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Time travel - Is it really possible?

if anyone can give a propper account for what time really is then could it only be only be possible for time travel to occur.

If time is an illusion, or just a working theory of our construction then it seems impossible and ludicrous to think there would be a way of travelling though it. Producing something that is apt for travelling through an illusion or mere theory? - sounds like a tough task

if it could be known however that time was a real thing, and exactly what the nature of that thing was then could we only begin to conceive of travel though it.

Such a thing would be very difficult to conceive in the first place, time is a thing of metaphysics. The thought of moving something physical through a metaphysical space seems theoretically impossible. (as i've said over and over in so many essays, notes, etc...; Physics and metaphysics are completely incommensurable)

there are alot of '"if"'s here and not many facts of the matter. the problem with time is there is no 'matter' to be a fact of. Gathering a ture understanding of something like time that seems so intuitive to everyone is as difficult as gathering an understanging (and explination) for human consciousness.


....oh yea and whoever made that point about not having any free will in order for time travel to exist i must agree totally with. We would have to be living within the constructs of 'hard determinism' in order for a present state in the future to remain constant.
 
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who says that we do have free will though? i tend to think that to a point we fool ourselves into pretending to think we are in total control of all our choices.
 
what's so offensive about determinism anyway? even if our choices are causally determined, we still make all of our choices about our actions for our own reasons. the causes of us having certain reasons for action may not be transparent to us, but that's hardly surprising, or particularly relevant at the time we choose to act. i don't have to know exactly *why* i believe i shouldn't kill kick my dog in order to have the belief that i shouldn't kick him. similarly i don't need to know why i have reasons for acting, as long as i have them and they're MY reasons, my actions are still the result of my will.

as far as a determined future goes, it's wrong to think of the future as if it's standing there coercing you into deciding to do x, like a criminal with a gun to your head. in actual fact, even if the truth of your future is determined, in the present you're still acting for your own reasons. you eat food because you're hungry, not because in the future you will be able to look back and say "i ate food at x time". your reasons for acting are yours, you identify with them, you choose which ones to act on, so i don't see how there's a problem for free will even IF hard determinism is true. determinism doesn't entail fatalism.

i also think an interesting argument for determinism can be obtained from the conventional Christian concept of God. if God knows everything, and has planned the Universe (Divine Providence), then he knows the past, present and future utterly and completely. if this is the case, then obviously the future cannot be changed by human action. Those wacky Christians and their crazy God have gone and fucked up the free will party again! so you don't need time travel to show determinism.

Thoth - Heinlein = the shit!
 
oopzs could u travel father back in time than u originaly built the time machine if u built a time machine with in a time machine
 
Determinism (there's different types but im talking about hard determinism here, which is the only model suitable for the existance of time travel) is offensive for those very reasons;

Responsibility: in determinism you couldnt have chosen to act otherwise. how can ppl be held resposible for their actions if the event is predetermined? it reduces the self to some kind of uncontrolled automata. the significance of morals and ethics if this were true would be rendered compeltely useless. not only that but the idea that we have or need a self or consciousness becomes unclear.

Causation: Hard determinism by definition must utilise causation to form how things are to be determined in that construct. the problem is that if causation is used, you run into the 'problem (or error) of regress'. (i dont know if you know) but regress is a logical mistake. The causes in the chain of events will forever revert back to previous events causing events that caused those events etc etc... what was the origional event that everything reverts back to? you then be asking how the universe was born (which reminds me of what stephen hawkings said once "universes just... happen!" HAHAHA it may be true but god i found it funny) of corse we can link causes through time, its such a basic thing we do every day, but saying that we couldnt have possibly chosen to do ANYTHING we have ever done any OTHER way because the universe 'just happened' once upon a time.... it seems a bit much dont u think?
even if the cause of the universe happening was found, you could continue finding the causes of all things, what then will you reach? either something that has and will always be, or find that nothing was the cause of everything.... both seem to be greatly puzzling and problematic


on the other side of the scale:

