When Stephen asked me to do an update to Lines Through Time, I demurred. I want to check in on that one in 10-year increments. But I got to thinking about the reasoning I employed in laying out the meandering course of my life, and it occurred to me that I don't (necessarily) agree with myself on this thing. That is to say, Phil 2008 disagrees with Phil 2003. Of course, once that sort of thing starts going on, look out. Anything can happen. I may do an update after all when Phil 2009 decides that Phil 2008 was overly fond of the decade as a measuring increment, or that he was just plain lazy.

Anyway, Phil 2003 tracks us through 20 years of decisions that led him to be sitting in his bedroom, looking out the window one fine autumn morning and wondering how he came to be sitting there. At each stage, he shows how a different decision or happenstance would have resulted in a completely different outcome. The problem with this approach is that each of these changes would have only changed the probability of one thing happening vs. another. Nothing is really excluded.

All of which is to say that Phil 1983 could have followed a very different course than the one outlined, and still ended up right where Phil 2003 picked up the narrative. Let's see how that might work. Phil 2003 writes:

After I graduated from college in Kentucky in 1983, I decided to move to Denver to go to law school. Had I not decided to go to law school, I might not have moved to Denver.

This one starts out kind of mushy. I might not have moved to Denver, but then again I might have. I chose Denver in the Law School time line because I had always planned to the live here as an adult. Why would that have changed?

I dropped out of law school a couple of years before starting my master's. If I had stayed in law school, I would never have started my master's.

Well, this is just silly. My wife went to grad school after getting her law degree as did (I think) my co-blogger. One does not necessarily exclude the other.

Mike and I met in grad school in 1986. If either of us had decided not work on that particular degree at that particular time, we would have never met.

This one is harder to get around. Unless we met later on the job (which would not have been as likely if I went ahead with the law degree) it seems unlikely that I would have befriended Mike had I not been in that degree program at that time.

My friend Mike started working at U S WEST a few months before I did. If Mike had not taken a job at US WEST, I would never have learned about the job opening there and would not have applied for it.

Continue reading "Alternative Lines Through Time" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[ I like dusting off some of these older posts from time to time, especially on more philosophical subjects that we haven't covered in a while. My life has taken some additional turns since I first published this piece. For example, we have already moved away from the house mentioned below as the "current" house.

Enjoy. ]

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?

David Byrne, "Once in a Lifetime"

Practical Time Travel is the art of getting from the present to a future of our own choosing. We do this by navigating possibility space and by realizing favorable outcomes. So the big question is, how do we get to a particular outcome? To answer that, let's start by examining how we get to any outcome.

As I'm so fond of saying, the present is the future relative to the past. So here I am living in 21-year-old-me's future. Am I living the outcome that Young Phil was looking for? It's hard to say, for a couple of reasons:

1. It's difficult from this vantage point to get back inside the head of my younger self. Unless we're really thinking about it, we tend to remember our past selves as being substantially similar to the people we are today. This is almost always wrong. We need to remember specific things we did and said in order to really come to grips with how different we used to be. Writing samples are tremendously helpful in this process.
   
   Unfortunately, even if we do remember what we wanted at an earlier point in our lives, it's hard not to evaluate those desires in light of subsequent attitudes and experience. So I tend to say things like "I used to have this stupid idea about becoming a tree farmer." Granted, I did once entertain that rather unlikely ambition and, in light of my subsequent career choices and what I've learned along the way about the kinds of things I'm suited to do — not to mention the business side of it, about which I then knew and still know absolutely nothing — it was a pretty stupid idea.
   
   By calling it stupid, I mitigate the embarrassment of being associated with such a harebrained idea, but I do so at the expense of truly remembering how appealing I used to find the idea. If we can't empathize with our younger selves, we can't get much of a handle on who they were or what they wanted.
   
   
2. Young Phil had, at best, hazy notions as to what it was that he wanted out of life. And he tended to scrap what vague plans he did make every few weeks. So, for all I can recall, the life I'm now living is a precise match to one of my plans. But even if it is, it's also a huge miss on several other plans.

