Time Traveler’s Toolkit, Part 3
Previous Entries:
What's a Speculist?
Practical Time Travel
Divvying up the Future
We begin with a simple question: to what extent can the things we do affect the future? Can we change the future only for ourselves or can we change it for others and for the world in general??
First, let’s back up and answer a more basic question: what doe we mean by "the future?" I can think of three pretty good answers:
Now let’s review the three points of view we identified last time and give a handy short name for each :
If we combine our types of future with our three points of view, we come up with nine different flavors of the future, as shown here:
|
IAM Simple |
IAM Relative |
IAM Absolute |
|
3PL Simple |
3PL Relative |
3PL Absolute |
|
T Simple |
T Relative |
T Absolute |
We can assume that an individual’s ability to affect the future is greatest in the upper left corner and diminishes to almost nothing as we work our way from left to right and from top to bottom.
Let's take a closer look at each and see how that analysis holds up.
IAM Simple
At the outset, we should note that a person's ability to influence any of these
different types of future is going to vary greatly from individual to individual.
But the IAMs are pretty straightforward, especially this first one. All those
futures in which we are fat, skinny, tattooed, and pregnant exist in the IAM
Simple future, although any of those might slop over into the next category
depending on how important we take any one of those changes to be. Other exciting
futures that lie along the IAM Simple path include those in which we have decided
what to have for breakfast, which shirt to wear, and whether to go to work or
call in sick.
The IAM Simple includes many events which are (apparently) not under our control. My phone may or may not ring in the next hour. I may or may not get the parking space I’m looking for. That check may or may not clear before the weekend. These are all things that haven’t happened yet, they are about me (or at least can be defined as being about me) and I would appear to have little or no control over them.
And there is an interesting middle ground between these kinds of future events. What about the question of whether I will be happy tomorrow? To what extent am I able to control that? I may not be able to do much about it if something terrible happens (assuming I’m not capable of preventing terrible things from happening) but what if tomorrow is a "normal" day? Can I just choose to be happy? Or do I have to create circumstances that will make me happy? In any case, to whatever extent our future subjective emotional state is our own doing, the doing of others, or the product of an uncaring world, it is part of the IAM Simple future.
IAM Relative
We are expecting a landmark, a milestone, and things are going to be different
when we get there. Of course when we reach the landmark or pass the milestone
and things aren’t as different as we had planned, a condition that I call Future
Disappointment sets in. Many of us had this after the year 2000. So many of
the things we had been led to believe would happen by that year never came about.
(Questions 2 and 7 of the Seven
Questions about the Future have to do with Future Disappointment.) But it
isn’t just about a particular year, Future Disappointment can occur around much
more individualized false horizons:
Calling these events false horizons is not to diminish the impact that they might have on us. But how often do they really pan out to have the kind of impact we expect? They are relative. The IAM Relative future includes changes like moving, switching jobs, changing haircuts. It can be planned events, such as the events listed above, or unplanned events such as a really nice weekend or a really bad hangover or moving, only this time because you’ve been evicted. In the case of planned milestones (getting a car, coming out of the closet) we can plan for the change and the relative future really does exist for us as the future. In the case of the unplanned milestones (car accident, waking up and realizing that you’re gay), we only see them as a relative future that we are currently living in (or have already passed.) And of course, the term "future" is at that point more of a temporal courtesy. Few of us really believe that we’re living in the future, question 1 of the Seven Questions notwithstanding.
IAM Absolute
Declaring so many personal crises, above, to be relative, we hardly left room for the notion of a personal absolute future. Even without thinking about it, however, there are two obvious examples:
Of the two, the second probably has the better case for being an Absolute Future. Birth is stuck in a kind of a permanent past. It’s the Go space on the game board.. As we saw last time in the example of the three predictions of the future that turn out to be true, death represents an absolute, ultimate future.
But are there other life-changing events which could be classified as Absolute? Possibly. There do seem to be certain events that can reflect a kind of "end of the world" and the beginning of a completely different, transcendent reality. These might include:
How are these distinguished from the signposts that lead to the relative future? On the one hand, it’s purely subjective, so maybe there isn’t even a good case for keeping the two categories separate. On the other hand, when your world ends, you know it.
Some of these example may seem absolute at the time they occur, but don’t necessarily thrust their subject into a completely different plane of existence. Perhaps a few weeks/months/years after the amazing transformation occurs, we awaken to find it somewhat less amazing. And although our lives have been fundamentally transformed, the transcendence has passed.
