Time machine.

Because I'm keeping it a big secret.

Having a time machine in our physical world involves impossible logical and physical conundrums because any physical action has physical consequences.

gungasnake

I too consider that to be the most likely scenario.

Followed closely by the event that chai tea just is refusing to share.

Maybe there ARE time machines, and constant interference from time travelers with the space-time continuum is constantly re-writing our history every minute.
How would we, locked in time, know about it? If someone went back 5 minutes ago to biblical times and re-wrote the bible, all of history would change with it. We would have no knowledge of how it was, only how it is.
All my memories surrounding those altered passages would be changed to match them.

In other words, maybe time travel does exist, and did get exposed, to the point of everyone knowing..it would only take one trip back in time to undo this knowledge and revert it back to secrecy.

For the record I don't think time travel is possible, as we only have the faintest notion of what time even is. Personally I see it(time) as a byproduct to perception, something created by our condition and awareness.

Well, according to Special Relativity, it's possible to travel into the future, sort of. As for a machine that goes both ways, author Larry Niven has speculated that if one is ever invented, people will continue going into the past and messing with history until someone makes a change that prevents the invention of the machine in the first place.

Then who's to say it hasn't already happened?


Personally, though, I think the notion of a time machine is fun, but not very realistic.

Doktor,

You raise a good point.

We don't need a time machine, we just need a machine to make us smart enough to not just live in the present moment. So we can never invent time machines. We will invent "smart" machines that let us not be so stupid.

The idea of a time machine rests on an assumption of linearity in time.
What about other notions of time?
Linear time can be depicted metaphorically in terms of a time-RIVER with a boat containing travelers moving from downstream (the past) to upstream (the future). With this model of time in our heads it is "sensible" to imagine that one can get out of the boat and move, faster than the boat, into the future, or back to where the boat came from, the past. This is because the model contains the future as existing before it exists (before the boat gets there) and the past as continuing to exist after the boat leaves.
What about using a time-LAKE metaphor? Here the boat floats on a surface that is always changing, yet goes nowhere. This model of time contains only an ever-changing present--no past (downstream) or future (upstream). With this model in mind the idea of a time machine makes no sense (a sense depending on the notion of linearity).

All I can think of when I run into this topic is:

Why would we want to have such a "machine" in the first place?

What is it with our neurotic need to "know" the future?

It comes from the ability to misunderstand the present...

Yes, Cyracuz, and as I understand "the present" it is constant change, but timeless in the linear sense of time. To me "the future" as a thing that is waiting for us or "the past" that has been left by us are cognitive fantasies. It is because of their unreality that why we have the conundrums of time travel discussed so far.

I agree JL.

To me the giveaway is that it isn't the present that grows old. It is we, within it. Time does not pass, we do.

Maybe it's just failure to cope with this fact, a failure to accept one's mortality, that causes us to "reverse" the concept of time in our understanding.

We are all living in a time maching.

It is slowly moving us all into the future.

Enjoy the trip.

I am.

Me too.

Cyracus, I think I see your point, as well as Frank's, but I'm unsettled by your observation that "it isn't the present that grows old. It is we, within it." I agree that the present is not a thing that ages, but I do feel that 'I' am not something existing within time; 'my' very nature IS change (or what we might call time).

I suspect, JL, that the reason you "feel" that way...is that "feeling that way" preserves your non-duality guesses about reality.

It is a gratuituous preservation as I see it.

I understand JL.

What we view as time is in a way the idea of causality, stripped bare of all content. Time is the axiom that lies beneath one way of understanding existence.

I believe that the self is nothing more that a set of such axioms, and that fundamental changes to the viewed self, changes to these axioms, affect the way we wiev everything else.