What Pseudo-Time Traveling Says About You
About the Author
Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.
This thought experiment is useful for figuring out your values, fantasies, regrets, fears, and so on. It’s also just plain fun.
Suppose you could snap your fingers and be 16 years old again, in an alternate reality that is a perfect copy of the reality of our universe when you were 16 years old, with the exception that you’ll have your current mind. Or maybe you’ll be 22 years old again. Or 35. Or maybe the way you were a week ago. You get to choose the precise age from your past.
This is NOT time travel: you’re not going back in time. Instead, your future is an alternative reality copied from your past. So, we avoid the contradictory time travel issues about changing the past.
After you snap your fingers to initiate the transition from this reality to the next, your body will be exactly that of when you were 16 (or whatever) years old, with the exception of your brain. Your brain will contain all the memories you have now, plus all your beliefs, fears, hopes, personality traits, and so on. Maybe that means parts of your brainstem have to be different too. That’s fine. The point is to have your body be as close as possible to the body you had back then, but your mind has changed as little as possible in the transition from this world to the alternative reality.
You get to stay in the alternate reality as long as you please. A week is fine. A whole lifetime is fine. You return to this exact moment in our reality when you leave the alternate one. So, from the time you snap your fingers to the time you return to this reality is zero seconds, although it’s as long as you want as measured in the other reality.
The thought experiment invites several questions, which get more penetrating as we go down the list.
First question: “Would you do this?” (I’m going to assume you would.)
Second question: “At what moment in your past will you go to?”
Third question: “What is it about that moment that makes it stand out as your choice?”
Fourth question: “What do you plan to do there?”
Final question: “What do your answers to the third and fourth questions say about your values, fantasies, regrets, hopes, fears, desires, and so on?”