Time Travel & Unconditional Love

An Overview of TILT’s Guiding Premises & Terminology

We envision a world where unconditional love and travel in time are integrated into human and planetary thriving. 
To achieve this vision, we develop tools and technologies that give people direct access to the experiences of time travel and unconditional love. In this section you will learn more about how we understand those concepts and how we are working to scale them. 
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Defining Time Travel and Unconditional Love

First, some definitions. At TILT, we understand “time travel” to mean the experience of mental, informational and/or physical aspects of reality not “happening” in their usual order. So by that definition, a time traveler would be a person, animal, microorganism, piece of computer code, or physical device who (or that):

  • experiences visiting a point in time that is not the commonly accepted present and is not a memory of the commonly accepted past,
  • influences the commonly accepted past in a way that is detectable to careful external observers at some point in time, or
  • receives information about the commonly accepted future that cannot be predicted based on data from the commonly accepted past.

Three types of time travel can fulfill these requirements: mental, informational, and physical time travel.

When we say Unconditional Love, we mean a compassionate connection to and acceptance of what is in oneself and others, with no strings attached and no expectation of return. We do not mean accepting all behavior in your space – you can unconditionally love someone and choose to never speak to them again (See 5 ideas about unconditional love, below).

Why We Study Time Travel & Unconditional Love Together

We see unconditional love and time travel as representing the two most major shifts humanity will experience in the next 50 years. Scientific evidence is already driving the beginnings of a cultural recognition that human behavior is influenced by many factors, including factors that occur in the future

Understanding that we are not fully in control of our behavior could lead to a breakdown in human culture, or it could lead to an awareness of the necessity of unconditional love as a universal approach to the reality of human vulnerability. By integrating research and applications related to unconditional love with those related to time travel, we are working towards the latter outcome. Meanwhile, this new understanding of human behavior will also be affected by the recognition that the future impacts the present. This recognition, among other discoveries, has already brought about the desire to find positive applications for mental, informational, and physical time travel. But using time travel tools beneficially will require rigorous thinking about how to concurrently access and scale unconditional love at the global level. 

From a discovery standpoint, it is our intuition that the mathematics and physical principles that will be discovered by examining the scientific underpinnings of unconditional love will provide necessary insights into the principles needed to understand and apply time travel, and vice versa. This intuition is based on the idea that the experience of linear time exists only within the experience of duality; meanwhile, nonduality and nonlinear time seem to be more closely related to the experience of unconditional love. Admittedly, the technical details are not clear (it’s just an intuition at this point), and this is also part of the reason TILT exists — to facilitate clarity about the theoretical and potentially practical relationship between unconditional love and time travel, if there indeed is one.

The 3 Forms of Time Travel:

Mental, Informational, and Physical

Mental time travel occurs in the mental realm, which does not mean it cannot be used to influence physical reality or receive information about physical realms. The key here is that what is “traveling” (if anything really travels) is an aspect of mind. As beautifully described by philosopher Galen Strawson, we are just beginning to understand the relationship between mental things like intention, experience, and ideas and physical reality. At TILT, we are remain conservative in the sense of not assuming any unproven constraints about the interactions between mental and physical realms.

Mental Time Travel

Mental Time Travel

Mental time travel occurs in the mental realm, which does not mean it cannot be used to influence physical reality or receive information about physical realms. The key here is that what is “traveling” (if anything really travels) is an aspect of mind. As beautifully described by philosopher Galen Strawson, we are just beginning to understand the relationship between mental things like intention, experience, and ideas and physical reality. At TILT, we are remain conservative in the sense of not assuming any unproven constraints about the interactions between mental and physical realms.

Informational
Time Travel

Informational time travel occurs in the informational realm, which does not necessarily exclude the mental or physical realms. The key is that what is “traveling” is information. If you’ve seen the FX series Devs (spoiler alert!) you know about one form of informational time travel — the main characters influence the past while attempting to connect with it, which influences their future. This time-loopy problem is not a bug in the world of informational time travel, it’s a feature.

In fact, influencing the past is the feature for past-directed informational time travel. For future-directed informational time travel, receiving that influence from the future is the feature — it’s the mirror image of influencing the past. The difference between what we call “retrieving information about the future” and “influencing the past” is really where we put ourselves relative to the action. It’s the same action —just observed from different points in time.

Physical time travel occurs in physical reality, which does not exclude concurrent mental or informational time travel. The key here is that what is traveling is physical matter or energy. It may be “traveling” outside of spacetime, but it is physical matter or energy in itself, and it “begins” and “ends” in spacetime. 

