Technology is great. It seems like every day there are new breakthroughs that border on science fiction. Each new development leads us to another. Sometimes I wonder if our technological limitations are only held back by our imagination. Or maybe it's the other way around. One of the main themes in Dune was that computers were ultimately a limitation to human potential. We thought that computers and technology would be the tools that made us better, but in fact the mind was the true tool to our advancement. The message was that technology, while seemingly beneficial in the short term, was actually going to eventually stunt our long term growth. We have yet to uncover the true potential of our own minds so it's anyone's guess as to what we are really capable of. Instead we rely on computers to do our thinking for us. As I've mentioned before we're giving up the ability to process simple things because a machine is doing it for us. The whole idea is that the machine frees us up to think about other things. What are those other things though?
Maybe the technology we create to make life easier is really slowing us down. In a way we tend to use it as a crutch. There is this belief that if technology can't solve the problem then maybe it can't be solved. I find the concept of time travel endlessly fascinating. I've been thinking about it lately though that maybe technology will never reach a point where it provides us with a means to travel through time. Then again that's based entirely on the fact that as of right now it seems next to impossible. So what if the way to travel through time had nothing to do with physical travel, but rather conscious travel? There was a book by Richard Matheson called Somewhere in Time where the main character used the force of will to travel back in time. What he did was mentally concentrate on a specific time and his body followed. Maybe there is some hope in that idea. There are times when you kind of "zone out". Your conscious mind slips off somewhere. So technically are you not really there? Your body my still exist in the same location, but your mind is somewhere else. What if we were able to take that and go to the next level and instead of just mentally checking out, we then focused our ability to mentally traverse previously experienced times?
It's been theorized that all moments are existing at the same time. If that's true then how come we aren't able to remember the future? What is it about our perception of time that causes us to only view time in a straight line and we can only see what's behind us? If all time is happening at once then one day it might be possible for us to re-experience the past. We would need to just alter our perception. I suppose the would be two schools of thought on that, assuming any of it was possible. 1) You could go back and experience it, but not change it because you can't change a memory. 2) Since the past, present, and future are all happening at the same time then what's to stop a person from altering any point based on previous knowledge? I'm sure everyone has moments in their life that they wish they could back and change. Or even bigger, how many times do you wish that you had today's knowledge yesterday? Imagine where your life would be if the younger you had the experience of older you. I won't get into the whole potential paradox idea when it comes to time travel. Instead I wonder about how you wouldn't know to make the right choice until you made the wrong one. It's only then, when you regret what you've done, that you realize you should have done it a different way. Maybe somewhere out there you already made both choices and it's up to you to decide which route to take.
If the mind believes something then the body is forced to believe it as well. We've all heard about this with the placebo effect. Even hallucinations can cause physical effects because the mind creates its own reality. So while believing something may not make it so, sometimes the mind can't tell the difference between actual reality and perceived reality. I suppose as far as the mind is concerned there is no difference because we all live in our own realities. Everyone else is just a visitor as their reality bumps up against our own. So what's to say if someone truly believed that they traveled back to 1912 that they didn't? We may think them to be crazy or delusional because their perception of reality differs from the accepted norm. How can we ever know what the mind is really doing behind the scenes? The advances in technology can potentially solve many of the mysteries of the universe given enough time. Can that technology ever really help solve the mystery of ourselves or what we're capable of? Maybe one is just a precursor to another, but it's us to figure out which comes first.
