A friend of mine says that if he could return to an earlier time in his life, knowing then what he knows now, his life would be vastly different. That is perhaps true of all of us, but he says it is particularly true of him. “My life is a chaotic series of stupid mistakes,” he has told me often enough, “and I know if I could go back I would change everything.”
Although on the surface of it, such mental exercises seem rather pointless, any thought experiment that would ask us to examine our own lives, and question whether the decisions we made in the long ago, or even yesterday, are decisions that in retrospect we would make again. The impossibility of returning to the past armed with our present knowledge may make some dismiss out of hand such musings as fantasy, but it is a mental exercise that may fit the hand more easily when we think about our present. How can we use this thought experiment to more rationally interact with others and the world? Stay tuned as we examine this question.
