My brain seems to be a time machine. I can go into the past, into quite specific moments, and change things. And while there are some grandfather paradox issues (where you kill your grandfather when time traveling and then can’t exist, but couldn’t have existed to do that in the first place, blah blah) where my interpretation and experience of an event changes in a way that invalidates many of the things Previous Me said and did, thereby sort of killing Previous Me (at least his identity) and constituting a brand new past from way up here in the present. And the future, I’m there all the time; when I construct an imagined picture of the future in my brain, I’m actually there. And the imagined picture actually exists, in the sense that my neurons are doing some stuff that creates, “mechanistically”, the reality of that imagined picture of the future: Future Me in materiality.
Anyway, the past is fungible. I just need to think differently about it. The measurable reality of events that can be classified in numbers and letters is all well and good, but it’s a super incomplete picture of my past. “I was five years old and I ran into a tree when I was running away from my brother” is a past that either caused long-term brain damage that led to instances of depression and weird ideas about philosophy, or it’s a watershed moment in the development of a long-running conflict with siblings and the idea of siblings (and their herding of me into trees), or it’s a fun story about concussions and running without looking where one is going, or it’s something that happened to a version of me that had a completely different set of cells throughout my entire body than I do now (several times over) and therefore irrelevant in every way. Time travel means that I can figure out which one it is or pick a new framework and with a little bit of concentration, actual out-loud storytelling, and journaling end up with a different event baked into my current brain cells. As long as time travel can be traveling to the space-time that is in my real, physical thoughts and having observer (and actor) effects that change real physical thoughts. And this works going forward to the future as well. Pinning down my brain in “the present” is a pretty much impossible task (scare quotes around the present because it’s a nonsense idea, almost as nonsensical as the past or the future); I’m always going at least a little forward and a little backward, and usually a lot of the former.
Backing up a few paces, all this requires the belief that time is a contextual thing. A subjective thing. Sure, there’s a crystal ion that has a half life, which when multiplied by some constant apparently is about one second, and one second seems to be about the same “thing” every time. But I say that thing, while pretty replicable across subjects, is not a total picture of “time”. Time has constituent parts that happen one after another (sort of like the plot that this book seems to be resistant to). Time doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and space is a pretty good medium for time to happen across, with one slice of space “happening”, followed by another “slice” of space (randomly interspersed scare quotes to keep this concept unnerving). So my brain can create time by slicing up memory or imagination space and placing the slices next to each other in some sort of order. This video editing cutting room action can be run thousands of times, with changing or exactly the same results (progress when it changes, anxiety when it’s the same story every time). The brain is like a video editor with access to some raw footage of real events (the past as experienced by my subjective eyeballs and other senses) and an animation studio where a whole bunch of relatively realistic or completely unrealistic stuff can be CGI’d up to create space-time slice layers (future sandwiches) of any variety imaginable. The fact of personal time travel across the real space of brain images (images, in this case, being an insufficient metaphor for the panoply of feelings, emotions, stories, smells, sounds, etc. that make up just one slice of spacetime brain sandwich bread) is part of the reason why economists get my goat; the claim that the time traveling brains of humans, in all their complexity, can be boiled down to systems, incentives, and macro and micro measurable (or even labelable) terms and then measured and graphed (horror italics deliberate) is so unbelievably absurd as to defy all my time traveling abilities to relate to. Yes, people buy things. Yes, people sell things. Yes, that buying and selling meets at a price. But the act of “buying” alone means such a different thing to one person vs. another for any given item. And I’ve had a little too much coffee to carefully break down why, but if you time travel to the last time you bought something and create a different reason for why you did it and how you felt about it, you’ll understand (and your existence won’t be compromised if your new story seems to murder your Previous Identity). At least possibly you’ll understand, I don’t know if understanding can be transmitted through my words to you, or if you even have a similar definition of understanding. But the sentences are written and I’m not going to time-travel-scroll-up to change them, even if a horde of editors descends upon me demanding edits in exchange for millions of dollars (at least in my animation studio, this is the decidedly-not-Disney movie that’s playing).
Anyway, to get back to some sort of plot that might line up with the time-space sandwich you thought you were eating when you started this book (as you continue to wonder why you continue, besides the silky-wonderfulness that is the voice of the audio book reader); it’s morning in May, even after that semicolon. It looks like rain, but it isn’t like rain. I’m drinking coffee, exchanging morning pleasantries with my mom. And writing this chapter. “Self-referential navel-gazing author continuously thinks about self and wonders what people have thought, do think, and will think.” That’s what they’ll say, according to the animation studio. But this is a low-budget production that’s not particularly believable. Proust was a navel-gazing author always wondering what people might think. And therefore… You get the idea. Navel-gazing, narcissistic, and self-aggrandizing. That will all be on the book jacket. Well it’s already on the tattoos, along with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of each of the words and the economists’ judgements about the getting of tattoos in fine print (which was particularly painful on the skin).
I miss my dad. That’s probably obvious from the tone of the book so far, or at least now it will be when your brain time travels and puts the entire text into the context of a memoir after the loss of a parent. But that’s my reality, so I’m not here denying it. I’m sitting kitty-corner to where we had our best conversation about philosophy. He didn’t read a lot of books, but he had thought about why he did things in life. And he had a lot of conviction, a big part of the reason I’ve fought so hard to demolish the conviction of every boss I’ve ever had, because I could not accept the level of conviction that he brought to the table that I couldn’t ever seem to sway, even when it was obviously “wrong”. I know now a little better that Pat’s perspective was not that of an authoritative perfectionist, it was that of a human person who happened to be my father. It’s sometimes helpful to refer to him by his name, to see him beyond the identity of father that has clouded my judgement and ability to do brain time travel and thought-space modifications for so long. But that conversation about philosophy, where I was sitting kitty-corner to where I am now, was one of the first times I could remember feeling like he was seeing my perspective from where I was coming from. Today, I look back and remember so many times when and where it now feels like he was seeing me as I was and am and will become. When I think about how lucky or fortunate or wonderful it was that I had a chance, in person, to feel that perspective seeing, even my springtime allergy desertified tear ducts spring into action, and my whole body relaxes, starting in my gut.
I don’t need to correct the definitional “nonsenses” of economists or the “wrong” perspectives of my dad. I’m here to time travel, space travel, have observer effects, and see and be seen by other people (seeing as a not-sufficient metaphor similar to the definition of images I used far above in this chapter). So getting to the bottom of things (impossible, turtles all the way down past the bottom), being right, or discovering insights that can either make me an awesome altruist or a bunch of money are all projects that I will probably get narratively addicted to from time to time, but hopefully only mildly addicted to and in a way that sits well below the more important stuff in the turtle stack.
Roman Ryan 