Only if you believe there being an external timeline outside of yourself; Maybe there is nothing else than your own personal experience (Solipsism) i.e. you go into a chamber, see funny lights, open the door and you are "somewhere else", then you see a guy who looks a lot like the younger you from your memories, and you kill this person - so in essence: you studied, built a machine that changes the surroundings, then you murdered someone. You don't remember being killed, because that isn't your experience and the "past you" you encounter isn't you, it's just another person you meet, because YOU are you, and no one else.
Also if you think time as dimension, then time travel is just moving in the dimension much like moving left and right, and killing your "past" self is just killing a part of the tail of a "worm" that is you.
Or if you think life as a photo album, with a new photo taken every tP (Planck time), altering old photos from a photo album doesn't remove the ones that were taken after that.
And besides, time is nothing more than the movement of "objects" compared to the movement of other "objects" Everything exists here and now, everything just moves, keeping track of the "previous state" of things just creates the illusion of time (which is a VERY useful tool) To grasp this: if nothing moves, like at all, you can't perceive time.
Yes, because there is no timeline. The "past" was "now" back then, and the time travel is "now" too, and that is a new experience in your life, it has never happened before. The "you" you murder isn't you, it's just some dude you kill just because everything you see, hear, smell etc reminds you very much of time you remember.
(Side note and to simplify: the population in the "past" you arrive is: past population + you; the "you" there isn't you, he just lives a very similar life, and it's not an alternate timeline, it's the only timeline since the one you "came from" doesn't exists anymore. And it doesn't matter if both of you made "another" machine and repeated that adding one "you" to the mix in every cycle, they are still other people who just look like you did; they are just other people joining your life long road trip. There will just be more "you" to perceive, but less everything else, since they block your view. There is only what you can sense and perceive, so it doesn't break the law of conservation of energy, because you still continue perceiving all that you perceive and to be honest even that is only a story you remember from the "past.)
You don't go back in time, you just go forward in your life, you just keep moving along your trajectory. Like a particle shooting through dimensions x,y,z, and "time", if mentioning time separately helps grasping it.
BTW which brings out something to note: the less you move in space the more you move in the time dimension (you are spending time), the more you move in space, the less you do in time (movement of you compared to the movement of everything else; speed of light, black holes, special relativity and such) but you are always going "forward" in some way; or rather you always experience change in some way - from this to that, and there's no going back per se.
So enjoy the things you have, they will only be experienced once, people, hometowns etc all change and grow. Even this very conversation, will never be the same again. Even if everything stayed exactly the same, you change, altering the relationship between you and everything else, thus making the experience of it different. And since that's the only thing you can perceive.. Well, that's the only reality there is.. for you that is.
Anyway, from a solipsistic point of view, the only one carrying the knowledge of the past is you; keeping record of the history is essentially creating reference to something that doesn't exist. An old photo of a long gone chair is the only place that chair exists anymore, the information of the chair is only on that photo, albeit in very compressed form and with some data loss (i.e frontal photo of the chair is missing data of the backside of it) and if I asked you to show me this chair, you couldn't, so the photo is kinda meaningless in a sense. The photo itself is all there is to it, it's just pixels, ink or whatever. You assign special meaning to it only because it resembles something you hold in your mind (a memory of taking the photo). There's nothing else than what is, and that's all there is to it; there is no past, there's just the present moment. There is just what you can perceive and what you know (knowing is kinda a form of perceiving)
"...that means that if and when we create a time machine we can create multiple instances of ourselves and live simultaneously after that point."
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but there is only one instance of you: e.g. if you cloned yourself, and send that clone of you to Antarctica, do you experience the penguins? Your clone is not you. "You" is a singular and a whole entity, it cannot be separate itself to other "selves", because the very act of separation makes it separate, i.e. not you.
- You are 10 years old, you study under a tree on a sunny day, with your nerdy glasses on, drinking a soda with the numbers 2.3.1994 written on the can.
