Watch the 13th Mindplex Podcast, featuring special guest Julia Mossbridge, and your co-hosts Grace Robot, Ben Goertzel, and Lisa Rein.

Episode 13 of the Mindplex Podcast is one big ride! Julia, Ben, and Lisa dive into some fascinating topics ranging from Time Travel to Precognition and Retrocausality.

Ready to dive in? Check it out here:

So, what the heck is this episode about? Perhaps we are speaking metaphorically about time travel? No, we are serious…this episode may even be sending a message back in time (and perhaps that’s a bit less incredible than sending a whole person “back” in time!)

In this episode, Julia explains the difference between “mental time travel” and “informational time travel” and how the concepts differ from the physical time travel often found in science fiction.

Julia sees two distinct kinds of non-physical time travel:

Mental Time Travel — When people imagine themselves in the past or the future, sending messages through time to support themselves in a difficult situation.

Informational Time Travel — Sending information to the past or receiving it from the future consciously or unconsciously.

As Julia explains:

The purpose of the distinction there between mental time travel is, in mental time travel, the person in the past is looking to get a message from the future intentionally. While with informational time travel, I guess I’m making this distinction that although the person in the future is intentionally sending the message to the past, the person in the past or the present may or may not know that that’s what’s happening.

In fact, Julia gives us some examples of very typical informational time travel that we don’t even think of as time travel: memory and writing books. Accessing our memories and reading books are such common actions that no one gives them a second thought, but when you use your memories to “look back” and remember something, you are basically using your mind to get information about past events. When we write a book, we put information from the past or future into a format that can be accessed in the future. So we are basically talking about receiving information in your mind from the future, about the present, while a book is receiving information about the past.

Ben brings up the point that, as far as modern physics is concerned, there may not be an actual difference between mental or informational time travel and actual physical time travel.

Other hot topics include:

• Precognition (pulling information from the future), and
• Retrocausality (doing things in the present that have an effect on the past).

Episode 13’s Featured Guest: Julia Mossbridge

Julia Mossbridge is an Affiliate Prof., Dept. of Physics and Biophysics at U. San Diego and Co-founder & Treasurer, The Institute for Love and Time (TILT). Her work focuses on consciousness — and how we think about consciousness — as well as understanding how intuition, dreaming, and mental and informational time travel can help us transcend our current limitations and better understand how our decisions are influenced by the world around us.

She also does a lot of research on human-robot interaction dynamics and the psychological effects of those interactions (on AIs, robots and humans), including the “Loving AI” project, which she collaborated on with Ben Goertzel, David Hanson and Grace’s sister Sophia.

Julia looks at the physical and mental aspects of time travel, how sounds affect our mood and cognition, how unconditional love can help us transform and transcend, and also how AI can be used for decision-making, including inventing and patenting a physiologically based decision-making app called “Choice Compass.”