Martels' "time projection" from 1985 to 25,000 A.D. counts as time travel because there is at least the possibility of his return. Martels inhabits a fascinating timeline that is one branch of Blish's Haertel Scholium, a kind of mini-multiverse. Characters in the twenty-first century of this timeline engage in Wellsian discussion of time, dimensions and consciousness. Like Wells' Time Traveller, Martels arrives in a post-civilizational perpetual summer where there is a museum of past technology. He is told something that seems relevant to the mind-body question that we have discussed in relation to artificial intelligence in Poul Anderson's works. A personality is a semistable electromagnetic field using the computing apparatus of a brain and the energy source of a body. Since we do not understand how neurons cause consciousness, we might think that the consciousness resides instead in the electromagnetic field but the same question arises. How does such a field generate consciousness? The philosophical question remains whatever the empirically discovered nature of the organism and/or any associated fields.
A variation on time travelling is provided by "world-line cruising." (See here and here.)
In Martels' timeline, the instantaneous Dirac transmitter receives messages not only from the present moment but also from every other part of the four dimensional continuum, i.e., from the past and future as well. Thus, intertemporal communication, which is a conceptual link to Starfarers.
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