Contemplating Time Travel Paradoxes & Music Videos

Classic time travel paradox: travel back two hundred years and bring a bicycle. Fate has it that you leave the bicycle in care of Baron Karl von Drais, whom history remembers as inventor of the “dandy horse.” He copies your design (albeit poorly) and voila: the bicycle was never born, has no inventor, lives within a loop without a start.

Of course, this thought experiment requires us to limit things to just a single time line. And it begs the question: if a thing exists without an origin in time, where does its origin exist? What great Platonic realm beyond the flow of time projects its forms upon the shifting patterns of appearances we call our lives? And where do we get off assuming things need origins at all? That axiom is, after all, just something we’ve deduced from observations of how one thing follows something else, and can’t be reasonably stretched to wrap around whatever greater and acausal space within which time occurs.

If we don’t indulge our metaphysical assumptions, bike-without-inventor would be both effect and cause. Our one time “line” begins to look at least potentially like something woven, full of loops in which the future influenced the past. And then we have to ask: if cause can flow both ways in time, why do we still experience a past and future? Or, if cause can only go “downhill” from past to future, what else can we call the influence exerted by displacing something from the future to the past? What’s worse: a bike-without-inventor, interacting with the rest of everything, then means that influence without a cause perpetuates the universe, and nothing actually has an origin (since everything’s dependent in some way upon its interaction with the bike).

If we do suppose a multiverse, we free ourselves from bike-without-inventor paradoxes, since each trip is not just straight along one axis past-to-future, but transverse across the many causally entwined alternatives. The woven tube becomes a maze, a kind of anthill made from all the tunnels traveling through time produces, linking somewhat-independent causal flows. You bring the bike across and give it to a universe that didn’t have to think it up, but that is not the universe it came from, so it keeps its narrative intact.

The cost of this is knowing every universe exists (at least, all universes do that can) – which means our choices are determined by a cosmos growing every single version of itself. You have to make each choice in parallel, and just experience your making only one of them. And thus, you bringing back-and-sideways bicycles into another version of your history is another pre-determined thing you do...but predetermined not by something in your past, but something basic to the structure of the multiverse. So once again, we find the origin of all phenomena to be completely void. We cannot point to it in time – in fact, we probably cannot identify a start to time, if we go looking – and we definitely cannot point to it in space. This is the case no matter if we take the universe to have just one, or many, histories.

In other words, what we declare to be a cause entirely depends on how we frame the question. Causing what, within what span of time, within what volume, and to what degree? ...To whom? There’s always going to be more room to add more complicated answers to this question, as we push the sphere of our investigations outward to include more differentiated parts within the unity of universe-as-one-phenomenon.

The same is true if we inquire into what led to making any given choice: by bringing more and more awareness to the question, we get very quickly to the place on the horizon of our knowing where the story bottoms out in mystery. You cannot even ask the question without asking who decided it is time to ask the question! (Or, from another angle, maybe you don’t even ask the question; it just asks itself, and you’re the question.) Seeking God or Source or What-Have-You like this is sort of like arriving at a party no one started, at the house of someone no one knows. How is this happening, and who’s in charge of these shenanigans??

These are the kind of thoughts that seem to bubble up while watching Hot Chip’s video (directed by Shynola) for “I Need You Now.” Like Charlie Kaufman’s magical Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, David Lynch’s masterful Mulholland Drive, or Shane Carruth’s mind-melting Primer, this much-shorter piece rolls right on past “mundane” and into “lucid dream” terrain – a koan worth repeated viewing. (Notice how the mind attempts to string it all together into something sensible. Then check it out again. Have fun with tolerating ambiguity!)