A certain comic floating around the internet of Hobbes and Hobbes having sex with each other brought an intriguing question to mind: If you were to travel back in time to have sex with yourself, would that be gay intercourse or masturbation?

I spent a week straight hurting the minds of my friends at the college lunch table with this question and eventually brought everyone's expertise into the matter, one coming from a philosophical point of view, another from a physics point of view, and with me coming at it from a linguistic point of view.

A the philosophical friend finally put all his effort and current knowledge of religion and philosophy into the matter and posted his in his journal of facebook. And in response, another friend asked further that if it was gay, would it also technically be incestuously gay?

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Burrito Philosophy: Time Travel and Related Matters
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12:32am Sunday, Apr 6
I have a friend who has been wondering about a serious (sic) philosophical conundrum. I'm sure it's kept him up a few nights, and allowed him to annoy the hell out of some of his friends. His conundrum is this:

If you went back in time and had sex with yourself, would that be gay or masturbation?

I realized I really didn't know, so I did what all philosophers do (or should do) in such a situation. I got a burrito and sat about working out the problem.

For the purposes of this we will assume time travel is possible and one can visit oneself in the past without inadvertently destroying the universe. It is quite possible that this is not true. On a related note, I despise time travel.

In his own reflections my unnamed friend, whom most of you reading this have already identified but I'm not naming anyway, had on his own decided that it boiled down to the definition of the word self. This makes it a reiteration of the mind-body problem, a classic problem within particularly Western philosophy. The question is whether the you from the future is the same is the you in the past/present. Hate time travel... The act is homosexual if the two entities are different, but masturbation if they are the same.

I do not intend to solve this problem here. Crucial to this is that I was raised in an Eastern philosophic tradition in which it is ok to not actually answer anything. However, what I can do is outlie several possibilities given common theories about the soul and self.

Materialist: I list this first because it is easiest. Materialism denies the existence to all non-sensory phenomena, accepting only matter as real. If we exist only as physical bodies, than two bodies means two individuals, as they share no characteristic linking them. Thus the act outlined in my friend's inquiry is homosexual.

Psychological: Psychology typically must admit the existence of non-material aspects of the human, such as thought. However, the human mind is so much a product of the experiences it has been subjected to that the same person at radically different times of their life may logically be different entities. However, other psychological theories assert that people do not change significantly over the course of a life. The verdict? So tell me about your mother...

Platonic/ Pythagorean: Pythagoras and Plato advocated belief in an eternal soul, existing at all points in time, but transitioning from one entity to another. This soul is the real, permanent self, transcending the divided line between the gross world of images and the permanent world of the forms. According to this theory, the act would be masturbation, as both bodies belong to the same eternal soul. This is the same in mainstream Western religion, with the added corollary that masturbation may be less of a sin than homosexuality, depending on interpretations.

Descartes: Descartes is one of the philosophers most responsible for the Western notion of mind as self. "I think therefore I am" necessitates that the entities performing the sexual act must be thinking beings. As they are almost definitely not given the circumstances of the experiment, neither exists. Gay or masturbation? No.

Hinduism: Too vague, try again.

Bhakti Hinduism: By this I mean Hinduism practiced as a worshiping faith, in reverence of the Hindu pantheon. In this incarnation, Hinduism is very similar to Platinsim in its concept of the soul. Masturbation.

Philosophical Hinduism: Known as the way of knowledge, this variant of Hinduism does not admit of a pantheon of deities as beings of worship. It is a monist belief system, asserting that all of the universe consists of a single substance, Brahman-Atman, or God. This system does not admit of separate individuals. Thus, not only is this act masturbation, but all sexual union can be construed as such. Enjoy that thought.

Traditional Buddhism: Traditional Buddhism also does not admit of a self, but it also does not promote the idea of Brahman-Atman. The best answer possible would be gay, as most Buddhists do not expressly deny the existence of matter.

Zen Buddhism: The traditional method of Zen instruction is the koan, a riddle given to a neophyte that has no real answer. The idea is that the student agonizes over the riddle continuously until their mind finally breaks open in an epiphany as they realize the folly of trying to reason through the riddle. This question would make an acceptable koan.

So there you have it, a perfectly good burrito irreparably damaged by this line of thought. Excuse me while I wash my mind.