Having children arguably takes you back to your own childhood…if not they make you feel your own age.
Here I present a corollary.
We all travel in time. We’re born young, we experience moments and age as our minds gain wisdom and our bodies reach a peak in physical condition before embarking on a downward decline terminating in our demise.
Image credit: http://discovermagazine.com/
Star Trek has teleporters which work by mapping a person at one end, disintegrating them, and cloning them at another point in space. All memories and experiences are preserved in the map and are therefore conserved, and even though that reconstruction is only seconds old, their memories and experiences are exactly the same as the version of them that had had disintegrated. It’s therefore purported that they are essentially the same person.
Teleportation – a projection of a person through the spatial dimension.
I wonder whether parents can in part say a similar kind of thing…that by creating a child with a similar (though admittedly not identical) genetic makeup, and raising them with shared experiences, and similar (though again, admittedly not identical – due to those genetic differences) moral values…can we say that our children are a projection of ourselves into the future?
If this is the case, parents are time travelers in a different sense than non-parents.
This time travel capacity of our children makes sense; each time my daughter topples over I yell out “Hey be careful there!” after the event!
Paul
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