Is time travel possible?

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**Klawz**

Time travel is possible via the laws of current quantum mechanics, but is notoriusly difficult to preform. (you need a LHC 20 light years in diameter to even create a time-space wormhole, and even then there is no way to control or even keep stable!)

**dogma**

Nurglitch wrote:
Is there a forum rule that means I can't make my own comments about consistency unrelated to the point you were making?

No, and it was foolish of me to assume your point was related to mine.

Nurglitch wrote:
Well, I'm curious about why you think I was "put out by [my] professor". He wasn't my professor, he was my external reader and universally known for being a dick (unfortunately the other researcher in the philosophy of mind in the area who wasn't my advisor had decided to go find greener pastures, presumably without the dick in them). After my thesis defense the chairman of my department apologized to me for that external reader's behaviour. That apology didn't protect me from the agreement that was brokered where he and another idiot ghost-wrote the published version of my thesis, but at least someone had the balls to admit the guy was protecting his work rather than objectively evaluating student work. I'd pointed out what Turing had gotten wrong, reducing thinking to displays of intelligence, and how it allowed people like Searle to further cloud the problem of consciousness with nonsense like the Chinese Room Argument. I still have one of the idiot's journal articles; an author's proof copy handed to me so I could familiarize myself with what Turing really thought. I suppose it's an objective lesson in telling people what they want to hear, especially in scholarship, but what's the point of practicing philosophy if you aren't interested in the truth?

That outlines your situation in a far more sympathetic sense. I made a judgment based on my own experience in academia, which has been conflictual, but never problematic in the sense of plagiarism. It helps to have professors who are almost universally near retirement.

Nurglitch wrote:
On topic:

The existence of free will is independent of time travel and the truth-status of determinism. There's plenty of theories of ethics that don't require agents to have powers of causation; indeed, it's usually the mark of a decent theory of ethics that it doesn't get bogged down in whether the world is one way or another, but works with what we have whatever that may be.

Compatibilist?

**halonachos**

Didn't Einstein say that time travel was possible, but only in a backwards direction? So you could go back in time, but not forwards as the forwards has yet to exist and if you do go back you may as well be stuck there because your own time has yet to exist.

**Nurglitch**

dogma:

You have an interesting point about professors nearing retirement: they seem much more interested in new ideas than younger ones. Kind of like Inquisitors that way...

And yes, compatibilism, epiphenominalism, and so on all make a virtue of appealing to the sense that it really wouldn't make a difference if we didn't actually have a choice - after all, if the universe really was, say, determinist, we'd still be stuck making choices and exercising agency. In that way it's like the theory selection between Einsteinian relativity and Newtonian mechanics: the former may be "truer" but the latter is good enough.

Which is interesting about time travel, in that its possibility is more culturally significant than it is technologically interesting. The question, at least to me, is the sort of time-travel stories that a culture tells, as it tells you about their conception of time.

**Ahtman**

Nurglitch wrote: what's the point of practicing philosophy if you aren't interested in the truth?

The money and the fame of course.

**Drk_Oblitr8r**

I don't think it's possible. Time isn't a substance, it's a measurement. There are different types of measurement, distance for example (cm, inch, etc) It doesn't matter how you measure it, because it will always be the same. You can walk in one direction for 4 miles, stop at a random spot, then continue in any direction for another 4 miles. Even if you turn around and walk back in the direction you came from, you've only walked 8 miles.