We are at that point in the same position as the children of that caveperson who discovered fire. We are in a position to appreciate the magnitude of the change, and we may still consider it to be the turning point in history, the beginning of the new age. However, we no longer lose sleep thinking about it.
Our lives have been transformed, but not ended. Not replaced with something utterly different. Life after the discovery of fire was much better than life before the discovery of fire, but when the excitement died down...we were still cave people.
With that in mind, I'm going to update our model thusly:
|
IAM Simple |
IAM Relative |
IAM Bridge Events |
IAM Absolute |
|
3PL Simple |
3PL Relative |
3PL Bridge Events |
3PL Absolute |
|
T Simple |
T Relative |
T Bridge Events |
T Absolute |
Bridge events are milestones that are transformative but not absolute. They are, if you don’t mind a small paradox, near absolute. Bridge events are different from the events that trigger a relative future in that they tend to be unplanned. They are what those paradigm people refer to as "discontinuous change."
Let’s look at some examples. Getting married is listed as an event that triggers an IAM Relative future. It is definitely a milestone: the anniversary of the event is tracked for years to come. It’s almost always a planned event. And it is for most people, to say the very least, a significant change. Getting married is generally not, however, the end of the world as we know it or the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. It’s big. But even the bigness is expected. Unless there is something fundamentally wrong (or amazingly right) with the marriage, we know that what we are experiencing is somewhere along the spectrum of what is to be expected.
So getting married is relative.
Falling in love, on the other hand, is much closer to being absolute. It is by and large unplanned. We don’t exactly cause it, which is not to say that our behavior doesn’t play an enormous role in its coming about. And it is hugely transformative, an upheaval that impacts almost every aspect of what we do and how we feel.
However, the transcendence experienced with falling in love (or religious conversion, or going to prison, or what have you) wears off after a while. So what occurred was transformative, but not absolute. It wasn’t really the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. It wasn’t really the end of the world. It was a bridge event.
3PL Simple
Like the IAMs, the 3PLs are pretty straightforward, especially this first one.
The 3PL Simple includes all those futures in which those around us become fat,
skinny, tattooed, or pregnant. We can have tremendous impact on this future.
Everything we do for the people in our lives, everything we do to them,
and everything we allow to happen to them by doing nothing...these all factor
into the 3PL Simple.
3PL Relative
Some of the IAM Relative events that we experience are shared by the people
who are closest to us and so become doorways to the Relative future for them
as well. Getting married, which I listed above, begins a Relative future for
you and at least one other person. If you and that person decide to have children,
it also marks a major event in their pre-history.
There are other examples of ways you can impact the 3PL Relative future. Many of these have to do with family. For example, if you decide to pack up the old Buick Roadmaster wagon with your spouse, three kids, and all your worldly goods and head out from your little house in Kentucky to a much smaller apartment in San Diego, you have probably defined a relative future horizon for everyone involved (including some of the folks in San Diego.) There are also good opportunities to spark Relative futures among your friends, co-workers, and even total strangers. It can happen.
All that being said, opportunities to impact the 3PL Relative future are limited. It’s no easy task to create Relative future horizons for other people. People tend to want to make up their own minds about what the big stuff going on in their lives is. And besides, who wants to create the definitive future for someone else? Generally, when you think about the future (obvious family considerations aside) you think about your own future. Often as not, when you create a Relative future horizon for another person, you didn’t even intend to do it. You were trying to make something big happen in your own life and you just happened to drag a few of the rest of us along with you.
Witness the Kentucky/San Diego move detailed above. Much as they may end up appreciating it (or hating you for it) later, the kids probably didn’t have that much of a say.
3PL Bridge Events
Can you cause 3PL Bridge Events? Can you give others a whiff of a near absolute future, a future that transcends everything they’ve ever known?
Possibly. Maybe you can provide information or point someone in a direction that fundamentally transforms their life. But more likely, you just happen to be in the vicinity when these things occur. Even gifted teachers and spiritual leaders will rarely claim full credit for major changes taking place in their subjects’ lives. Like relative future horizons (only moreso), people tend to bring these on themselves.
3PL Absolute
You can give birth to another person. You can kill another person. That’s all I can think of. Even if you save another person’s life, this is just a relative future horizon.
T Simple
Technically, every event that occurs in the IAM Simple future also occurs in
the T Simple future. So, yes, you can control things that happen in The Future®
to the same extent that you can cause things to happen in your future. That
doesn’t mean, from the broader perspective, that anyone will necessarily notice
or care.
T Relative
The previous example given of a relative future was the end of World War II.
