If you go back in time after the day of your birth, does your past self exist or not?

Question

if you were born in 1970 and go back to 1980 is your 10 year old self still there somewhere? how does that work in theory? and ive heard of the grandfather paradox, so i assume if you tried to kill yourself it wouldnt work either, since you couldnt be there to go back to kill yourself, im just trying to understand time travel before I go ahead with my blueprints

Answer 1

One of the phenomena which we observe ( and even participate in) everyday and every minute that could answer this question has scarcely been studied on its effect on time - the feedback loop. It is employed by scientists and engineers in dynamical systems.

The mathematics of dynamical control systems are used to regulate the motors of your computer drives. Since signals are most efficiently carried by analog waveform rather than digital waveform, the mathematics of dynamical systems is used to devise ways to rein in the flow of analog signals in "fooling" equipment into accepting analog signals as digital bits and pieces. Hah! The telephone company got you fooled didn't they? You threw away your "analog cell phone" when they sold you a new piece of equipment called "new technology of digital voice" when all they did was regulate analog signals more effectively. The same mathematics are used to ensure your car travels at the speed you want it to travel, ensure your amplifiers and speakers produce the volume of sound you want produced as well as to ensure the proper functioning of a lot of features we all take for granted nowadays.

Imagine a woman at the head of the hose watering some flowers. She calls to her spouse to turn the tap on. He turned it on too strong. She calls to him to turn the tap lower but it became to weak. She tells him to turn it stronger and after a few more yelling feedback, the flow of the hose becomes just right for her to water her beloved bed of flowers without murdering them. This is an example of a feedback loop.

One of the controversies of time regression and progression is the paradox where a woman found a time gate that allowed her to travel back in time to kill her father before she was even born - kill her father before he could produce sperm. Does she then exists at all? Then was the father ever killed? The answer to this question lies in the field of dynamical control mathematics married with the field of quantum statistics.

Imagine that rather than an "analog continuity" in controling the tap, the husband could only turn it on or off. So that his wife has to call "turn on the tap!" and then "turn off the tap" repeatedly till the end of the day or until she is satisfied with watering her flowers. If the husband is creative enough, he could turn the tap on-off at a frequency that would simulate a regulated flow to his wife's end of the hose and hence avoiding killing her flowers.

The event of killing one's source of existence at a regressed time frame is an abrupt event. We could imagine that in one time frame, she did go back to kill her father. Therefore, there is no father to produce her. So she no longer currently exists in the time loop to kill her source. Therefore in the next loop her father exists again. Then she exists again. Then the next loop they do not exist. These "on-off" existence of father and daughter goes on indefinitely like a binary digital square wave students often see on an oscilloscope. Let us look at events in two or even three dimensions of time - let's call the normal existence of father and daughter in world as time dimension X and the progression of loops repeating as time dimension Y. To the dynamical control systems engineer or scientist, the events of X dimension on Y dimension of time now looks like a feed-back loop. The time dimension X is now the speaker/amplifier volume versus the time dimension Y as the horizontal time dimension on an oscilloscope and we see a square wave. There is no paradox. The events simply repeat indefinitely or until an intervention occurs.

Wait a minute, don't be fooled by the cell phone companies. Every event is an analog signal rather than a digital signal. In reality, there are no true square waves. A quality control manager will admit that her factory selling 3 metre rods could never produce any rod exactly 3 metres long. It is statistical distribution of thousands of rods sold that average out to 3 metres within what they call a 6-sigma range. Similarly, may I remind scientists and engineers who romanticize over the exact event surrounding the effort of the woman to kill her father - the "laws" of statistical behaviour demand that she will always land at a different time within the range of her control. That repeated event is not discrete or exact. She unconciously tries to return to the same time but each return time is at least slightly different from any previous attempt. Since her time of return is a distribution rather than exact, her time of return is subject to the phenomenon of outliers. Which in quantum electronics would be akin to what is termed as the tunneling effect.

An outlier is like a 3.2 metre or a 4 metre rod being produced when a factory is attempting to produce only 3 metre rods. Outliers are rare events, but significant. So significant, companies (like fibre optics or electronics companies) have dedicated departments to recycling or mitigating outliers that cannot be sold to the customer. The romance that some scientists have with discrete events and hence ignoring analog behaviour and outliers can have drastic consequences that could cause a space shuttle to explode over Texas on its journey home. An outlier can break the Y time loop by refusing to behave as expected in the X time dimension. Some modes of operations in electronics depend on the action of outliers to function.

We have to view time as cards being dealt onto the table in sequence. If the card player (G~D or his/her agents) slow down in dealing the cards, we would never know because our consciousness of time is progressed by each dealing of the card. And if the players are neither satisfied nor tired, they play another game and another game. Like repetitive sampling. You repeatedly produce a signal to study it. Each region of the repeated signal has its "time name" reference. You repeatedly replay a game you recorded. Each repeated moment has a "time". How many minutes left till the end of the quarter.

Sometimes G~D gets up from his/her office chair and stops the system in which we live to perform a system backup or recovery. If G~D is an experienced sys admin, when G~D restarts the system and ensures a seamless continuity of our existence, we will never know that the system had stopped for maintenance. Unless, of course, we are given the privilege to peruse his/her log files. But still, we would never have felt any pause in time.

