Nil by Mouth

today i have been

today i have been thinking about 2 things. the first is a question my friend G. asked about time:

> From your experiences

> (not from your socialization)

>

> Do you feel that time is

>

> a. linear (past to future)

> b. looping

> c. all of the above

>

> please respond quickly

i think he’s taking up a collection…

oddly enough i studied this extensively in college.

i had many nightmares and anxiety attacks about it. more in a dry academic brain meltdown kind of way than in a inner metaphysical crisis kind of way.

i can only barely remember the details but i think i held onto the… err… point? undergraduate years are so slippery…

so we talked about it mostly in terms of time travel. it worked in the context that if time is a linear or looping sequence, and we exist as points in constant motion than time travel should be entirely possible. by possible here i mean it should be a logical proposition.

i argued in a few papers (i wonder if i still have them) that time travel is a logical impossibility and inconsistent. this conclusion led to another that, time is neither linear or looping, but something more akin to a point. actually this didn’t lead to my “point” conclusion but came from it.

listen:

time travel? i say no way – the short explanation (and it’s gonna have to be short because i am halfway through a screwdriver and it’s been a hard day. details on that to follow). if i traveled to a point back in time where i might have met myself. say i traveled back to my college philosophy of science class and sat in on a class. let’s call time traveling neille, NeilleN and non-time traveling college student who is probably full of wild fantasies about her future (.. err more about that later).. we’ll call her NeilleT. so NeilleN, the meanie she is, takes an ax she has hidden in her backpack, creeps over to NeilleT’s chair, and in a fluid sweep, raises the ax over her head with both hands (cause that shite is heavy, duh) and chops off NeilleTs right hand.

our logical dilemma is perdy obvious. if NeilleN really chopped off NeilleTs right hand, NeilleN wouldn’t be able to lift the ax and chop off NeilleT’s right hand… but… but. yeah [gulp of screwdriver]. if you think about NeilleN taking a gun and bustin a cap into NeilleT, it’s even more obvious (but i like the ax story a bit better for some reason). anyhoo i think the guy who we read that disagrees with me (or i with him might be more appropriate) is a Princeton professor named David Lewis. He has an essay on this in Philosophical Papers , i think. i can’t be sure because i sold my copy after the class. my head hurt, ok. i can’t remember what his counter was to that, but i didn’t buy it. I did like On the Plurality of Worlds though.

beyond the logics and proofs of the exersize, i had and still have a personal feeling about the nature of time. that there’s no line, no loop, no spiral, none of that… time is experienced once and once only. if we are point, it’s a point, if it’s a loop so we are a loop. i think this because i can’t remeber what it was like 10 minutes ago. i mean really i can’t. i’ve tried this alot, mostly to torture myself by trying to relive bad things that happened to me, but i can’t do it. i can feel bad again but usually for new and better reasons. i guess it seems that “past”, “present”, “future” are so relative that one can only be defined by the other 2. they really are 3 parts of 1 thing, time, now, us, me, you, my cat is sleeping… ya dig? anyway – that’s all i got for the moment. i’ll let you know if anymore surfaces.

• May 18