Can we as individuals have an impact on this level of event? A very few of us
will have a visible impact. Many, many more of us will have a smaller, but real
impact. The war effort provides good examples. Only a few people signed declarations
of war or stormed Omaha Beach. Many more folks were involved in scrap metal
drives or in manufacturing equipment. But everyone involved had a real impact.
Several future developments that we’re interested in at the Speculist will represent the beginning of a Relative Future for humanity. Both the development of a cure for aging and the establishment of the first interplanetary settlement are good examples. It isn’t hard to view the present as the era when human beings can generally expect to live a century or less, or the era when human beings live only on Earth. Nor would it be hard to define the future as the period that occurs beyond one of these landmarks.
T Bridge Events
As individuals, we can impact T Bridge Events to the same extent that we can
impact T Relative events. The only question is whether there are any on the
horizon. The one I can think of is the Technology
Singularity. Although I listed this earlier as an Absolute Future, it might
fit better in the Bridge Event category.
You can argue it either way. If the Singularity is the end of the human era, it's an absolute future. If it's the migration of human intelligence to a new computational substrate, maybe it's just a Bridge Event.
It's till bigger than the invention of fire, though.
T Absolute
Again, we can have some impact on it, but is it on the horizon? Some religious
folks believe the Apocalypse is imminent. We could collide with a giant meteor.
It would be that kind of thing, an unexpected catastrophe that brings the world
to the end. Personally, I don't see any T Absolute Futures on the horizon (with
the possible exception of the Singularity.) And, clearly, that's just as well.
Next time, we’ll begin to look at how these different futures fit into what I call Possibility Space.
Posted by Phil at August 25, 2003 05:33 PM | TrackBackTime Travel:
Reality or Just Plane Fiction? A Terminator II Essay.
Many Science fiction stories, as we all know, are based on ‘Time Travel (T2?).’ It is a wonderful mystical ability for writers to tap into that allows them to introduce all kinds of variables into their movies and television shows. It is so widely accepted by audiences (much like Shape-Shifting is now) that no one even bats-an-eye as they are ‘whisked off’ up-and-down-the-corridor-of-time by a movie’s plot. I’m not quite so sure if audiences have come to accept the notion that ‘all’ aliens can speak ‘fluent English’ just quite so much as time travel - by comparison that is! But, for how accepted Time Travel (T2) is in the movies, how much do we really know about its mysteries? Will we really ever be able to transgress its boundaries and alter history?
At the sub-atomic level, our cosmic reality is ‘plain and simply’ quite strange. It is reality quite different than what we normally experience at our current size! Real life scientists, conducting sub-atomic experiments in labs all over the world, have uncovered and verified many unusual happenings in the realm of the very small: paradoxes, instantaneous events (implying speeds faster than light), and even the power that conscious-human-observation has as it actually ‘interacts’ with what is being witnessed (something called the ‘Uncertainty Principal’).
Among the strangest of such events is an actual recorded instance of T2! It happened in an atomic accelerator experiment, where they routinely smash atoms together in order to create much more exotic forms of matter from raw energy: you know - that whole E=MC2 thing! During the one experiment, they actually witnessed (and recorded) an atomic particle ‘leaving’ an event, before it ever ‘arrived!’ The infinitesimal time difference between the departure and arrival was imperceptibly small (something on the order of a billionth of a second), but it did, in fact, happen!
Perhaps these complicated experiments only provide proof for something many of us already believed? Tom Brown Jr, for example - a best-selling author on wide-ranging Native American subjects - frequently alludes to mysterious and perplexing notions regarding T2. There are also many recorded cases, as we all have heard, of dogs barking before earthquakes, of people having premonitions that came true, and so on and so on. Even within my own family, my mom’s one-time childhood Boxer ‘Baron’ (-by all accounts-) knew when her father was on the elevator coming home - in a large New York City apartment tower - long before he ever got to their door. This was despite the fact that he worked in the building and came home at all different hours of the day and night. So, what gives? Is some ‘trickle over’ T2 possible? If so, what happens then? Can we change the course of events by altering history?
Creating Paradoxes:
For Sara Connor, an innocent woman of the early 1980’s, who probably liked the BeeGees just as much as I did (at the time of course - everyone did… No really), things would have been all ‘hunky-dory-fine’ without the perplexing use of time travel (T2) by the movie’s ‘over indulgent’ script writers. Imagine getting caught up in something that you haven’t even done yet! Just because you ‘might’ someday give birth to a troublesome human resistance fighter ‘refusing to die quietly’ at the bloody hands of The Machines, doesn’t exactly mean you’re to blame. Right? What an absolute hapless gall that Skynet being must have had for taking such lethal and premature actions. Everyone knows we are all innocent until proven guilty… right?