Our conciousness in time is mostly one of analog continuities/discontinuities (subject to quantum granularity). The phenomenon of our traveling back in time may be occuring continually every miniscule of seconds of our lives. But not as drastic and abrupt as going back in time to kill our parents. The local feedback loop of infinitesimal repeated events resolves to a path we are conscious of. Our existence is either by an averaging of collectively all the repeated events or by dominant outcome due to occurances like outliers. Probably both. Most scientists familiar with quantum mechanics view it as a statistical resolution of all possible events. However, if you view it from the point of view of dynamical systems mathematics - they should be a resolution of all repeated events.

You then ask: "I don't understand - what do you mean resolution of multiple events because I am only conscious of one set of events?" You need to be reminded you are not conscious of one set of events but you are conscious of one collective effect of multiple sets of events. If you had worked in a factory your management would quiz you "What is the product we are producing?" If you answered, "Our product is a 3.3 GHz CPU", your future in the company is limited.

This should be your answer:
"Our single product is the billions of high performance CPUs that is sold by this company. This product is the combined good statistical behaviour of those billions of CPUs. The product I see is not one single IC chip but collective of all CPUs and our combined efforts that would make as many customers as ecstatically happy as possible."

There, if you are willing to see a product as a statistical collective simply out of concern of ensuring you have a salary the next week, why not see your existence as a statistical collective of all repeated or repeateable events (and in the language of most quantum scientists - possible events)?

If we can accept this then imagine the barber saloon door that swings back and forth and finally comes to rest. We could lessen the or increase the number of swings by dampening or oiling the hinges. Therefore, one day when we discover means to travel back in time in large leaps, we would need powerful computation capability to design and control the dynamical and feedback effects of our time regressive travels. Notice the word "design". While pure quantum physicists try to calculate, the dynamical systems scientist "designs".

Answer 2

You still exist in the linear sense of your experience of time, so 30 year old you looping back to a prior point on the timeline would not impact your 10 year-old self.

There's no reason 30 year old you and 10 year old you can't grow old together (at least until 10 year old you reaches the point where he goes back in time).

You would just exist in two different physical places within the same timeframe.

If you interact with yourself (or say - kill yourself), you may mess up the series of events that led to your time travel journey. That would be a paradox because the timeline wherein you went back in time would be erased and,
as a result, you would not have been able to impact the timeline in the first place.

Answer 3

Please. It's not a time machine if you can't go to a 'real' past. So yes, your past self exists. What you can do in the past however, depends of what kind of time machine you used.

If you are fortune enough to own something in the Nathan Brazil class, do what ever you want. The NBTMs work by isolating the time travelers 'data' then resetting the program called reality to a saved point from the past. When your data is reintegrated, nothing prevents you from killing the younger version of yourself because your existence arose from a prior reality. As an effect of a prior cause, you are free to eliminate the 'copy' of the cause that caused you. Be warned though, there is a cabal of agencies and entities that will wipe you from all existence if they catch you using any kind of reality hack. Temporal dualism is a bit of a cosmic no no.

Legally speaking you are much safer with one the Monastic TMs; however, because they only 'bend' time, when you step out of the Tardis or DeLorean door, the younger self you meet won't be a copy, it will be you, and you can't kill them because your current existence means they weren't killed.
And it gets worse. You can't shoot Hitler, because if you do, his early death will remove any reason you might have to shoot him, and so you won't, which means you will, which means you won't ........
Any paradox inducing behavior will create a vibration in space time, and however the vibration resolves, you will believe that that was the way it always was. You can change the past, but you can't know you've changed the past.
See, in 1967 President John Kennedy had a 2nd nuclear showdown with the Russians, that resulted in a full out nuclear exchange. In 2060 a marine named Lee Harvey Oswald stepped into a time machine so he could assassinate Kennedy in 1963. When Oswald pulled the trigger, he was a soldier dedicated to preventing the greatest disaster in American history. 3 mili seconds later, when the continuum stopped ringing, he was a psychopath, because Kennedy never started a nuclear war.

Now you shouldn't believe this story because Oswald was always a psychopath.....

....just like you will be if you're not careful with those blueprints.

Answer 4

time travel is generally assumed to be impossible, however theoretical physicists seem to differ. according to the general theory of relativity, the more one approaches the speed of light, the more time slows down. the first part of this theory is that if one were to exceed the speed of light, time would turn backwards (look at a tangent graph and you will see what i mean) this is where physicists seem to split.
one:A: when you go back in time, you will instantly be annihilated because you were obviously going to do something that killed you, in which case, time would continue on its expected course (with the absence of you)
one:B: if your future self does not affect anything to do with your history, you will be "permitted" to continue in the past, where you will live.

two: when you go back in time, no matter what you do, you will still exist because your past time and present time will be in different dimensions ( sort of like a train jumping from one track to the other; whatever you do on the new track will not affect the one you came from. ) however that might be kind of awkward to explain why you dont have social security, a birth certificate, and you dont know where your parents are.

Answer 5

You are free to write science fiction in any way you choose. Meanwhile, some basis in evidence or theory is needed before this belongs in science.

Answer 6

" im just trying to understand time travel before I go ahead with my blueprints "

Hehe... Good luck.

Answer 7

Oh Bozo, that is funny. My jet lagged and went down and cannot go back but only foreword to the future and loving every minute.