Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy

Time Travel

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Time travel has been a popular trope for decades, in books, TV shows and movies. It is not uncommon to see people going back and forth in time and being heroes (or dicks) in general. Recently I have been reading up on and thinking about the scientific aspects of it.

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After doing some research and reading up various journals, here are my thoughts on time travel:

Time travel to the past

I am a firm believer of the notion that time flows in one direction and it is impossible to reverse the flow of time and “travel” into the past. As such, the various temporal paradoxes are null-and-void. It is impossible to go into the past and change what has already happened.

The biggest proof? If this was possible, someone from the future would have come to our present or past and left evidence.

What I believe you can do is “look” into the past. You can do that today when you look at distant stars. Whether you can see past events at places not far away (like earth)? I am not sure but I don’t think so.

At some level, I feel comfort in the fact that the events in the past are set in stone and cannot be changed.

Time travel to the future

I believe time travel to the future is possible, but not in the way you think. It is a well known fact that gravity and velocity influence how you perceive the passage of time. Such effects have already been observed, albeit at a small scale.

So technically, you can travel (say) 10 years into the future at the cost of only 1 year of your personal time. But, as per the previous topic, this is a one way street. When you do this, you leave behind your time forever and cannot go back.

How?

You can do this in 2 ways

  1. Travelling every fast at relativistic speeds (Special relativity) :

    Eg you can travel to earth as it will be in 200 years, if you travel 2 years at 99.995% the speed of light. However, since the closer you get to the speed of light, the higher your mass becomes, it may be impossible to accelerate a human to such speeds.

    However, lower returns, like travelling to earth 4.5 years from now at the expense of 2 years of personal time is possible at just 90% of the speed of light. At 90% of the speed of light, a 100kg mass will only increase its mass to 229.4kg.
  2. Being in close proximity to a huge gravitational well (General relativity):

    This was beautifully demonstrated in the movie Interstellar, in which, due to their close proximity to a black hole, the protagonist travels 14 years into the future from the reference frame of earth, at the expense of only 45 minutes of his personal time.

Again, none of this is science fiction; all this has been repeatedly confirmed by experiments. At this point, it is not a physics problem, but an engineering problem. Will take a few massive leaps in spacecraft propulsion technology and all this will become everyday affair.

Mathematical Predictive Time Window

You know how you can calculate (on paper) that when one billiard ball hits another, what path they both travel? You can do that with 3,4 balls, too. As you scale up, the problem becomes too difficult to calculate on paper, but computers can do this at a much higher scale already.

Now imagine a computer powerful enough to calculate/predict the path and behaviour of individual atoms. Now, if you were to build a sufficiently powerful computer that can predict the path and behaviour of all the atoms on earth, you could easily predict the future and see what is going to happen days, months and years into the future.

Similarly, if you reverse the billiard ball concept, and you measure what speed and angle each ball is travelling at, you can predict the starting position of each ball (and the cue stick). Extending this concept to extremely powerful computers, you could theoretically look back in time into the past.

The Roadblocks

There are however the following problems with this concept:

  • Measurement : Measuring the position and movement of each atom instantaneously is almost impossible, because by the time you measure them, these parameters have already changed.
  • Storage : If you were to store the data of each atom (1 bit), even with the most efficient storage mechanism, it would require a like-for-like atom in the computer. So to store the data of each atom on earth, you need at least a computer with the same number of atoms. To simulate the whole universe, you need at least another universe.
  • Free Will : All of this assumes that a living creature’s behaviour is purely a product of the neurons firing in the brains, in turn their behaviour at the atomic level. Which also assumes that everyone’s behaviour is pre-determined and there’s no such thing as free will.
Philosophy

Consciousness

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Over the last few years, I have, more and more, been thinking about the hard problem of consciousness. What does consciousness mean? Where does it come from? What happens to it after death? With this post, I have tried to wax philosophical and give structure to my thoughts on this topic.

Overall, I think the possibilities can be summarised into the below three

Scenario 1 – Consciousness is purely a by-product of the physical structure of the brain and the neurons firing inside.

Scenario 2 – Consciousnesses is a combination of the physical structure of the brain and additionally something we cannot “see” or measure today. Some say it may be quantum phenomena. Both physical & quantum are tied to each other and cannot exist without each other.

Scenario 3 – Consciousness resides in the brain, but can free itself from the brain at death or during a Near-Death Experience. Is what most religious people call a “soul”.

Now let’s try comparing all three scenarios during hypothetical situations.

Teleportation & Consciousness

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Teleportation is a (theoretical) mechanism in which a machine reads your atomic structures at the “source” and relays it to another machine at the “destination”. Then the source machine disintegrates your body and the destination machine replicates it at the same time. Using this technique, you are supposed to instantaneously (Or at least at the speed of information transfer) travel from one place to another.

  • If Scenario 1 is true, then teleportation should theoretically work just fine. One simply enters on one side and seamlessly emerges on the other side. But if you think a bit deeper, a few paradoxes arise:

What if you don’t disintegrate the body at the source? Even better, what if you recreate the body at 2 destinations twice? Where does the person’s consciousness reside then?

Does the same consciousness exist at 2 (or more) places at the same time? Imagine the feeling.

As per me, the more likely explanation is that when you teleport, the person at the destination is not you, but a copy of you with your memories. So basically, when you undergo teleportation, your consciousness dies and a clone with your memories is born at the destination with a new consciousness.

  • If Scenario 2 is true, then teleportation will kill you at the source and just create a new body at the destination, which will be a brain-dead body. A working teleportation system will be next to impossible to develop in this scenario.
  • If Scenario 3 is true, then there’s no current theoretical basis of teleportation, but once we crack the mystery, it may turn out to be the easiest method of all. Your consciousness can easily transfer from one body to another. This is shown in many movies and TV shows like Altered Carbon.

Death and Consciousness

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The concept of consciousness has a profound impact on death (and finding ways to avoid it).

  • If Scenario 1 is true, it would be easy to cheat death. A common Sci-Fi trope is gaining immortality by transferring yourself to a computer. But the same paradoxes as teleportation arise. What if you transfer yourself to a computer before you die? Or you copy yourself to two different computers? Does your consciousness exist at 2 different places at the same time?

The more likely explanation is that it is impossible for consciousness to exist in a computer. Your digital clone may behave like you, but won’t have consciousness.

In such a case, the only way to cheat death would be to prevent the biological degradation of the body.

  • If Scenario 2 is true, the only way to cheat death would be to prevent the biological degradation of the body.
  • If Scenario 3 is true, we have no way (currently) to cheat death, but once the secret is cracked, it may be easiest of them all. Just transfer your consciousness to another body or a computer. This concept is shown in this specific episode of Black Mirror (One of my favourite TV episodes of all time). Or maybe after you die, your consciousness automatically moves to another body. This would translate to the concept of reincarnation in some religions. Maybe a soul can even exist without a body, which is where afterlife comes in.

Personally, I think Scenario 2 is true and human civilisation will perish long before we figure out the secrets of consciousness.

Personally, I hope Scenario 3 is true and one day we figure out how to do the things mentioned above, once we stop killing each other and the planet.