Complete free will (or libertarianism) would be some form of chaos. Imagine a world where you could act in any particular way you felt.... (it woud be like in the simpsons 'do what you feel' episode) but worse, we have to be constrained in some way, forced or determened by social, moral, or sometimes caused powers. Even more ludicrous would be the the idea of complete freedom, one would not even be governed by gravity or philisacality. Existance would be like a mathamatical plain in geometery with no points, lines or even a scale, such a thing could only exist in our minds.

we are not as simple as billard balls merely bouncing off eachother, one determining where the next will rebound to.
complete free will although wold be somewhat overwhelmingly chaotic

the other option is Compatabilism: a mix (and type of) of Determinism, and free will. Not everything is determined by causation, but obviously sometimes it is, and we still have free will, we can choose what we want to do, so long as it is not determined or governed buy any other constraining power (as listed above)

if compatabilism seems to be the only feible model out of the those presented, then time travel could not exist as for a present state in the future to remain constant that future must be pre determined by 'hard determinism' which is in hand governed by complete causation.

(oops sorry i didnt intend for this to be so long!! 8o thankx 4 reading if ya reached the end tho=D i hope it was worth it, oh yea n sorry about the spelling mastakes)
 
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DQ: oops sorry i didnt relise you've already covered compatabilism, my point is that to travel in to the future, that future you are travelling to must be a fixed point, so if compatabilism allows for free will it could not possibly be a fixed point,.
at the point in time where you leave real time, you could land into an inconceivable ammount of possible relaties that wound exist if free will (or compatablisim) exists. it would be something like sliders in that case, well the general idea of it anyway. Depending on how you think of it,that point in the future could be an almost infinite ammount of points, or the point would be completely non existant.


....and any of that is only possible if we could make a propper account for what time is anyway
 
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there is so much reading here to be done.. more than is possible to be read while i sit at my desk at work....

what i need is a time machine so i can read it all and then go back in time to the time i should have been working and wasn't as i was reading and start all over again...

actually. when i do that i'll be able to post a reply infront of this one giving proof to the existance of time travel.

actually, rather i'll go back in time and post this message here just to mess with everyones heads in front of a later message saying i'm going to go back in time cause i just lost my job for reading bluelight at work way more than i should..
 
Beatbreaker:
how can ppl be held resposible for their actions if the event is predetermined? it reduces the self to some kind of uncontrolled automata. the significance of morals and ethics if this were true would be rendered compeltely useless. not only that but the idea that we have or need a self or consciousness becomes unclear.
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the fact that we "couldn't have done otherwise" doesn't entail that we aren't responsible for our actions. read the paper by harry frankfurt (PM me with your email address and i'll send it to you)... and THEN come and tell me why determinism means we're uncontrolled automatons. i can see you've read some philosophy stuff but i just think your interpretation of hard determinism and free will is too simplistic. and your spelling is shithouse ;)

i still think the future could be a fixed point, and free will could exist. as for the alternate universes theory... i can accept that alternate universes may or even do exist. i can't accept that every time anything happens a new alternative universe is created. and i don't think you need to have a theory like that to explain free will. IMHO what free will is, is an agent acting because of a set of reasons that he or she identifies as her own reasons for action. The truth of future events is determined because of the way we act on our reasons. Our reasons and deliberation are not influenced in any causal way by the way the future will turn out!

as for whether determinism implies regression and therefore an "uncaused cause", i see what you're saying. however if you ask most physicists they'd probably tell you that the fact that the universe is the way it is NOW doesn't mean it was ALWAYS like that. the laws of physics and matter didn't exist before the big bang, time itself didn't exist, and we don't have any problem accepting that they just started at the big bang. what i'm getting at is the truth of determinism NOW doesn't entail that determinism has ALWAYS been true. i assume you understand the formal use of the term "entailment", here.

although i will agree with you that an uncaused, completely random universe would be chaos, and i think this would be MORE of a problem for free will than a determined universe.
 
Just as an aside, how does hard determinism deal with things like entropy, or the Heisenberg principal?

