So It Goes, Part II — "I have changed and manipulated time"
I love to joke about Ed Mylett, who online-famously claimed he could “change and manipulate time” and turn 1 day into 3. In business culture it’s a ridiculous idea, the kind of overly performative hustle content that turns into an obvious meme.
Philosophically, though, the idea that time can be manipulated is not ridiculous at all. Time is perceptual framework. It’s something our senses generate. I wrote about this last year in So It Goes, which was inspired by the Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. The Tralfamadorians see all of time at once, the way we might see a mountain range. To them there is no sequence, no beginning or end, no “before” or “after.” All moments coexist. A person who dies is simply located in one rough part of the terrain. That same person is alive elsewhere in the same eternal landscape.
That idea reshaped the way I think about my own life and how I perceive things, experiences, relationships, etc.
This essay continues that thought.
Time Does Not Have True Influence or Power
What I mean is that everything that exists today existed at every other phase of the universe. It’s only the arrangements and configurations that change. The universe is essentially a giant reconfiguring machine of the same core components. This creates an illusion that time produces newness, when it’s really just combinations of existing materials that produce what looks to us like something fundamentally different.
For example, technological improvements only appear time-dependent because new inventions rest on earlier ones. Computation required mathematic, mathematics required language and symbolic reasoning, this required certain cognitive biological functioning, and so on. The potential for each breakthrough, however, was always possible fundamentally. The sequence was a matter of incremental evolution, not a feature of time itself dictating when or when something could fundamentally exist. All developments or arrangements of ideas or materials that are possible in the future are possible at every other time as far as the fundamental laws of the universe are concerned.
Human Nature Looks Stable Along the Whole Arc of History
Most people talk about humanity as if it gradually improves. They imagine that violence, cruelty, and chaos belonged to older eras. I don’t see it that way. Human behavior seems very similar across the entire arc of recorded history. Modern people behave “better” only because the environment disciplines them. We have surveillance, social rules, legal systems, economic interdependence, and nation-states with “monopolies of violence.” These structures limit the expression of impulses that always existed, still exist, and will always exist.
Where these structures weaken, human behavior quickly reverts to something that looks ancient or primitive. We call these places “exceptions” to an otherwise improving world, but in truth they reveal how human instincts have not evolved as much as we like to believe. What has evolved is simply the surrounding edifice or architecture.
Living in Europe has made this obvious. In America the past feels distant because the physical reminders of earlier eras are rare. Here the past surrounds you. You stand in a city square and realize that World War II happened almost yesterday in historical terms. You visit a medieval street and realize that the Crusades feel like last week. You walk through a museum and the Code of Hammurabi feels like last month. Compressing history this way collapses the illusion of moral distance. The people who lived during these times do not feel alien. They feel scarily familiar to us.
Your Current Moment Is a Tiny Slice of a Larger Pie
Our senses give us three spatial dimensions and an experience of time that moves in a sort of line, or a pipe or cylinder as I wrote last year. This creates the feeling of “now.” But, as a mental exercise, think of your perception as similar to a two dimensional creature living on a sheet of paper. It can see length and width, but it has no ability to perceive height or depth. Imagine a stack of paper shaped like a cube… it can only experience one page or one layer of the stack. It would live its entire life without any sense of the pages above or below it. It might think it’s a dot on the bottom-right of the page and conclude its life is towards its end, despite the fact it’s on page 12 of 500. It just can’t see the depth… it thinks in only two dimensions.
We may be living inside a similar limitation as it relates to our fourth dimension, which is time. If there’s a dimension that contains all moments at once, we wouldn’t have any ability to cognitively access it. We would believe we live inside a sequence because that’s the way our perception organizes the inputs we receive from the environment. But, again, this is just a function of 1) how our brain organizes those inputs and 2) how many inputs our senses are designed and able to receive.
The practical philosophical point of all this is to say that… your happiest memories are not gone. They are just part of the larger structure you can’t instinctively perceive. You’re simply standing in a small part of it physically in a “different time",” but that doesn’t mean the moment is “gone” or “behind you".
The “Bicameral Mind,” if Real, Shows How Your Perception Can Evolve
American psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed an extremely controversial idea in 1976 when he wrote The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He suggested that early humans did not have any true level of consciousness. WHAT?! Yes… instead, the brain operated in basically two modes. One side issued commands and the other side “listened” to those commands… interpreting them as external voices. People heard guidance as if it came from gods or ancestors… they literally heard voices in their head and did not think those voices were theirs. And this explains anthropologically and cognitively why the concept of “gods” arose in early human populations. Normal internal dialogue and thoughts you and I have everyday… were just “voices” from faceless invisible beings to them. What a concept. It’s eerie to really think about… how our brains might be wired and coded just like modern computers. It’s why the last episode of Westworld Season 1 was called The Bicameral Mind… if you saw it, you’ll know why.
Jaynes’ theory was wildly speculative, but if true, then our behavior would have certainly been organized intelligently, but we didn’t have the inner narrator that we take for granted now. It was like intelligence that “wasn’t ours". Real consciousness would have appeared only after society grew more complex and it required a new kind of internal mental processing. Mind blown.
And that would then lead to this conclusion… If consciousness itself is just a perceptual upgrade of our brains, then our experience of time is likely another one, no? It’s a useful operating system rather than an objective truth... it’s the version of the tool deemed necessary for us to have to navigate our current environment.
How I Actually Manipulate Time
OK, so if all possible moments coexist in a larger structure, the only way to move through them is through memory, imagination, and creative tools like writing and imagery. These are the methods that allow us to perceptively experience other positions across our four dimensions if we lack the ability to comprehend a fifth one.
So my mental trick is to think of a vivid memory, for example, not simply as a replay or snapshot… but as a way of accessing another coordinate of my own life. A vivid projection of the future functions the same way. You begin to inhabit a moment before you physically reach it. You pre-react to it. You experience the emotion of the possible moment a little bit ahead of time. Your present behavior then begins to orient itself around that imagined coordinate, which changes your trajectory or changes your emotion or preparation.
This kind of thinking is the only meaningful form of time travel available to us. Nothing about it requires a physical machine. The mind is the instrument.
A moment with your children or your family or your friends does not disappear. It takes place in a part of the landscape you cannot see from here. The Tralfamadorians are looking at all of those moments simultaneously. The concept of something “that happened” or “will happen” is foreign to them… just like living in only a two-dimensional space is foreign to us. Future moments are already embedded in the structure as possibilities. When you imagine them, you make it easier to walk toward them. You adjust your direction.
This is what “manipulating time” actually looks like for me. It’s not about squeezing more hours from the day, but treating time as a perceptual limitation and remembering that every moment in your life is still there somewhere within the larger dimensional framework. Every relationship and event is happening right now, and is always happening, in the big picture. You are just physically on a different point. But where your body and your mind are physically at any given point doesn’t take away the fact that all events past and present exist at all times.
We’re basically moving within a 5+ dimensional shape we can’t understand.
For me, this brings me great comfort. Because if nothing can ever be truly “discovered,” then nothing can ever truly be “lost” either.
So it goes.