The Grandfather Paradox Solved

The Grandfather Paradox states that if you go back in time and kill your grandfather or your young self, then you will stop existing.

This was actually shown in movies such as Back to the Future and Looper.

This paradox has its roots in the the Arrow of Time Problem which was already resolved a long time ago by Parmenides, again by Avicenna, and again by Descartes, Hume, and Hegel.

Unfortunately, science keeps on unsolving it because of the ‘factual’ nature of science itself.

Only the Now is Real

The solution to the paradox is that only current perceptions are real.

If the One is absolutely without participation in time, it never had become, or was becoming, or was at any time, or is now become or is becoming, or is, or will become, or will have become, or will be, hereafter

Parmenides

It means past and future perceptions are equally fake. They are illusions.

A past memory becomes real after it is recalled by the mind as a current perception.

• For example, if I remember that I ate bread yesterday, then it becomes real if I can actually recall that memory. If I cannot recall that memory (put the past as a current perception) then that memory is fake.

Likewise, a future speculation becomes real after it matches current perception.

• If I predict that an earthquake will happen tomorrow, then it becomes reality if I actually perceive an earthquake on that day as a current perception. If not, then that prediction was fake.

So if I travel back in time and see my young self, then that young self is real because it is a current perception.

But it is not me since I can still perceive myself. Conservation law does not allow 2 entities when 1 will do.

Multiple Identities from Multiple Realities

Therefore, my young self is another identity. Killing him has the same effect as me killing any other entity that is not me (non-suicide). So there is no grandfather paradox.

That paradox only seems to exist because the mind sees the whole event from a linear point of view of time, assigning reality to past, present, and future. This makes it assign a single identity to the present me and past me.

This was fully and exhaustively explained by David Hume.

‘Identity’ or ‘sameness’ is the distinct idea of an object that remains unchanged through time. It is the opposite of ‘diversity’. Yet in our common way of thinking, they are confounded with each other. The similarity of the successive objects in our idea of diversity makes us consider it as one continued object. This resemblance is the cause of the confusion and mistake. It makes us replace the diversity of objects with the notion of identity. We might properly think of the object as different for a split second. But in the next moment, we always assign an identity to that object. Our propensity to this mistake is so great. We fall into it before we are aware.

David Hume

Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 4, Section 6

In other words:

• only the current perceptions are real
• each identity is unique and independent of others
• each reality is likewise independent, this leading to alternate realities and multiple universes

Science Always Unsolves the Problem

The culprit in the Grandfather Paradox is the linear point of view which in turn is a necessary consequence of observing phenomena in isolation in a third person perspective.

Such a perspective necessarily abandons the current perception of the identities in the phenomenon and assigns a reality to past and future (i.e it makes predictions from the phenomena – this comes from the tendency of the mind to connect things).

This is exactly what the scientific method does, each time it makes experiments and records data – giving past data a reality while hoping for a reality for its future predictions.

And so science itself unsolves what has been solved.

The Asian sciences of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism avoids this by keeping not attached to the illusions of the past and future.

Hinduism takes this to the extreme by renouncing them so that it can experience past, present, and future as one unit as mukti or moksha.

To avoid unsolving things, we bring back Descartes’ physics which always accounts for the illusion and reality, as the mind-body problem, something that Newtonian physics doesn’t have.

Instead of basing time on entropy of space, Descartes’ physics bases time on the unity of perceptions.

Instead of order and disorder, time is based on unity and disunity of spacetime slices as they are glued or unglued by the flow of cognition.

This will allow time to be mastered so that time travel can be done and predictions will be more accurate, as a new breed of time-technologies which are a different class from electromagnetic technologies (TV, radio, internet, smartphones).