Let's Talk About "Time Travel"

[Ninurta]

To the average person, the past can only exist in the form of memories. True, we can see the effects via the
passage of time, such as cave drawings and the lines on our faces, but specific points in our past tend to be
only accessed from our mind having the ability to 'visualise' a moment from our past.

The lines in my face are starting to look like cave drawings - there may be some correlation between that fact and my standard mode of behavior there...

That's why such outlandish stories like the John Titor account struggle to work, his vague explanations of how he
travelled back through time did attempt to offer the idea that every action now at this moment creates a time-line
and therefore, an uncountable amount of possibilities become available.

That's a good explanation of Titor's "Many Worlds" paradigm, with the caveat that (in my concept of time, anyhow) the actions do not exactly "create" a new timeline (that's just an explanatory device so that folks can understand the concept), but rather the timelines already exist, always have and always will. What we perceive of as the "creation" of a timeline is just our decision or action setting us in motion along one that already exists out of many other possibilities, which also exist simultaneously.

Strangely, our brain holds the key. I too believe that the past, the present and the future reside together as a set
of information formed from physical actions and mental processes. Our limited perceptions that are based on our
surroundings, our self-accepted place in our reality and what we can imagine corralled with a rationality, create
memories that are also bound by those self-imposed rules.

For many, ruminations on such a complicated puzzle forces the suggestion that time doesn't actually exist and in
a way they're sort-of correct. It doesn't exist if we look at it under the titles of past, present and future, that's linear
-thinking again and won't get you far.

I think we are about to get into metaphysical territory here, which may (or may not) delight Mystic Wanderer. The key IS our perceptions of events, but where do those perceptions come from? One may say "it comes from our brains", which would be correct as far as it goes, but then the question arises of "well where do our brains get it from?" One may say "from our eyes, ears, and noses", but another may have a different, more metaphysical (or quantum-physical) explanation. There are those among us (Atheists come to mind) who cannot conceive of anything they cannot touch, see, smell, or taste. For them, the explanation ends at "from our brains", because that is the last physical link to the conundrum. Beyond the brain, we enter realms that they cannot grab and shake, and so, for them, must not exist.

Albert Einstein should have been kicked in the balls for not explaining his theory of relativity fully to the layman, the
smiling German accidentally hinted via diagrams that the past and future could be somehow accessed, when in reality
he was talking about light travel.

Yes! Exactly! The "Twin Paradox" is not a paradox at all when one realizes that it's only the light travel which makes it appear to be a paradox! Time itself does not telescope in the way that the theory explains it! Travelling outward at the speed of light only means that you are matching pace with the light itself, and the information it conveys - it does NOT mean that you are somehow magically manipulating time itself. Likewise, the return journey appears to speed time up as you consecutively pass each information packet that the light is carrying, but upon return, thousands or millions of years will not have passed - you will only be caught up to the present (of both of the twins) if you payed attention to the light you were passing on the way back home. The only time that will have passed for both twins is the time the journey - out and back - took. There are experiments that "prove" that time is relative to speed, but they are flawed by confirmation biases.

If my past is a caveman's future, are the only significant relevance in the distance between the caveman's possible
imaginations of the future and my factual knowledge of the past, are simply me and the caveman?!
If so and for that tiny minuscule timeline between us, the only two factors are us and hence, understanding the passage
of time is also connected to our respective consciousness.

Exactly. Time can never be traversed by the physical or corporeal being. We can only attain the illusion of time travel in that manner. "Time travel" can only be accomplished by the non-corporeal, whether one cares to call it "metaphysical" or "spiritual". It's all a matter of consciousness and perception, rather than actual physical motion. The physical is limited by our understanding of physics, the non-physical is not (unless we are atheists and limit ourselves to the physical realm).

The trick to answer this -I believe in my humble opinion, resides between where we dangle earrings from!