Continue reading "Lines Through Time" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the themes of the Speculist that I have neglected over the past couple of years is the idea of Practical Time Travel -- the notion that we are moving through time not in the reversed or accelerated way described in science fiction stories, but rather forward one day at a time through myriad possibilities to a future that is, to the extent that we can make it so, one of our own design.

Some balk at the idea of describing this as "time travel" at all, but that is exactly what it is. I would make an analogy to space travel. In one sense, we are all space travelers, completing a trip around the sun each year. And that's just the beginning: the sun doesn't stand still, and the galaxy itself is hurtling through deep space away from all the other galaxies. We are all astronauts -- moving through local, interstellar, and even intergalactic space.

Still, it doesn't seem remarkable, or even particularly interesting, to move through space this way, seeing as we all do it...all the time. And yet, when someone moves a much smaller distance through space -- say into earth orbit or to the moon -- that is remarkable. Why?

Well, it's remarkable because the astronaut broke out of the normal pattern of space travel that we're all engaged in (and don't think about) and chose his or her own destination. Time travel works the same way. When we stop plodding along helplessly towards "the future" (as relentless as, and in fact parallel with, our annual journey through space around the sun) and start working on arriving at a future of our own choosing, then we become time travelers. A year from now, it will be 2009 for everybody, but the question is which 2009 you will be living in? The one that just shows up? Or the one that you chose as your own destination?

Via InstaPundit, Gil at Virtual Memories writes a very moving coming-of-age/beginning-of-the-year piece in which he quotes the philosopher Hegel:

A will which resolves on nothing is not an actual will; the characterless man can never resolve on anything. The reason for such indecision may also lie in an over-refined sensibility which knows that, in determining something, it enters the realm of finitude, imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity; yet it does not wish to renounce the totality to which it intends. Such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful. “Whoever aspires to great things,” says Goethe, “must be able to limit himself.” Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality, however painful the process may be; for inertia would rather not emerge from that inward brooding in which it reserves a universal possibility for itself. But possibility is not yet actuality. The will which is sure of itself does not therefore lose itself in what it determines.

In choosing a destination, we also choose the destinations that we won't be arriving at. When I decided to write this blog post, I chose not to write any of the other thousands of posts I could have been working on right now. Our task, this year and every year, is to choose a few good outcomes that we want to work towards -- or rather one good destination at which we would like to arrive -- and start working towards it.

Glenn also linked an interesting NY Times piece with some ponderings on the subject of regret as it relates to these kinds of choices. The following passage in particular caught my attention:

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.

So if you want to avoid regret, don't worry about everything you missed out on. Be a time traveler. Choose a destination for yourself and start towards it. It seems that what people regret is knowing that there was a future out there they could have worked towards, but didn't. Kind of like an astronaut who thought maybe he could have made it to the moon, but never gave it a shot.

But even worse than that would be an astronaut who could never decide if he wanted to go the moon, to Mars, or to Venus...and so never went anywhere.

Pack your bags, time travelers. All your yesterdays are behind you. All your tomorrows lie ahead. Choose a good one, and don't stop until you get there.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This Reuters article:
Centennial time capsule car found ruined | Oddly Enough | Reuters

Got me thinking about a couple of things. First, how might the time capsule have been done better (please confine speculation to approximately mid-century technology), and second, what would constitute

"an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity with the kind of lasting appeal that will still be in style 50 years from now."

with respect to early twenty-first century technology?

Please discuss in the comments.

P.S. I think I'll do some checking into how the economics of the capsule contents might have been improved. I'll let you know if anything particularly interesting comes of that.

UPDATE (Moments later): a bit of searching yields a price range of about $900 to $11,000 for similar era Belvederes in conditions ranging from semi-restored to ... iffy. A restored 1956 done by hot-rod legend Boyd Coddington's shop goes for $29,500

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

I'm reminded of Doc Brown's 70 year preservation of his time traveling Delorean:

Notice how this was portrayed in Back to the Future III. Dr. Brown put the vehicle up on pylons. It's covered. And it's in a sealed room.

A mine would be far superior to a natural cave because caves tend to be damp (they're usually formed by water). The preserver could choose a place in the mine where drainage is assured. Barring a cave-in or the renewed mining activities, this sort of time capsule would be perfect.

