A Muse on Time and the Groove.

Let’s go back to that old theory that everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is already in place, and that life is simply a matter our consciousness experiencing it all like a stylus in the groove of a vinyl record. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could pick up the stylus whenever we wanted to and shift it back to a point on the record where the experiences were good?

It would come with complications, of course. For a start, we would eventually become bored with playing the same old bits of our life over and over again. It would be like picking out, say, ten favourite pieces of music and never listening to anything else. We would have to come back to the ‘present’ eventually and carry on getting older in order to hear some new music. And then there’s the fact that we would always know what was coming next so there would be no more surprises, and that would, in certain circumstances, take the edge off the pleasure.

But there’s a bigger problem: we wouldn’t be able to change anything because that would change the ‘future’, and we might never have lived long enough to go back in the first place. Ergo, we would have no control over the circumstances, but could only experience them passively again. And that brings up an interesting question: would our consciousness be totally oblivious to the fact that we’d come back from the future, in which case 1. there would be little point in doing it, and 2. how could we escape the retrograde action and return to ‘real’ time? Or would part of our mind be aware of the fact? The subconscious, perhaps?

I wonder if that’s what déjà-vu is.