IMHO what free will is, is an agent acting because of a set of reasons that he or she identifies as her own reasons for action. The truth of future events is determined because of the way we act on our reasons. Our reasons and deliberation are not influenced in any causal way by the way the future will turn out!
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This seems like a simplified way of saying that determinism is akin to "I can do certain things, however I choose not to" rather than "I have no free will."
I wonder however, what the real difference is... If we acknowlege that it is impossible to perform actions that are not compossible with what is a static predetermined future, how does our sense of reason somehow determine the 'truth' of our future? Somehow, it seems to evade the question. If we say that perhaps in the future, it is determined that I shall die in a nasty boating accident. While my sense of reason may lead me to boad that boat and get myself into the fatal situation, there is no possible other way I can reason my way out of it. I can not decide against boating that day, or sleeping late, for example. It is an impossibility. You seem to think that I could have reasoned my way out of it, or I could have not chosen to go boating in the first place yet for whatever purpose, I made the concious descison to get on the boat and thus I bear responsiblility. (I hope I am not misenterpreting). How is this "can't" vs "won't" argument anything more than semantics? If the future is a place, and we somehow glean information from it via some form of time travel or communication with the future, what does that do for our reason? Would we be able to use our reason to manipulate the future, or would our lack of free will be just revealed to us in an abrupt way?

Even if our descisions are not affected in a causal way by the future, are we still not just naive participants in an unfolding pattern? Does this not make our reasoning futile for anything but a mechanism for self delusion?
 
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You seem to think that I could have reasoned my way out of it, or I could have not chosen to go boating in the first place
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Thoth! i said nothing of the sort! it's just a form of the grandfather paradox... you couldn't have reasoned your way out of the boating accident because you didn't avoid it. what i mean is that our rational decisions/actions are part of the full set of causes that lead to the future. so to say that our actions and decisions are irrelevant because the future will happen anyway is to ignore the fact that (as in the GF paradox) the future will be what it will be BECAUSE of your decisions, not in spite of them. be careful not to put the effect (the future) in the place of the cause (our decisions and actions).

now if you could somehow find out about the future before it happened, a la Minority Report, then you've got problems (as Tom Cruise found out). but it's doubtful that even with relativity (assuming we're not talking about multiple universes here) allowing you to travel forward in time, you'd be able to see your own future. you'd be travelling in time relative to an external existence, so you'd be seeing "the future" in one sense, but you'd still be in your own present. you could never actually visit yourself in the future, at least according to the rules of time-travel that seem most likely given current knowledge of physics. (open to argument on this point).

but if i grant that you could somehow come to know your own future/fate, it would seem hard to accept that you can still act freely. but i think that even if you know your fate, your fate is still determined by a combination of your own actions and the set of external circumstances that run the world. your actions might be different than if you didn't know your fate, but that doesn't mean that your decisions don't affect your fate. i hope you can figure out what i mean... anyway, i imagine the psychological implications would be pretty difficult to cope with.

as for how hard determinism accounts for heisenberg's uncertainty principle, i think you could probably say either: the uncertainty is really just caused by factors we're unaware of; or that maybe determinism is not that hard. the ancient greeks actually introduced a concept of random atomic "swerve" to soften what they saw as the problem of determinism. but yeah, i dunno about that. quantum physics is kinda out of my league. maybe ask BT?
 
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"Destiny isn't a thing by chance, but is mainly due to choice!"

Though this quote can be viewed in many ways, it doesn't answer the initial question..."Can time travel be achieved?"

If we were to exist in the realm of possibilities (no restrictions), anything is possible.

5,000 years ago, people on earth wouldn't have even began to imagine that the technological advancment achieved in a short period of time could have been so great by their decendants.

5,000 years from now, well.... I'm not saying that we will achieve time travel... but I can say this, limitiations are set by the physical rules humans have set for themselves i.e we measure time, space, matter according to what we have discovered, or should I say rediscovered.

Every possibility exists, it only requires the discovery or rediscovery of what has been available from the dawn of existence. What lies ahead is another chapter of human evolution.
 
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