Temporal Thought Experiments

Poul Anderson's works present single, mutable and multiple timelines. Comic strips might provide a helpful way to think about them. This idea will probably be developed over several posts.

A 3-Panel Comic Strip

Panel 1: Two characters, A and B. A tells B a joke, short enough to fit into a single speech balloon.

Panel 2: B thinks. Silent panel.

Panel 3: B laughs. Speech balloon - "Ha! Ha! Ha!"

In this thought experiment, A an B are conscious, perceiving themselves and their environment as three-dimensional. In their experience, A jokes at time t0, then B thinks at t1 and laughs at t2. To readers of the comic strip, the left to right direction on the page is one of their three spatial dimensions. Within each panel, that direction is also a spatial dimension. However, for the 3-panel comic strip, the left to right direction on the page is A's and B's temporal dimension. The main point here is the total difference between the temporal dimension of the readers of the comic strip and that of the characters.

The readers can:

see all three panels at a glance;

read them in turn;

read them in any order - 123, 132, 213, 231, 312 or 321;

focus on a single panel for any length of time.

If A and B knew of this, then they would think that they were being timelessly observed by extra-cosmic beings whereas the readers are experiencing duration in the normal way. If anyone asks, "Does B laugh before or after a particular reader reads panel 3?" then he is conflating two completely independent timelines. I think that such conflation of timelines is a problem when discussing Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series but I will have to develop this idea further.