Time Travel Animal Brain

Time Travel and the Animal Brain

Will we ever stop misunderstanding time?

Much as been written about the nature of time, but no philosophical explanation has gained widespread acceptance. However, a general principle in science is that the best explanation is the simplest one that accounts for all observations. When discussing time travel, three issues must be considered to explain why it is so poorly understood.

First, our animal brains evolved millions of years ago to remember past events, in what sequence events take place, and to anticipate the future. These abilities helped to protect our very distant ancestors from predators and other natural dangers. For example, if our fish ancestor saw a shark moving toward it (in the present), it would recognize it as a predator, partly because it remembered seeing it eat another fish like itself (in the past), and it would anticipate that diving into a crevice smaller than the shark would keep it safe (in the future). Our animal brains cause us to see reality as a movie, with a past, present, and future, and with an expectation of events happening in sequences.

Second, in science, the meaning of each word must be defined exactly for an accurate understanding of the subject under discussion. The Britannica Dictionary has 104 different entries for time, making it one of the most poorly defined words in use. When discussing the fourth dimension, the only definition of time that is appropriate is contained in Einstein's Theory of Relativity: time is rate of change. Rate of change slows with increasing gravity and acceleration, and speeds up with diminishing gravity and acceleration. For example, the difference in rate of change between sea level and the top of Mount Everest is 22 millionths of a second. Mountain tops are further away from Earth's center of mass, therefore the force of gravity is diminished, and objects age at a faster rate.

Third, the first three dimensions of space-time have position as an attribute (inherent quality). We can locate our position anywhere within three dimensional space. However, the fourth dimension, rate of change, does not have position as an attribute. Rate of change can only vary as faster or slower.

We subconsciously associate position to the fourth dimension without being aware that we are making a logical error. This includes the "arrow of time" concept, which is only an illusion. Our animal brains remember events happening in sequence, and we think of this sequence as "forward". But forward and backward are not attributes of rate of change, and one cannot travel backwards in rate of change.

When it comes to time travel, there is no there to go to because position does not exist for rate of change. We are here, in the only part of time that can exist – the immediate now – and in the presence of constant change. Past and future do not exist except as memories and concepts in our animal brains. This very simple view of time is all we need to understand that time travel is a concept, not reality, and has found its best use as entertainment.

While there is no past, the universe has memory, of a sort, in the assembled history of complex molecules, layered sedimentary and igneous rocks, tree rings, and evolution revealed by DNA analysis across species. But that record is only a partial account of the past, and far from complete.

So does time, as rate of change in Einstein's universe, have any relationship to time as the assembled history of complex objects? What if we dropped the word time and used specific descriptions instead, such as rate of change and assembled history? Do these two refer to the same aspect of the universe? No. Their relationship is only indirect.

Eliminating the word time from scientific discussions reduces the possibility of improperly combining disparate concepts, and the tendency to subconsciously view time as some sort of overarching supernatural dimension.

Postscript
Recently, reports have surfaced about a new interpretation of the Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is a mathematical construct resolving differences between gravity and the quantum world. In it, the bridge is described as being a mirror in spacetime, mathematically connecting two directions of time. In our macroscopic world, these quantum directions cancel out and time has no direction.

An erroneous interpretation of the Einstein-Rosen bridge saw it as a wormhole, and science fiction greatly expanded on the concept, leading to traveling long distances in space nearly instantaneously. But a proper interpretation of the bridge shows it to be a mathematical construct that is unstable, rapidly vanishing, and incapable of traversal.