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Re: re: time travel: presentism, going nowhere and personal time
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Apologies for not putting this as dialogue but I don’t want to be typecast. Alice’s Adventures in Platonia (or somewhere) is becoming a bit of a project, but that will have to wait. Backwards causation is no different to forwards causation, at least in classical physics. Newton had real difficulties explaining why time went forward rather than back, and it seems that metaphysically at least the direction of the “arrow of time” is contingent. Now, with that in mind you argue that “time” will still move forward, even though “change” is going backwards, forwards or anything at all. The only way this is possible is if you claim that time is not reducible to change (for my views on this have a look in the first edition of the journal). Now, this problem doesn’t have to occur if you have someone “traveling in time” as change is not really rewinding, or if it is, it is not rewinding in exactly the same way as it wound. So we can still have time reducible to change. I think that this might require you to abandon ay notion of objective time (relative or otherwise) and only allow personal time. I wouldn’t really mind doing this too much. That said it would depend on how you defined the mechanism for time travel. If I were to specify at time a, Alice(a) and Alice(b) both existed, Alice(t) having the memory of time (b) and supposing herself to have traveled back from it. Time b is later. It only has Alice(b) about to time travel (or not, possibly). She is Alice(a), but later. Time c (a later time) has Alice(c), who is identical to Alice(a), and Alice(t*) who is identical to Alice(t). Unless you wish to propose a non-relationist time, a and c are the same time. I think I need diagrams here. Ah well.
Gawd bless us, every one.
x
James
P.S. Thank you Alice. Your few words of praise make it all worthwhile.
P.P.S. Is anyone else going to the metaphysics conference in Nottingham in January?
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