The classical models of personhood are all very well and good if you want personhood to be real; but what’s often the most real about being a person are the pains of knowing from your memory what you chose to do. You are what you did. If we could change what happened (or happens, or will happen), we might save ourselves the pain of what remembering what happened (etc.).

From the ol’ fashioned view of personhood, the irreversibility of the past is dangerous to suspend belief in, partly because it is too sweet a comfort. It’s the same reason why it’s not decent to fantasize about the lottery. The unreachability of so complete a life-change only darkens the colors of your present estate. You feel poorer without the winning ticket—or the opportunity to see that one person again; to unsay what you said; to heal a friendship, whatever it might take.

The changelessness of the past is an important anchor to the self. You don’t remake the past without unmaking persons. (Some time-travel movies went hard down the “there’s nothing you can do” line. The Butterfly Effect and Looper made time travel very un-fun. The only way to undo the past was to undo oneself, a version of killing baby Hitler that was melancholic and cool because you were actually a decent enough guy to point the gun in your own direction, and you still had the last, heroic word.)

Time travel may not be a problem from the standpoint of physics; a universe is perfectly imaginable where some natural phenomenon—say, a sun by means of a black hole—travels back in time and destroys its cosmic grandparents or jumps ahead and impacts a future-state galaxy. It may turn out that the world in which we live is open to time travel (though I doubt it myself). Which is to say: the paradoxes of time travel are not intra-timey-wimey; they occur when you throw a person-shaped monkey wrench into the time machine. The puzzle with time-travel movies is not so much a mechanical one as it is spiritual. It’s not the laws of physics which ask of us a past which does not change, a present balance of necessity and contingency, and an open future; it is our understanding of personhood. That is to say, the laws of physics (and the authors of those laws in Hollywood), by envisioning a world in which time travel is possible, construct a cosmos inhospitable to persons.

Consider perhaps the strangest effect of time travel (strange from a person’s perspective): no time-travel story has avoided, and many of them openly play with, the fact that no person may alter the past or visit the future without leaving himself behind. All time machines are, in fact, devices for copying persons. Films like Looper and Primer, or the TV shows Dr Who and Rick and Morty, face this reality head-on, allowing the original and the newbie to engage with, even kill, each other. In films like Tenet or the Marvel universe, on the other hand, this duplication is nothing too strange; it’s just another part of the just-so of time travel.

The ancients did not entertain such ideas—modern physics had yet to be invented—but I’ll wager few things would seem more demonic to Christian theologians, or more sub-human to stoics like Seneca, than to “instantiate” a new person by altering the basic dimensions of the cosmos. No intimacy, no love, no divine action. Just brute force upon cosmic stoichea. Scratch babies born in labs; try persons created by breaking the universe.

Whenever the laws of time travel are used upon a personal subject, the creation of the double is granted without contest. Without so much as a “what in the—” the story assumes that a person can be created ex nihilo. The writers of the film ask for some leeway, no doubt, but the narrative seems to demand more than, “just grant that there is a person made from another by the law of physics.” Pausing on that moment can make the spiritual planes spin. It is a moment of quantum-mechanical auto-production—the technological conception of someone who shares the same characteristics to an uncanny degree, though usually possessed of their own intellect, memory, and will. Nothing weird here. Yet if we can go skipping along in a world which can conjure up a person by breaking the cosmos, perhaps something else has already broken.

So long as the existence of many or an infinite number of Yous is somehow unsettling, the old notions of personhood (according to which, there can be only one) still stir. On this older notion of personhood, a multitude of Yous is unthinkable. They are not You. Everything which seems essential to you—the features of your face, your physical make-up, your origins—are sort of transferable. Other descriptors—your will, intellect, consciousness, memory, hope, decisions—are not included. Even in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the effort to make these sharable (i.e., “you have access to all your infinite selves”) only highlights the point. Either Evelyn receives knowledge the way Neo learned Kung Fu in the Matrix—merely a sped-up version of learning from another person—or else the more that the selves coalesce, the less discernible is the supposed difference between them. (Also, who knows what really happened in EEAOO…)

Inhumane cosmologies are not new. In our own way, we may sense in this new cosmology a similar dread to that which the Greek tragedians felt. Fate—like time-travel—contended with personhood. It questioned our sense of choice, of the divine power to define ourselves by our actions. The war with the Fates was often a war against a cosmos which seemed unwelcoming, unfit for truly human living. Neither identity through memory of past actions nor an irreducible freedom to make something happen (I and I alone did this) fits in a world that seems at its roots to favor all-embracing necessity or absolutely unbiased chance. In the same way, according to time travel, or the multiverse, you and you alone are not You. You may on any given day create a duplicate You by traveling in time. In fact, in the multiverse, there is already an infinite number of Yous, just as much You as You are, doing all the things that Yous do.

The final Irony is that the mechanics which render this world inimical to personhood are used to obtain salvation of persons. The seriousness of moral responsibility, the tenderness of love, the urgency of forgiveness—they all rely on an unchanged past, on an open future, on the unique, solitary unity of one’s Self. If these grounds are rendered plastic, as so many building blocks which, like our bodies, we are able through technology to alter, then they vanish, and with them, any sensible belief in our semi-divine power to define.

But, it seems, there is no alternative. The gods will not save us; they are too busy elsewhere. The world does not care; it is moving along despite us. Being is not a gift; it will dominate or be dominated. Only by means of technical control of the cosmos can we procure the salvation of our supposed selves. Except that such a salvation will render the saved impersonal (almost as if such technical means can only produce technical results). You would not be saved at all.

Only an alternative cosmology will do. I cannot say whether or not time travel is valid, though certainly many wonder how much confabulating is at work among physicists. An alternative science—a divine science, one might propose—will have to ground existence, indexing our cosmos upon a Person, or something equally gracious. For it’s either persons, or particles-n-waves—all the way down.