*Spoiler Alert*
So, Desmond traveled to the future from 1996 to 2004. This was no ordinary time travel though (as if such a thing exists). His was a travel through the conscience. Because of a super-electromagnetic stimulus his mind was able to pass between past and future (albeit chaotically). This was one of my favorite episodes to date - because it was one of the more sci-fi episodes. The idea of cognitive time travel was new to me. H.G. Wells wrote before the time of Jung - so he had to make a machine that transported both body and mind. Bill and Ted needed a phone booth, but they still traveled with their bodies. So, how could time travel happen neurologically but not physiologically? Does this present a mind/body problem? Does the transmigration of the soul present a mind/body problem? Aquinas does not seem to think so:
Understanding is an act proper to the soul alone, needing the body … only to provide its object; whereas seeing and various other functions involve the compound of soul and body together. Whatever operates of itself independently, has also an independent being and subsistence of its own; which is not the case where the operation is not independent. Intellect then is a self-subsistent actuality, whereas the other faculties are actualities existing in matter (Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, I.2.20).
Here Aquinas shows that understanding does not need an instrument as sight needs eyes but is only presupposed since it needs the body to provide its object. The mind needs the body to provide “phantasms” to the intellect. In other words just as the eye provides reception of color from an object the imagination needs the body to provide its figment. Therefore, if Desmond were to travel successfully through time via his mind he would need a constant - a body to regulate the chaos of the imagination. Of course this constant should be his own body (which is why he did not take the form of a cow or any other thing), but his own body was affected by the electro-magnetic pulse and apparently could no longer regulate the intellect consistently. Therefore, Desmond had to find a constant outside himself yet one that was so intimately connected to him that it could regulate his intellect. He found his constant in Penny. That really was an amazing scene. It shows how that which is beyond time is incomprehensible. Literally. That which is infinite is beyond description, yet we experience it in love. Love is where finite beings meet their infinite Creator. He is infinitely outside of us yet intimately near. Hope is what keeps the two together, “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Rom. 5:5). Penny was Desmond’s hope - the love which binds past and future into the present.
