The Traveling Mind

Time travel, is it or is it not a future possibility? The idea of time travel seems to focus on time as being on a continuum and that what happens remains trapped in a time warp (at least this is my interpretation). I do not believe in a physical ability to travel back and forth through time as in we will not be able to hop into a capsule one day and blast ourselves back to the era of the dinosaurs or 100 years into the future. After viewing Inside Out, what I do find plausible is our innate ability to mentally time travel, meaning that we're able to go backwards or forwards  through time in our minds. Past memories and hypothetical thoughts are our "loops".

One theory that I noticed in Inside Out was from Making Things Happen which is the theory that in order for one thing to exist another thing must be or not be present. In the film, Joy believes that two contradictory emotions could not occupy the same space at the same time, illustrated in how she doesn't allow the other emotions to touch the memory balls and works hard to make sure that Riley, the protagonist, is always happy even when happiness was not the appropriate emotion. Moreover, in order for happiness to exist, there could not be a presence of another emotion, shown by the memory balls being one entire color thus even though that sadness or other emotions were "necessary" they were not "sufficient" amongst the presence of Joy. However, in the falling action, Joy begins to realize that "neither A nor B needs to be designated a single condition or event for the cause of any event is almost invariably a set of these" (477). When Sadness touches Joy's favorite memory of Riley winning the hockey game causing the memory to become sad, Joy realizes that it is because of the sadness Riley felt that caused her parents and friends to cheer her up which in turn causes the memory to become more joyful. It is not sadness alone nor joy alone but rather a set that occupies that space which creates the conditions of the event.

The film illustrates our ability to alter our past, one aspect of time traveling. Let's take trauma victims for instance. Those who have experienced trauma may time travel back to painful events and block them out or erase them from their cognitive time line or cognitively restructure the event. This is when you see someone legitimately forgetting what happened to them or believing their oppressor is dead because they killed them in her or his mind. Does this change reality? For the individual, yes but nothing happens to the entire world because one person altered or erased his or her past experiences as Taylor mentioned "to revisit an occurrence is to imagine that event with all things the same except for ourselves" (484). Instead of being bullied, you go back and stand up to your bully and beat him or her up. Secondly, we have the ability to travel to the future through hypothetical thoughts. As old Joe says in Loopers, the more steps one takes in the direction of that hypothetical the more clearer and likely that future goal becomes reality. For the more forward thinkers like myself, it's always like occupying multiple spaces at once, one foot in the present and the other in the future (483). Spatially, today and tomorrow are relatively the same time for us. I can sit in class and fast-forward to eating dinner and then go actually eat dinner after class. The future is only a possibility until it is actually done which is why in Loopers present Joe could kill future Joe and still be alive but if the present Joe dies all the possibilities and old Joe die with him. We are our own time machines. What we recall; what we envision for the future are unique solely to us. We can dare to enter our portals.