Typical times children begin to ask questions, from a lecture at the Medical College of Georgia that @ashleydickinson passed along to me:
"what" 2 yrs"where" 2.6 yrs"who" 3.0 yrs"whose" 3.0 yrs"why" 3.0 yrs"how many" 3.0 yrs"how" 3 ‐ 6 yrs"when" 4 yrsThis could be interpreted as either a rough scale of abstractness, or a rough scale of what is most salient and critical. Either way, is it surprising that "when" ends up so late on the list? "What" something is, that we can grasp relatively easily. But our concept of time and how we operate within it, that's something we're still so completely far off from understanding.
I was told yesterday that time travel is the ultimate superpower; through time travel you could address every other desire imaginable.
The respondent began by pointing out how time travel could be used to approximate super speed, strength, and all the other traditional superpowers, but this also speaks deeply to the idea of want/decisionmaking/happiness.
As you may have heard me say/will hear me say again, the problem with those three things is that we have little capacity to think about them with respect to time. If you shift the time perspective among any of them, their meaning is completely different.
Consider a basic example of this:
I 'want' to go back in time to redo x/y/z 'decisions.' That will leave me feeling more 'happy.'
A small and incomplete list of problems that happen to come to mind:
1) it's highly likely and in fact guaranteed that you will 'want' something else later when the conditions of your situation have changed (see: "Decisions are about comparison. If you have control over conditions, you have control over decisions.")
2) decisions are never made in the moment. They are made in the past. (see: "There's not just one decision; "I'm here because of a long chain of events"")
3) deciding what "happiness" means is the messiest part of talking about free will (see "free will, decision making, and happiness"). This is partially captured by the idea people are trying to express when they say ignorance is bliss. Consider the thought here in reference to the PSFK post Phone App Diagnoses Disease Through Sound:
What superpower would you want? (Or should I ask "want"?)
