Thoughts on meeting Dr. Who

If you really were to one day, walk down the street and happen to notice a old wooden blue police call box dusting away in the corner somewhere, you would do well to wait for a while. If a man appears to be running towards it, most certainly follow him.

Most people who meet this person, The Doctor, seem to have life-changing experiences. This is really easy for the doctor, because he is a time traveler and time travel most certainly leads to life-changing thoughts.

What degree of changes we are talking about here? Lets examine in detail. The doctor, who would offer you a ride inside the tardis, has the potential to show you everything from the birth of the earth and the end of time and universe itself. Thats all well and fine, but what about my life and my troubles? Fair question. Where would you like to go? One would pause for a moment and think about the life-changing events in his or her own personal life. From the faded memories of the early childhood and beyond that, and would like to visit a few again. Now what we are as a person today, is a collective of all the things that have happened in our lives, and each moment and action matters, because if it happened differently, you wouldnt be you and you wouldnt be thinking the way you do. Your present (the right-now moment) thought process is an amalgamation of all the experiences you have had over the months and years, some are conscious changes, some are unregistered changes, a complex system with innumerable factors which if represented mathematically would result in a myriad array of equations and nested epi-equations reflecting your cognitive processing. This matching of potentials is necessary because for some reason, I believe that all mental models (which we understand to be an integrated exchange system of the physical brain, the mind, mental and physical memories) have to be 'kept busy' with processing of information.

This leads to an interesting offshoot here. The mind has the capacity to process and store information in neurons and it is generally agreed that there are one billion neurons in the physical brain each making 1000 connections to other neurons, and by some fantastic upscaling and assumptions we have a figure to the physical limit of the brain's capacity: one million gigabytes of information. We dont need all this for our daily life, but regardless of conscious thought (consciousness described as the ability of the mind to describe itself) processing of some quadrillion bits is happening every second anyway. The brain (or the mind) is always upto something. One of my friends Dr. Chirantan Kanani, expressed his happy hopelessness at the fact that we have no idea how the brain works. I said, maybe we will in one hundred years? He said, thats height of optimism! This is where day-dreaming in our waking state and dreams in our sleeping state enter our discussion, but only for a cameo. For the realms of the dream world, visions and whatnot, are beyond the scope scientific inquiry at the moment, though always at the door.

Coming back to the time-travel situation, suppose you wish to go back in time to stop an awful road accident you had which left you in bed for a few weeks with an acute bout of existentialism and hopelessness kicked that in your life then, and the pain and the slow process of regenerating tissues, making you want to avoid that, and you wish to intervene and stop yourself from entering the vehicle on that day at that time at that place.

Now there is a charming assumption that certain points in time are fixed (and this has been often recited by doctor who himself) and no matter what you do some things happen. This would mean that the accident i was so desperately trying to avoid doesnt need to happen in the exact same manner, but needs to happen with a certain flexible conditions. The exact date may not be important, the exact time is not important, its only important that it happen within a range of factors. This argument doesnt appeal to me because it is not backed by a good answer to why things happen. If its so important, who decides that? You? God? Destiny? Destiny is a good concept but free will is better. Also it seems like a poor excuse in our explaining things, and we often resort to the less-wild answer 'to prevent things from falling apart.'

Another view states that once time travel is possible, you are automatically dealing with copies of people and alternative timelines and multiple universes. This is backed by quantum mechanics and is thus a strong argument. The hypothesis is that if there can be two outcomes to anything, the universe splits and both outcomes happen. I chose not to think in this direction unless you can give me an address of this copy-universe so that we may go there to continue our talk.

So we are left with the possibility that you indeed can change things, and you successfully go back in time and change the event, stop it from happening. This would change you, this would change the experience you had with yourself gnawing yourself in the dark while recovering. This change would be instantly reflected in your present self. This is similar to saying, that if you go back in time and not go so far as to kill yourself, but neatly scar yourself, you will instantaneously have the scar appear in your present-self.

The situation here is of getting a feedback to your actions, whatever you may do to yourself while traveling back in time and dealing with yourself and getting an instantaneous effect. We may discard the wonderful Doctor and his tardis at this point as we enter a state of consciousness or existence sans time. This is a state of instant wish-fulfillment or thoughts being realized as soon as they arise, but we are looking at entirely new definitions and consequences to the words 'as thoughts arise' and 'thoughts being realized' in this state of consciousness or existence.

My hunch is that this is not a state we are heading into, or should be aiming at, but we are already in it.