there any way of knowing or suspecting that we are living in a Fractional Reality ? Maybe. And if so; i believe that this reality shows many of The Hallmarks of A Fractional Reality. )

And According this ‘Understanding’ of how such a Reality would work; 

In order to save computational memory & Operational Speed, The Reality Generator is very Lazy & only Creates The Tiny Bubbles of Reality that The Sentient Entities in The Reality are experiencing at any given moment. 

The Realities that The Reality Generator Creates are largely based on The Expectations of The Entities, Providing a Variety of Tricks to further reduce The Amount of Reality that must be ‘Remembered’ in The Global Environment that Multiple Sentient Entities Share. 

Given that; 

It would be quite easy for any ‘Scientist’ or ‘Engineer’ to build a Time Machine that ‘They Believed’ would work, & then The Reality Generator would dutifully Generate a Reality that they Expect to Experience in The Past or Future. If they Expect UnExpectedness, The Reality Generator will provide them with The Level of Unexpectedness that they Expect ( ! ) 

Then upon returning The Their ‘Present’, The World would be Changed according their Expectations, possibly requiring an Isolated Reality Bubble that no longer corresponds with The Global Reality that The Other Entities in The Simulation are Experiencing.

Method ( B

This second method requires The Discovery of A ‘New’ Force that pushes Atoms & Other Tiny Bits in A Specific Direction that we are familiar with as; Clockwise Time Progression. 

It further requires that there is a Means by which this Force can be Flipped Over, Causing all The SubAtomic Particles to Move in The ‘Other’ Direction, Causing ‘Time’ to Seeming move backwards. 

This ‘First Tier’ Force would supersede The ‘Second Tier’ forces, Such as Gravity & ElectroMagnetism, So that they too would be ‘Somehow’ Reversed, without causing The World to Fly Apart ! 

This would create a lot of very serious problems & difficulties— The most curious would be if The Instigators of this effect were able to isolate themselves from this backwards moving universe, So that The universe that is now moving backwards has to flow around The hollow spaces which The Time Travel Commanders previously inhabited. ( ? ) 

The way that i imagine this successfully ( ? ) working is that The Engineers would discover that they can do this; Then dig some very deep holes in The ground with Capsules that have Time Traveling Shields around them. These Capsules would contain 1 or 2 or n people in each, & there they would wait until they were needed. 

Let us say that The First Capsules were planted in 1970, & after 911, The Time Traveling Engineers would want to send a Time Traveler ‘Back’ to 1999 to prevent that chain of events that led to 911; whatever they may be. The Time Traveling Engineers wait until The FBI & CIA & figured out how The Chrononauts should prevent 911, & they would then send this information to The underground Chrononaut Team. The The Time Engineers then Flip Over The Time Force, which sends The Earth Backwards in time for 5 years or so. This Bubble of Backwards time is expanding at something like .6 The Speed of Light, So that When Time as Reversed for 5 Years, which takes 5 years for The Chrononauts to wait for, they Activate a Time Force Flipper that Causes Time to begin flowing forward again. The Backwards Causing time Bubble has in this time gone outward something like 4 light years. 

As There exists a small Inequality in The Progressive Speed of The Forward & Backward flowing Time Bubbles, The Forward/Canceling Time Bubble expands at about .7 The Speed of Light, so that it will eventually catchup to The Backwards Flowing Time Force Bubble something like 30 light years from Earth & Cancel it out, then Dissipate. 

Meanwhile; The Chrononauts, which have been sufficiently isolated from The world for The duration that they have gone backward in time to, have not caused any anomalies by their missing bodies as time flowed around them! They then exit their time capsules & stop 911 from occurring. As it turns out; They end up causing 911 in what becomes something of a fiasco, causing The Entire program to be canceled. The remaining Chrononauts are found to be all completely insane from being in The Capsules for such a long time & sue The Government for a few millions of dollars.

Also; There are Aliens that know about this method of Time Travel & have long ago outlawed it, As when time starts moving forward again, there are always— ‘Bumps’ that The Process is Responsible for. 

When they Discover that we are Using this Technique & effecting a rather Large Bubble of our Surround Space; They are ticked off. 

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End of Final Digression.

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But getting back to The Showmyn.

The Showmyn can see into The Future. 

The Newcomb ‘Paradox’ wants us to believe that there is somekind of crisis of Freewill/Determinism going on here, But what it actually requires is that if It were possible to look into The Future, Then The Future can also look into The Past. 

Since we are already familiar with ‘Looking into The Past’, this doesn’t seem like such a remarkable insight or revelation. But if we imagine that this ‘New’ kind of looking into The Past is using The Same Mechanism as ‘Looking into The Future’; there is a subtle provision that may expunge The Paradoxical Perception of The Showmyn’s Claims vs Freewill.

It is this : When The Showmyn looks into The Future & Sees The Decision that The Rube has Made; The Rube’s Freewill is existing simultaneously in The Past, through that same ‘Window’ of Time Relativity. There isn’t any cause & effect in a universe that is predicated on time always moving forward. 

That Pedestrian Intuition of Clockwise Time is just wrong. 

If The Showmyn can open a window into a Future that Exists equally with another vantage point in The Past, then The Past exists for all Future Circumstances as well. 

All of our Freewill Decisions are being made in a context of an Holistic Chrono Ill Logical Reality which makes them Time Independent. 

Our ‘Perception’ of ‘This then That’ is a Crazy Illusion. 

Our Freewill exists outside of that misapprehension. 

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