- 20 years later you build a machine, you step into machine, then you get out of the machine and everything's changed - the sensory input through your eyes, ears etc is very similar to something you remember. The information you receive is somewhat identical (to a generalizing and conceptualizing mind).
- You walk around taking it all in. Then you see a 10 year old studying under a tree on a sunny day, with his nerdy glasses on, drinking a soda with the numbers 2.3.1994 written on the can. And you kill this child (you monster wtf?). And continue on living in that new and wonderous place with a familiar "old-vibe" to it as a 30 year old, with the memories of building a thing and killing child (You absolute monster). +you have the knowledge of where that level of technology, state of things and kinds of people leads to next.
(Side note and to simplify: the population in the "past" you arrive is: past population + you; the "you" there isn't you, he just lives a very similar life, and it's not an alternate timeline, it's the only timeline since the one you "came from" doesn't exists anymore. And it doesn't matter if both of you made "another" machine and repeated that adding one "you" to the mix in every cycle, they are still other people who just look like you did; they are just other people joining your life long road trip. There will just be more "you" to perceive, but less everything else, since they block your view. There is only what you can sense and perceive, so it doesn't break the law of conservation of energy, because you still continue perceiving all that you perceive and to be honest even that is only a story you remember from the "past.)
You don't go back in time, you just go forward in your life, you just keep moving along your trajectory. Like a particle shooting through dimensions x,y,z, and "time", if mentioning time separately helps grasping it.
BTW which brings out something to note: the less you move in space the more you move in the time dimension (you are spending time), the more you move in space, the less you do in time (movement of you compared to the movement of everything else; speed of light, black holes, special relativity and such) but you are always going "forward" in some way; or rather you always experience change in some way - from this to that, and there's no going back per se.
So enjoy the things you have, they will only be experienced once, people, hometowns etc all change and grow. Even this very conversation, will never be the same again. Even if everything stayed exactly the same, you change, altering the relationship between you and everything else, thus making the experience of it different. And since that's the only thing you can perceive.. Well, that's the only reality there is.. for you that is.
Anyway, from a solipsistic point of view, the only one carrying the knowledge of the past is you; keeping record of the history is essentially creating reference to something that doesn't exist. An old photo of a long gone chair is the only place that chair exists anymore, the information of the chair is only on that photo, albeit in very compressed form and with some data loss (i.e frontal photo of the chair is missing data of the backside of it) and if I asked you to show me this chair, you couldn't, so the photo is kinda meaningless in a sense. The photo itself is all there is to it, it's just pixels, ink or whatever. You assign special meaning to it only because it resembles something you hold in your mind (a memory of taking the photo). There's nothing else than what is, and that's all there is to it; there is no past, there's just the present moment. There is just what you can perceive and what you know (knowing is kinda a form of perceiving)
"...that means that if and when we create a time machine we can create multiple instances of ourselves and live simultaneously after that point."
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but there is only one instance of you: e.g. if you cloned yourself, and send that clone of you to Antarctica, do you experience the penguins? Your clone is not you. "You" is a singular and a whole entity, it cannot be separate itself to other "selves", because the very act of separation makes it separate, i.e. not you.
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PS. But that's just one possibility. No way to be certain of it. The whole space-time can exists already, even the future with all of it's intricacies. And time is just like a water level that rises pushing us on the surface upwards. And creating a time machine/bubble allows us to sink in the depths of time, going the other direction on that dimension.
There is a theory that a time machine cannot go backwards past the time it was created, but I think if the machine created a bubble that bends the reality around it, ignoring the buoyancy of time, thus being outside of time as long as the bubble is maintained, so I think the range of the thing is dependent on the power source on board.
But then it begs the question: what force makes it sink? What is pulling it? Or would the aforementioned machine just be a stasis pod as the time-water-level rises past it? If it needs propulsion, how do you propel against time, with gravity? It seems to have an effect on "time."
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