Travel to the Future

 

The usual way

We should feel some awe at our ability to travel in time, but we tend to take travel to the future for granted because we do it so well.

Russian Doll: Time, Many Worlds, and Computer Simulations

For the first episodes, the Netflix series Russian Doll seems to be a darker reworking of Groundhog Day. Fatal accidents on the night of or day after Nadia’s 36^th birthday party keep bringing her back to the bathroom sink in the party apartment during the festivities. Nadia retains her memory of all the repeats, and the memories cumulate in an orderly fashion, e.g. she does not on loop 2 have memories of loop 1 and on loop one have memories of loop 2. So it is possible to regard each loop as having its own local time, embedded in order in a super-time experienced only by Nadia. This far we are within the Groundhog temporal metaphysics.

Two (or More) Moving Spotlights of Time

There is something special about this moment: that it is now.  We talk about the “flow” of time, are tempted to say “the now moves” and may find appealing the analogy of a spotlight sweeping across a series of pictures. I am not, here and now, going to defend the, philosophically controversial, moving spotlight theory. What I am going to do is to show that we could have evidence, not decisive evidence but pretty good evidence, that there were two or more spotlight nows moving along the timeline, and perhaps moving at different speeds, or even in different directions.

Groundhog Day: The Movie as Metaphysics

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