I have written in the past about consciousness being an accumulation of sensory experiences [see ‘Is there are real ‘you’ or ‘I’? on March 6th, 2019]. Our memory consists of fragments of images, sounds, smells and feelings from the past that we can re-assemble into a complete experience often triggered by something in the present that resembles a fragment of a past experience. We can time travel in our minds by thinking about the past. It is so ubiquitous that we barely stop to think about it. Yet, we are fascinated by the possibility of time travel into the future. However, our subconscious minds are constantly time traveling into the future [see ‘Predicting the future through holistic awareness’ on January 6th, 2021]. They are constantly making predictions about what will happen next, whether anticipating the path taken by a ball so that your hand can be positioned to catch it or picking up an umbrella as you leave the house so that you do not get soaked when it rains later in the day. The further we attempt travel into the future the less dependable our predictions become and I suspect the same is true for travel backwards in time. The reliability of our recollection of past experiences become less as time and entropy erode the connections between the fragments in our mind so that we struggle to reassemble all of the fragments in the correct order and our personal history is unintentional rewritten.
Source:
Stefan Klein, We are all stardust, Melbourne: Scribe, 2015 (a conversation with Hannah Monyer on memory entitled ‘Do You Remember?’).