Hi
I've been reading post on this site for a while, but only just signed up. One particular topic that caught my attention is all the discussion on spells to travel through time.
They all seem to follow a similar pattern: someone desperately wants to go back in time to fix something, people respond explaining that its impossible due to physical laws/messing up the future through a domino effect/universe collapsing on itself. However most the posts seem to assume that a persons whole physical being would go back. I was just wondering why it's not possible that just our conscious mind (or soul?) could go back to our past body, and stay there? Because we technically wouldn't be destroying our past self, since we've already lived through what we would have... if that makes sense. The only restriction on this type of travel would be that you're limited to only the period of time that you've existed in.
As for the whole stepping on a bug and causing catastrophe, I can't really comprehend why this would be an issue. If someone was going to go back, wouldn't the whole point be to change what happened? Sorry, but I really don't see how small things could cause major problems, all the scenarios posted on this seem unrealistic.
Can anyone explain why this method would be impossible? Or (theoretically) possible? Any thoughts? Arguments? Nasty comments on my ignorance?
Ah! We've discussed this in a few other threads and my boyfriend and I were talking about this last night. He explained to me the premise of the movie "The Time Machine" which I think is a perfect explanation of why you cannot go back in time to change things.
WARNING, SPOILERS:
So, in the movie there is a man in love with a woman, but she dies, and so he creates a time machine to go back in the past to save her. He goes back dozens of times and she still dies every time. Eventually he goes to the future and this brain-like being explains to him:
Because he made the time machine, she will always die. Because she died, he made the machine. And so when you go to the past, the time machine still exists in the present. The only reason he made the time machine was to stop her death, so as long as it exists it means she will die. But without it, he can't go back and try to save her. It's a paradox.
I've seen the movie and it doesn't really answer my questions. Yes, he can't seem to stop her from dying BUT he does change the past; he changes the method by which she dies.
To be honest I'm not personally interested in traveling back in time to another point of my life (unless I can take lottery numbers and stock reports back with me ;P) its just a topic thats caught my interest and seems to be discussed a lot on the site.
Well, then I find your question about only the soul going back really tricky. Most people agree that the soul is here to learn and when it learns it passes on (and comes back to do it all over again, or a bunch of other options). So, because I adhere to this belief, I think that the soul staying in the past would hinder its growth. And, if the soul leaves the present, would the body then go into a coma? Or would it die and you exist as some sort of time-traveling ghost stuck in the past?
I think that the consciousness could stay rooted in the past, but I don't think it is healthy in the least. To me it's a sort of escapist method which would result in mental illness and hinder you from getting farther in life internally and externally.
But, if you could find a way to use hypnotic regression to go back to the past and live there mentally for a little while, why not? The past is as much a part of time as the future and the present, we just seem to have this idea that time moves forward in a linear fashion. There is nothing in my life I really want to travel back to... I seem to try to recreate it in the present lol. My interest in time travel could be likened to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the kids go in for months and are only gone for a few minutes in their world; I'm curious about how time travel effects the perceived speed of time?