Would such time-paradoxes exist if T2 were indeed possible? Could we ‘alter time’ by taking specific actions, or would we just be changing it back to ‘the way it should be’ no matter what we did? If we think about it, did not Skynet’s own attempt to prevent the birth of John Connor, actually lead to it! As those who have seen Terminator know, It was the human resistance fighter that was sent back to stop the first, ‘unfriendly’ Terminator who ultimately became the father of John.. Right? Despite how lucky he was, he just happened to die before he was born! How is that for paradoxes? How would we (or Skynet for that mater) ever know for sure if what we do to avert an event, actually ends up causing it: whether it is as we move progressively forward in time or go ‘skipping back’ to change things?
From what I know and have read, I ‘really believe’ that - like animals - we too can sense danger and at least ‘glimpse’ possible futures that we ‘will’ in turn be able to affect. I like to think of it in these terms: creatures evolved ‘eyes’ because there was light to be seen. A half dozen creatures here on Earth evolved to a state of ‘consciousness,’ I think, because there were things like gut feelings, intuition, and clairvoyance to tap into! Evolution just experiments with every possible option and sense it has available to it until it wires itself into whatever works best for survival. Being able to sense things are about to happen is said to be a ‘skill’ we can hone by ‘calming the mind’ or by ‘replaying’ any memories we might have of instances in time ‘just before’ we anticipate something like a phone call happening. How did we feel before the phone rang and can we make ourselves sensitive to that same feeling if it occurs in the future? Body awareness is also a key. If you are not participating in some form of Yoga or marshal arts (Tai Chi / ChiQong), you should be! It isn’t just for the sake of being limber or being able to defend yourself. Learning to ‘connect’ with the body is like a doorway to the inner-self, provided you leave the ‘ego’ at the door. Such activities are just plain fun regardless, so give them a try (for say a month or two). You owe it to yourself!
Once we can sense events or the all-important ‘gut feeling,’ it becomes absolutely critical to follow what it tells us! A great many people have avoided airplane crashes and getting mugged by simply paying attention to what they feel is right to do. ‘What-we-feel-is-right-to-do’ then becomes the ultimate question! How much we can protect ourselves from harm or do that leads us to something ‘right-for-us’ largely depend on our ‘intent.’ It isn’t necessarily just a person’s actions that matter. ‘Internal intent plays a defining role!’ Will we seek a ‘gut feeling’ only in order to try and play the right lottery numbers - just so we can get rich and become un-godly egotistical and even more wasteful? Who, subconsciously, would want that? Too many people sell themselves for money, when (in all reality) nothing about ‘you’ will ever change. I lived on the street as a three-time teen-age-runaway and I lived the relatively good life of a middle-class citizen, and I can tell you “I felt no different inside:” “we are who we are - regardless of outside circumstances.” Or, conversely, do we live our life so that we enjoy subtler things and do what we can to help other? I know that may sound all sort of ‘mushy,’ but it makes a difference: provided you realize that the intent to help others does not mean becoming a ‘door-mat’ for them, or giving-up ‘everything-you-own’ in the name of a better good. It is simply trying to find someway to help as best you ‘reasonably’ can!
Try to think of it this way. If a ship were sinking and people were drowning, how different is it to be swimming to the shore only to save yourself, or swimming to the shore so that you can get a life-raft (allowing you to go back and save others)? The action is the same (you’ll save yourself in both cases), but it is the ‘intent’ that differs. Our thoughts and who we are ‘deep inside’ really mater! There (in essence) really seems to be a ‘gravity’ between positive actions that will lead to positive events - much like a gravity that leads in the other direction. Most Buddhist will tell you the same basic thing via the power of Karma: do something bad and you will have only created a ‘seed’ for something bad to happen to you in return. Really believing this (much like we believe that stepping out of a two-story window will lead to a broken leg) would certainly alter how we approached life - wouldn’t you say?
So if you’re still asking if all this is really possible, just think of how much the ‘BeeGees’ ‘altered time?’ Dear god, things may never be the same..Right? Skynet probably set ‘them’ back with catchy song lyrics just to confuse the ‘John Connor’ in us all…. Well maybe! I actually liked Andy Gib a bit more than his three brothers. Not sure a T1000 could actually move like that, even if it could Shape Shift (S2?) into one of them?
- The End -
Sincerely: Chris Eldridge Member of: The Planetary Society,
The Carter Center for Peace, and NASM.
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