What kind of time for a Time Machine?

The linear, unstructured, parameter t used in the equations of mechanics, in spite of its great aptness in describing the nature’s laws, does not fit with the unidirectional flow of time ts subjectively experienced by humans, just the investigators of nature. Being ts the main foundation upon which we build our knowledge of nature through our continuous and inescapable reciprocal interaction − the possible key factor of our cerebral modulation, mediator between us and the world –, its objective essence appears to be inevitably destined to remain unveiled. We derive that any imagined and theoretically possible Time Machine, aimed to get us in our past or in our future allowing us to act there, does not have any practical grounds if it is built by using the illusory, impersonal, time, modeled by the parameter t, at the place of our interpersonal lived time ts. A real, humanly-tuned, Time Machine could perhaps arise by integrating ts in the body of a new kind of rationality – a ‘complex thought’ − where empiricism and logic-mathematic are harmonized with participation and interaction. Ongoing joint research in neurophysiology and physics (without neglecting any important contribution coming from anthropology) will surely help achieving such a goal. 1 Evolution of our system of thought Our image of the world is based on the experience we have of it through our senses and through the subsequent elaboration by our brain of the gathered information. At the dawning of the civilization – the time of myth −, the acquisition and the elaboration of the experiential information were based on a process of co-oscillatory resonance established by man with his environment, as the effect of a hearing amplified by his body, transmitted to his emerging consciousness. An important feature of such participatory attitude of our ancestors was that of finding themselves totally immersed in the flow of time, seen, from within, as a sort of continuous present. Along the evolution, the need to communicate generated the oral language, originally of a mimetic-poetic type (still pertaining to the effusive-participatory consciousness typical of the ‘primitive mentality’) and then of a dialectic type, whose «question-and-answer» structure shows already a separation between communicating individuals [1]. With writing − come after orality − the space -temporal bonds between the emitter and the receiver of the communication were reduced, thus extending the flair for abstraction and making less pregnant the possibility of an empathic resonance. As a result of such a flair for abstraction, an «extended consciousness» [2] eventually developed, culminating in the to-day’s ‘rational system of thought’, mainly based on the categories of logics, mathematics and empiricism, typical of the science’s approach to knowledge, and on a more precise consciousness about the flow of time, from past to future. As a consequence of the acquired habit to the rational system of thought, many of those ‘subjective’ skills connected with the knowledge captured and processed in a participatory, undifferentiated, attitude, are nowadays forgotten or disregarded as ‘irrational’, despite the very fact that such a knowledge is constantly in support of our ‘reason’ for the solution of problems (sometimes vital ones) not attainable by using the usual logical tools. 2 Limitations to our ‘rationality’ In this section we intend to show that our rational system of thought suffers several important shortcomings due to which it may be legitimate to be skeptic on the possibility to base only on it in order to really achieve a complete and ‘objective’ knowledge of the reality. We will see that, because of these shortcomings limiting the interpretation EPJ Web of Conferences