Time and Self: How Time Travel
Reveals What It Means to Be Human
To be human is to interact with time. The alarm clock chimes at 6:00 am,
the nightly news begins at 5:00 pm, and every year we become increasingly
aware of growing older. “Time is the very foundation of conscious experience,”
Dan Falk writes in In Search o f Time. ^ The brain dexterously organizes vast
amounts of information through concepts of past, present, and future so that a
person’s understanding of self is grounded in time. We perform what scientists
deem mental time travel when we project ourselves from a present moment into
a remembered past or a perceived future. Unfortunately, mental time travel is
both inaccurate and limited. Unable to physically relive significant periods of
humanity or positively predict events of the future, literature becomes a gateway
through time and space. Well-written works of science fiction like Connie
Willis’s Doomsday Book and Octavia Butler’s Kindred thoughtfully contribute
to the dialogue of what it means to be human, for they provide meaningful
opportunities to walk with the non-living within present and future perspectives.
By traveling through time and space in Doomsday Book and Kindred, we find
that our place in time influences us in dynamic and complex ways and is central
to an understanding of self
We would be paralyzed without the brain’s ability to organize sensory
information. Our computer-like brains file experiences into categories of past,
future, and present, or as Patricia Churchland prefers, into past, future, and the
self ^ The present moment continually shifts, but the self exists as a stable
middle ground between a remembered past and a perceived future. According to
the psychological continuity theory, for a self to be maintained, future mental
cognizance must evolve out of present understandings through uninterrupted
causes.^ In other words, the way a person sees the world at 18 years old will
differ from her perspective at 45, but she remains the same person because she
continues to view herself in the present tense. The changes she undergoes are
both gradual and the result of direct causes, but a consciousness of existing in
the past, the present, and the future develops the awareness of herself as an
individual being.
In Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, the reader travels with Kivrin from the
year 2052 to 14th-century England. Kivrin believes she has settled in 1320 only
to discover much later that she is living in 1348 in the midst of a Black Plague
outbreak. In Kindred, Dana, a black protagonist, travels from what is present day
California, 1976, to antebellum Maryland. She visits the past six times to protect
Rufus, her white slave-holding relative, in order to continue her lineage.
Externally, both Dana and Kivrin travel backwards in time, yet cognitively they
function within the context of the psychological continuity theory. They refer to
themselves in the present tense despite moving to the past, and each new