HackniacBLOG

Paranoid about what future you will do?

Anyone can do something stupid, and if you are a regular person it is a likely thing to have happen to you sometime, and likely more than once. Wouldn't it be great if you could plead and warn your future self not to engage in any dangerous activities and stop the bad action before it has a chance to happen? That's what I've been doing for some time now. I never got why other kids had imaginary friends, but now I think I have an idea, even though in this case my imaginary friend is myself. Whenever I think of something bad that could happen, I imagine myself talking to a future version of me, laying out a clear argument and instructions showing how to avoid whatever the bad thing is. Lately that has gotten me thinking. If I state, "I am going to have a talk with my future self", is that logically possible? If you follow the definitions of all the words in that sentence, can it occur in the real world? For some reason I had the innate feeling that it was possible but the friend I made that statement to thought otherwise. We had a long discussion but never reached a definitive answer. The next day I asked my physics teacher if it was possible, but he seemed confused as well, seemingly because he got the idea I wanted to go to the future and talk to myself in person, which involves some gnarly math and theories that haven't been completely worked out as of yet. What I was really describing is something that is more nuanced. I think that it is possible to have a conversation with your future self without a time machine, and I will lay out my method here as exactly as I can and try to explain its workings as clearly as possible.

The meaning of "talk"

I've looked on several online dictionaries to figure this out, but they all have slightly different definitions. However, all the definitions of talk include that the word means the exchange of information between two entities. This is what I intended when I made my original statement, so it is the definition that I will be using here. For my method to fit my original statement I will have to show that the exchange of information between my current self and my future self is possible, and works in both directions in the same manner as an ordinary conversation between two people.

Facets of conversation

Imagine a scenario where you are sitting at a table across from someone, having a friendly chat. You think of an idea, encode it in speech, and tell it to the person across from you. They hear your speech, decode it into an idea, and respond to you in kind. In this exchange the data flows both ways, but is an imperfect communication. Neither party can perfectly encode an idea in speech, and so neither party can know exactly what the other means. It can be further stated that at the same time the receiving party cannot know the original thought, the sending party cannot know the original thought either. This is caused because the way that a human interprets the world is constantly changing from moment to moment. It (and the universe, which affects it) fluctuates, and so it is actually impossible that it will ever interpret the same data the same way again. Even though the thought is stored in the memory of the sending party, when it is later reviewed it will be interpreted differently, and so the original meaning can never be known exactly again, unless the state of the universe was shifted back to the same conditions as when the thought was first constructed, which is a null point as that would constitute a shift in time.

Emulations

So basically your mind can only emulate past instances of itself, because as stated before, the way you interpret data does not and cannot remain constant. Imagine you have a specific thought one time and formulate a response. At some different time you have the same thought, and make a response. You have to consider the second response a guess, or emulation, of what you would have thought before, because it cannot be exactly the same because your method of interpretation has changed. In the scenario from before, you state a thought in words to the other person and they respond. Both your brain's algorithm and their brain's algorithm are imperfect emulations. Therefore it can be stated that any conversation, where two people are talking to each other, can have its definition simplified to an exchange of data between two imperfect emulations of a previous, static emulation.

Emulations of emulations

Now all I have to do is show that a conversation between my current self and my future self would be a two-way conversation between emulations, and then I've proven my original statement possible (cake :D). Obviously since I am human (as far as I know *wink*) I fit into my original statement that anyone's brain is imperfectly emulating the thought processes of previous mental states. This means that both my current self and my future self are emulations. Communication in one direction is readily available, through any method that can leave data for a future party to read. One example is my memory. Any memory I have now has a high likelihood of being available for use by my future self, and therefore a message could be sent that way. A more reliable approach would be to simply write a note and put it somewhere safe for future me to pick up and read. Communication the other way is a more complicated phenomena. Future me has to exchange data with past me. However, and this is the cool part, because past me was an emulation of a previous static mental state, all future me has to do is emulate the same past mental state. That is easily accomplished as we have a common memory of that state. He could imagine how I would have responded to his response on my initial communication to him, and it would be as valid a communication as if he was actually talking in person with me, because both the emulation within my current brain and the one in my future brain would be based on the same initial mental state.

Capping the argument

The original statement I wanted to prove logically possible was, "I am going to have a talk with my future self". I have shown that this is possible because any human's thought process is an emulation of a previous state and therefore the validity of communication between two humans rests solely on the ability of them emulating past mental states. "Talking" is equally as valid between two people as between two emulations of a person's thought processes. Finally, two communicating emulations can exist within the same person, and still have what can be considered a valid conversation.