The most compelling possibility — brought to us by theorists pushing science forward by removing restrictions, no less — is the idea that one could send a microscopic piece of matter through a very small wormhole. Recently, collaborators from the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton unveiled calculations suggesting that perhaps humans could survive a trip through a wormhole. But for everyone who didn’t go through the wormhole, those wormhole-traveling people would be long gone (unless they came back through another reversed wormhole, presumably).

Physical Time Travel

Physical Time Travel

Physical time travel occurs in physical reality, which does not exclude concurrent mental or informational time travel. The key here is that what is traveling is physical matter or energy. It may be “traveling” outside of spacetime, but it is physical matter or energy in itself, and it “begins” and “ends” in spacetime. 

The most compelling possibility — brought to us by theorists pushing science forward by removing restrictions, no less — is the idea that one could send a microscopic piece of matter through a very small wormhole. Recently, collaborators from the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton unveiled calculations suggesting that perhaps humans could survive a trip through a wormhole. But for everyone who didn’t go through the wormhole, those wormhole-traveling people would be long gone (unless they came back through another reversed wormhole, presumably).

Does Time Travel Really Exist?

All three kinds of time travel (mental, informational, and physical) are being investigated at Tier 1 research institutions throughout the U.S. and the world (examples: Washington University, University of California Santa Barbara, ETH Zurich, University of British Columbia, Argonne National Lab, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics). Interestingly, China has banned stories about time travel. The research cited above includes mostly investigations into physical time travel (except for Tulving’s work at Washington University [mental time travel] and Baumgart’s work at UCSB [informational time travel]) and they are all in the early stages of development. 

For a deeper discussion of time travel and a brief current-day map of possible time-travel technologies, please read Dr. Julia Mossbridge’s article How to Avoid the Time Wars, from which portions of this discussion were taken.

5 Ideas about Unconditional Love

Plenty of mystics, saints, and religious thinkers have deeply examined unconditional love, but only recently have scientists begun studying it. At TILT, we are committed to gaining a deeper understanding of this transformative human experience. The following ideas are pulled from a longer article by Dr. Mossbridge, 5 Ideas About Unconditional Love.

1. Unconditional Love is an Inside Job

We define unconditional love as the heartfelt benevolent desire that everyone and everything — ourselves, others, and all that exists in the universe — reaches their greatest possible fulfillment, whatever that may be. This love is freely given, with no consideration of merit, with no strings attached, with no expectation of return, and it is a love that motivates supportive action in the one who loves.

2. We access unconditional love, we don’t create it

Just like we’re not in charge of creating the sun or the moon or the color of the sky, we’re also not in charge of creating unconditional love. Think of it as a force like electricity — we are in charge of whether we access it, and that is all. Here, “accessing” unconditional love means finding ways to notice it working inside of you.

But how do we access it? In a scientific sense, we don’t know a lot about how to access unconditional love consistently. Anecdotally it seems that prayer, pets and babies, positive intention, meditation and other such practices help.

3. Unconditional love is its own thing

Unconditional love is not the same as happiness, enlightenment, awareness, awakening, or acceptance — to name a few terms that are often confused with unconditional love.

Unconditional love is not about skill or intellect or knowing the right thing to do. It is more like gravity than intelligence — anyone can access gravity, only some can access intelligence. When we access unconditional love, it feels like a heartfelt desire for the best for everyone, even and especially if you have no idea how the best could be accomplished.

4. Unconditional love is boundary-blind

When you feel unconditional love for someone else, you also feel it for yourself, and vice versa. 

This makes it very different from romantic or platonic love, in that you can access it suddenly and completely without a waiting period. It’s like when the sun comes out from behind a cloud — you’re there, standing in the sun while the sun shines on you no matter what you’re up to or how you feel.

4. Unconditional love is boundary-blind

When you feel unconditional love for someone else, you also feel it for yourself, and vice versa. 

This makes it very different from romantic or platonic love, in that you can access it suddenly and completely without a waiting period. It’s like when the sun comes out from behind a cloud — you’re there, standing in the sun while the sun shines on you no matter what you’re up to or how you feel.

5. Unconditional love allows healthy boundaries to arise

While unconditional love itself is boundary-blind, it inspires healthy boundaries when we access it. That’s because accessing unconditional love applies to yourself and others at the same time, so when you access it you have a deep heartfelt desire for your own greatest positive fulfillment as well as everyone else’s. 

Many people think that feeling unconditional love means accepting all behavior, including abusive or violent behavior, without any consequences. This is a misunderstanding linked to the myth that unconditional love is the same as acceptance. When you experience unconditional love as a force that exists in the universe, and when you recognize that accessing it feels like a heartfelt desire for the best for everyone, you can see that unconditional love allows the courage to build good boundaries.