But even as portrayed in BTTF III, certain parts - like the rubber wheels - didn't fare so well. Even a carefully preserved car would need a lot of work before it would be ready for the highway.

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So the old question of Free Will (link takes you to a teaser; paid subscription required to read the article) is once again rearing its head:

Underneath the uncertainty of quantum mechanics could lie a deeper reality in which, shockingly, all our actions are predetermined

"WE MUST believe in free will, we have no choice," the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer once said. He might as well have said, "We must believe in quantum mechanics, we have no choice," if two new studies are anything to go by.

Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics. A week after he announced it, two eminent mathematicians showed that the theory has profound implications beyond physics: abandoning the uncertainty of quantum physics means we must give up the cherished notion that we have free will. The mathematicians believe the physicist is wrong.

"It's striking that we have one of the greatest scientists of our generation pitted against two of the world's greatest mathematicians," says Hans Halvorson, a philosopher of physics at Princeton University.

I think Isaac Bashevis Singer got it right. Whatever they prove, life must be lived with the assumption of free will. Even if we know we don't have it -- and my guess is that we're still a long way from knowing for sure -- we have to assume that we do have it.

We may have free will; we may not. But life without the presumption of free will is absurd.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Via Kurzweil AI, Space.com is running a series of articles on a SETI proposal to perform the famous double-slit experiment over interstellar distances. The experiment will show that quantum effects are not just microscopic or localized phenomena. The first article in the series provides a good summary of how truly strange the quantum picture of the world is:

This, the simplest of quantum weirdness experiments, has been the basis of many of the unintuitive interpretations of quantum physics. We can see, perhaps, how physicists might conclude, for example, that a particle of light is not a particle until it is measured at the screen. It turns out that the particle of light is rather a wave before it is measured. But it is not a wave in the ocean-wave sense. It is not a wave of matter but rather, it turns out that it is apparently a wave of probability. That is, the elementary particles making up the trees, people, and planets -- what we see around us -- are apparently just distributions of likelihood until they are measured (that is, measured or observed). So much for the Victorian view of solid matter!

The shock of matter being largely empty space may have been extreme enough -- if an atom were the size of a huge cathedral, then the electrons would be dust particles floating around at all distances inside the building, while the nucleus, or center of the atom, would be smaller than a sugar cube. But with quantum physics, even this tenuous result would be superseded by the atom itself not really being anything that exists until it is measured. One might rightly ask, then, what does it mean to measure something? And this brings us to the Uncertainly Principle first discovered by Werner Heisenberg. Dr. Heisenberg wrote, “Some physicist would prefer to come back to the idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist independently of whether we observe them. This however is impossible."

Stephen and I were chatting about probability the other night. The specific topic was video poker, which I sometimes play virtually while doing other things (e.g., sitting on conference calls.) When I say I play virtually, I mean that there is no real money involved. I play with fictional, electronic dollars, but the games are (presumably) the same as they would be if real dollars were at stake. That presumption is borne out by the fact that I generally loose. Stephen opined that he would never play a game where the odds are stacked against him, which is the case with any typical Las Vegas casino game. The one exception might be Black Jack dealt from a one-deck shoe; the conventional wisdom is that a sufficiently skilled card-counter can work the odds to his advantage in that setting.

I wonder whether the appeal of games of chance isn't built into us at some fundamental level? We ourselves are clusters of probabilites, our lives are an ongoing series of likelihoods (and unlikelihoods) that we have to negotiate. Celebrating out fourth wedding anniversary last night, my wife and I talked about how vanishingly unlikely it was that she and I would ever meet — much less begin dating, fall in love, and get married. From the vantage point of the past, my present life is very unlikely indeed.

So the choice we have to face is whether we are going to let the probabilities grind us along, as I do when playing video poker, or whether we're going to try to "rig" the game in our favor, as Stephen insists we must do in order to make the game worthwhile. I think most of us are with Stephen. I know I am. Here are some of my original thoughts on this subject. I think the subject is worthy of more attention.

Here are some of my earlier thoughts on how we might rig the game.

What's a Speculist?
Practical Time Travel
Divvying up the Future
Types of Future
i Space
Reality's Flashlight
And Now the Extremely Good News
Give Yourself a Present
Roots of the Modern World

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)