It was really interesting to hear all these theories about time and the different ways people decide to understand time, some in a more conceptual sense and some in a more concrete sense.

I’ve definitely heard of the theory that time isn’t linear, that everything you’ve done, that you’re doing, and that you ever will do, you are doing forever all at once. I saw the theory described like a river, the water is flowing but that place in the river is still the same. I feel like a clearer metaphor would be a comic strip or something of the sort. You have the panels laid out, and things are happening in a chronological order, but the panels themselves don’t change. The character is doing the same thing in that panel as they were before, and they’re doing it at the same time they’re doing something else in a different panel.

I honestly felt as though McDermott was a bit more than just eccentric. You don’t need to constantly keep up with everything new that happens, but you don’t need to go to great lengths just to stay in the past. Isn’t that as much work as keeping up with the present?

the part that I felt was the most interesting was where they talked with Michio Kaku, who tried to explain time on a quantum view. The idea that every time you make a choice, there are parallel universes where you made a different choice is something I used to talk about with a friend of mine, so I thought it was cool that this was a valid quantum theory. Also the question of “if you choose chocolate over vanilla or pistachio, where do those other choices go?” and that you can’t know anything until you make a choice, sort of like Schrodinger’s cat (though that was a quantum thought experiment, so I suppose that makes sense). Talking about it now, it gets jumbled up in my mind, which is unfortunate because it made total sense to me when Kaku was speaking about it!

I don’t think that time not being linear doesn’t mean we have no free-will, yet at the same time it does. And even if you didn’t believe time is linear, it’s hard to argue that we have genuine free will. When you think about it, your choices are based on your upbringing, and that upbringing is based on your parents’ philosophy on child-rearing, and that’s based on how they lived and how they were reared. Your choices are based on what you’ve seen in the media, read in books, what negative and positive experiences you have. Your consciousness isn’t forced to make choices, but the choices you choose are all based upon the world that has shaped you, and that goes back to the beginning of time…or “time” I guess. So in a sense if you believe time isn’t linear, it makes sense that all the choices you’re going to make have already happened, because the world has shaped you into a person who would make only THOSE decisions.

But that’s not too appealing of a thought I suppose.