Abstract

In this note I raise a new problem for backwards time travel, and make some first suggestions as to how it might be solved. I call it the motivation problem. It is not a logical or a metaphysical problem, but a psychological one. It does not impact upon the possibility, or even the likelihood, of backwards time travel. Yet it is deeply puzzling, and we will have no idea what time travel would actually be like until we explore it. Thus, where other problems for backward time travel assume that we know what time travel would be like, and argue that we cannot have it, this new problem gives us no reason to think that we cannot have time travel, but argues that we have much less idea than we usually suppose about what it would really be like to travel back in time.