Parapsychology and the Nature of Time

Does Linear Time (tm) realy exist at the fundamental level?

How does precognition work?

Is time travel possible? Are there time travelers among us? What is up with the Mandela Effect?

Will post more thoughts but figured it might be interesting to let the topic breathe out a bit without my [me] just blat[h]ering.

I'm keeping an open mind but I find it hard to see time as anything more than the brain's way of measuring events and the gaps between them.  Mathematically it has to be treated as a thing in itself but we err if we apply mathematics too literally to reality.

Does Linear Time (tm) realy exist at the fundamental level?

Time is at least in part the measure of change, so the fundamental level of reality must have at least some timelike properties in order for it to be at all interesting, in particular for it to contain conscious beings (consciousness requires change to exist).  If this timelike property of the ultimate level of reality is nonlinear, then all bets are off as to whether coherent consciousness could exist in it. 

Is time travel possible? Are there time travelers among us? 

Because of the many kinds of well-known untenable paradoxes it entails, time travel is probably impossible. The following would be just one of the types, an alternate form of the "grandfather paradox":

The purposeful complex ordered configurations of information constituting human invention and artistic creation must necessarily have had a definite origin in time in the creative thoughts and intuitions of an intelligent human mind.

Let's say that in the future a time machine is invented, and its inventor decides to shortcut human creative invention and change history by sending back a technological invention and a work of art to before their historical creators were born. Say the design of the light bulb and a Rembrandt portrait. A situation would then exist in the subsequent timeline that an invention and a work of art would exist in our world that had no creation by human (in this case Edison and Rembrandt) or indeed any other minds. But we know that of absolute necessity these constructs had to have somehow been created by mind(s). 

Of course, this interference with past human events might easily change subsequent history so that the time traveler is never born. But he must exist. So the foregoing is just one of the paradoxes created in this thought experiment.

So it appears that at least this particular type of time travel is impossible. 

The only way out of this seems to be the last resort of positing some sort of overarching hyperdimensional continuum of which our universe is just a part. If the largest scale of this continuum includes absolutely everything (including the history of the time traveler and his world), at that ultimate level of reality all timelines would exist and the invention and the work of art would indeed still have had conscious creators. At least that paradox would be avoided.

Anyway, since time travel is probably impossible, there probably are no time travelers.

BBC Science Podcast:
Carlo Rovelli on why time is not what it seems

Carlo Rovelli first became interested in the nature of time when he took LSD as a young man. Later he became curious about the world of the almost absurdly small, where time has no meaning and space is grainy.
He took seven years to complete his undergraduate degree, having spent a lot of time protesting against the political establishment, falling in love and travelling. An extended hippy trip across north America was, he says, perhaps the most useful time of his life. All this rebelling taught him the value of seeing the world in a different way and the benefits of challenging the status quo.

I think our experience of time is an illusion produced by the brain. It is in part an artifact of the second law of thermodynamics which only exists in the physical universe not in the non-physical realm.

How does precognition work?

My only thought is whether, regarding precognition, telepathy and psychokinesis - at least as manifested in the lab - we should be thinking more about something like synchronicity, and less about cause and effect and information transfer.

Are there time travelers among us? 

To be fanciful, maybe UFOs are really us, time-travelers from the distant future when Earth is devastated and mankind near extinct. They need sperm and eggs and DNA, so they engage in genetic experiments on humans of our time. After all, aliens from other planetary systems in the universe wouldn't be genetically compatible. 
They don't worry about paradoxes - it's a matter of survival. 

"Then, there is the matter of the sinister Men in Black. They are perceived by UFO researchers as human-looking alien creatures or government agents, whose secret role it is to silence UFO witnesses, something that history has shown they are very good at. Maybe, though, the MIB are not the bad guys, after all. Perhaps they are “time-cops,” working to ensure that UFO witnesses don’t get too close to the truth – namely, the time-travel angle. After all, just about everything about the MIB is out of time. They almost always wear 1950s-era black suits. Their mode of transport – old-time Cadillac cars – is out of time, too. They have even asked witnesses, on more than a few occasions: “What time is it?”"

My only thought is whether, regarding precognition, telepathy and psychokinesis - at least as manifested in the lab - we should be thinking more about something like synchronicity, and less about cause and effect and information transfer.

This is not clear to me. Could you elaborate?

This is not clear to me. Could you elaborate?

It partly follows on from the kind of thing discussed in this thread:
http://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-wa...tion-study

For example, some experimental observations can be interpreted either in terms of precognition of a randomly selected target, or in terms of psychokinetic influence on the process of selecting the target. My thought was just that perhaps neither of these is the right way to think about it. Could we instead think about it in terms of two random (or quasi-random) sequences of numbers - the guesses and the targets - and some process which is nudging those sequences towards coincidence?