Joe's Journey And The Death Paradox

When Joe was growing up, he used to be called Joey. At age 20 (in year 2020), his dad died and left him with a large sum of money. However, soon after, a strange thing happened. A man who looks exactly like Joey appeared, claiming that he is the rightful Joe, and that this inheritance was wrongfully stolen from him. An enoumous legal battle begins, and what baffled the court the most was that the DNA of both individuals were identical. Five years later, the courts still could not make a decision, and Joey lost a lot of time and money fighting the legal battle with this man who looks like him. Outraged by this chaos, Joey kills this man and was sent to jail. He became a mad scientist (the other prisoners called him Mad Joe) and begins to build
a time machine with the intension of traveling to the year 2020 and killing this man before the legal battle ever occurred. The same year Mad Joe killed this man, he developed a time machine and started to move to the year 2020. As he steps out of the machine, he sees lawyers signing papers with a young Joey, and blindly shouts: “No, I’m Joe! That’s my money.” Joe and Joey obviously do not believe that they share the same personal identity, and they fought each other on their father’s inherence. Regardless of their beliefs, it is still evident that perhaps time traveling (in the method Lewis explains) does not comply with personal identity. There are multiple issues and paradoxes. Joe does not have and does have memories of the legal battle before it happen. He is also dead and not dead at the year 2025. He doesn’t receive the inherience at all, but say if the court does make a decision, Joe has and does not have the inherience. Allow me to elaborate on these issues. John Perry, in his A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortablity, introduces the concept of a “stretch of consciousness,” where individuals are aware of their “flow of thoughts and feelings” (Perry 25). This personal identity criterion requires that the memories “were caused in the right way by the earlier experiences” (Perry’s emphasis, 30). Lewis mentions similar requirements for personal identity with his explaination of causal continity and the necessity for mental continuity and connectedness. However, the memory criterion of personal identity prevents Lewis’s model of time traveling incoherent. I do agree that Lewis’s causal continty allows that Mad Joe in 2025 is the same Joe in 2020, stepping out of the time machine. I also see how Joe in 2020 is the same person throughout his personal time line, as he is the same person as he is now as he is in the past – this is explained with Perry’s stretch of consciousness. However, I do not believe the Joe, who shouts at the lawyers, and Joey, who is currently receiving the money and recovering from his father’s death, are the same. First, let me focus on Perry’s stretch of consciousness. As a simple explaination, if person A has the same memories (that is created in the right kind of way) of person B, then person A is person B. Thus, in another scenerio, if person A does not have the same memories of person B, then person A cannot be person B. Joe is most definity Joey from his past, but the current Joey is not this Joe. They have different memories – Joe knows exactly how the court will be going but Joey does not. Though Joey will eventually receive those memories in which Joe holds, it is not connected in the way which will make Joey, Joe. It also raises the concern that if Joe has more memories of himself and of Joey, does that make Joe the realest of the two? Furthermore, the way they experience these events will be different. For Joe, our time traveler, it would be his second time experiencing the court case. He also knows he will be killed by Joey and attempts to prevent his own death, but of course he fails. For Joey, he’s going through the legal case blindly and commits murder. The second issue is the death paradox.
With regards to Lewis’s model of time traveling, the moments after which Joey kills Joe, they are both dead and alive in the year 2025. Lewis justifies that events in personal time for a time traveler “depends on their locations in one-dimensional external time” (Lewis 147). He elaborates that it is possible for events to acquire multiple personal time locations, such as talking to oneself. This, I see, is fine. The issue occurs when for a single event, Joe’s identity is something that is both completely different from the other – dead and alive. Thus, raising the issue that if Joe’s death depends on its location in external time, how can he be dead when he is also alive and facing murder
charges? The last question of all, who should have received the inherence? The two believed that they individually hold the right to this inherence; Joe claims that it was wrongfully stolen from him while Joey was starting to sign the papers. As neither would loosely their grip on the money, they agreed that their identities were not the same. If Joe had received the money, one could defend him by claiming he was the original beneficiary of the inherence (as in “the first”) while another could argue that Joey was the original beneficiary (as in the intended). Following Lewis’s model, it would be very confusing to see who exactly was the “original” and which aspect of original should be used to determine the true beneficiary of the inherence. Thus, allow me to introduce time traveling as a multiverse in a series of multiple time lines or time dimensions.

Figure 5. Time travel as multiverses

Having multiple dimensions or universes of time allows for time travel to maintain an individual’s personal identity.
I will first explain this theory before elaborating how it will address the previous issues of Joes and the memory criterion, the death paradox, and the question of who is the true beneficiary of the inherence, and then I will defend time travel as a multiverse from concerns which Lewis has raised. As we follow the story of Joe as stated above, we have focused in on his personal time, which Figure 5 has labeled Personal Time 1 in blue (I will call him Joe 1 for the purpose of focusing the story on one specific Joe, but this does not mean Joe 1 was the first and original Joe). The purple line illustrates the presence of the man who claims to be Joe in the legal battle, which ends in the year 2025 when our focused individual in blue has killed him. Afterwards, the blue line individual created a time machine and “went back in time” to 2020, infringing on another Joe’s timeline. In this instance, the Joes have different personal identities as they come from different timelines and
universes. Now, allow me to address how the theory of time as a multiverse would allow personal identity to be maintained in time travel. In the cases of the memory criterion, they are connected to their own past by Perry’s stretch of consciousness and Lewis’s causal continuity, but they are not connected to the Joes who they fight in the courts. The different Joes (Joe from Personal Time 1, PT 2, or PT (n)) have their individual personal identities, which can be maintained even when they time travel to another universe with a different time dimension. Similarly, for their deaths, they maintain their individual personal identity as the location of dying is in relation to an external time which differs from their original external time, in which they killed the other Joe. Joe n-1 died in External Time 1’s 2015, while Joe 1 died in External Time 2’s 2025. Thus, it is resolved that the true beneficiary of the inherence is the Joe who belongs to that specific timeline. This brings into question whether timelines of different universes can be changed, which may be possible, but is an entire discussion for another time. Lewis has brought up concerns of having another dimension of time. He gives the analogy of a mountain railway, in which “the place two miles due east of here may also be nine miles down the line, in the west-bound direction” (147). He does not believe that personal time is a second dimension of time, instead, he supports that time is just another one dimension in the four-dimensional world. However, I disagree. Looking at his mountain railway analogy, though a place may be two miles due east, the path of travel prevents the eastern two miles walk and thus instead, for the subjective individual going to this place, it must be nine miles down the line in the west-bound direction. Time, in the function of the block theory, must be in relation to the path of travel by the individual. Normally, external time and personal time would be in matching rates so that there is no discrepancy as to what the objective time dimension should be. However, once a time traveler separates himself from external time, he does not have a constant external time to support his fourth dimension, and thus personal time must be his subjective, relative fourth dimension of time, which supports his only possible path of travel. His maintaining of his subjective, relative four dimensions allows personal identity to be coherent with time traveling.