Causal Discontinuity

This post reiterates a by now familiar argument that remains a live issue as long as we are rereading the Time Patrol. Maybe this time some parts of the argument will be expressed more clearly.

In "Brave To Be A King," Manse Everard is in a timeline where the Cyrus who should have become King of Persia was murdered in infancy and where Keith Denison of the Time Patrol has been obliged to play the role of the adult Cyrus. Everard intends to "delete" this timeline and to replace it with a more acceptable one in which the infant Cyrus was not murdered so that neither Denison nor anyone else is required to impersonate the adult Cyrus.

Before making this change, Everard speaks as if he is in a changeable timeline, i.e., in a timeline which clearly exists because he is in it yet can be changed into or replaced by an alternative. He is in this timeline but will replace it. The tensed verbs, "is" and "will replace" refer not to different moments within a single timeline but to a temporal relationship between two timelines. However, after making the change, Everard speaks as if he is in not a changeable but a discontinuous timeline. He speaks as if Denison's career as Cyrus has simply never occurred in any sense whatsoever. It is true that, after making the change, he and Denison are in a timeline where it is true to say that, within that timeline, Denison has never been Cyrus. But Denison's impersonation of Cyrus was in the previous timeline.

If there were only a single, discontinuous timeline, then it would be impossible to travel into the past and to change the timeline. In such a timeline, causality is violated not by time travellers who have travelled into the past but only by those who have appeared from nowhere and nowhen with the mistaken memory of having travelled into the past. In such a timeline, it would be unnecessary to fear that anyone who has travelled into the past has changed it.

Anaitis

 

The Shield Of Time.

"Yet it mattered not that the Greeks identified Anaitis with Aphrodite Ourania and built her a fane in their own style. She remained an Asian goddess, her cult the largest..." (p. 24)

Deities of different pantheons are identified. Venus is Aphrodite and Aphrodite is Anaitis.

The courtesan, Theonis, is:

"'An avatar of Anaitis.'" (p. 50)

"'Face and form like Aphrodite's, voice like song, skin like snow, gait like a panther's. Midnight hair. Eyes the green of a fire where copper is about to melt. That's what they say.'" (ibid.)

Theonis is an Exaltationist, Merau Varagan's clone mate. Thus, she continues the theme of villains with voices like song.

A time traveller is identified with the Goddess in Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time. 

Freedom

Varagan:

"'We have tried to remake time in order that we may rule it; and we have desired to rule in order that our wills may be wholly free.'"

-The Shield of Time, p. 44.

One group can be wholly free only if others are unfree? (Poul Anderson's Exaltationists and SM Stirling's Draka?)

Freedom from what and for whom to do what?

The freedom of a minority to control the economy?

the free development of each individual?

A contentious issue.

Singing Villains (Not Quite)

 

"[Aycharaych] spoke perfect Anglic, save for a touch of accent that added a kind of harsh music to it."

-Poul Anderson, "Honorable Enemies" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 277-302 AT p. 278.

"[Aycharaych's] voice was low, sheer beauty to hear."

-Poul Anderson, "Hunters of the Sky" IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 149-301 AT II, p. 160.

"[Aycharaych's] voice sang and purred onward, soft as the cognac they shared, in Anglic whose accent sounded less foreign than archaic."

-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Sir Dominic Flandry..., pp. 339-606 AT IX, p. 459.

Merau Varagan

"'A lovely vista,' [Varagan] said in American English, which his voice turned into music."

-The Shield Of Time, 976 B. C., p. 43.

Villains are either menacing or charming...

Musical adaptations of the Technic History and the Time Patrol? (No.) When I visited the Albert Dock tourist attraction in Liverpool, a shop assistant almost sang to me in her Liverpool accent. If I had been Andrew Lloyd Webber, that would have been the inspiration for a musical. 

Iraq And Avalon

Iraq before war:

"...seventy primary targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction had not been spotted because they were buried deep or cunningly disguised as something else."

-Frederick Forsyth, The Fist Of God (London, 1995), Chapter Fourteen, p. 386.

Avalon after attack:

"He sighed. 'Let us be frank, citizens,' he said. 'Our intelligence about this system was very bad. We had no idea what fortifications had been created for Avalon -'"

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT IX, p. 544.

If you are going to get into a fight, be prepared. I have spent a lot of time blundering into conflicts with my eyes closed.

Time And A Time

 

An sf fan commented that most writers just tell us that their time travelling characters are in 209 BC or whenever whereas Poul Anderson makes us realize it. In The Shield Of Time, we pass directly from a discussion of variable reality to a description of a house in Bactra in 209 BC but I have already summarized the latter here. The Bactrans do not suspect the temporal forces moving around them.

(Quick breakfast post before long walk by the river in summer weather.)

Temporal

Might a physicist and a linguist cooperate to devise a version of Temporal? The main problems would be tenses and temporal adverbs. Everard says:

 "'Then it'll never have been. You won't exist anymore.'" (see here)

"You won't exist anymore" acknowledges that Novak exists now. "...it'll never have been" means that it is possible that the beta timeline, which they are in, does not exist now. Everard's dialogue oscillates between the mutable timeline model and the discontinuous timeline model.

As with Wells' The Time Machine, we appreciate the discussion of time and time travel and, as part of that appreciation, have to engage in the discussion.

Death And Annihilation

 

The Shield Of Time.

Everard to Tamberly:

"'It could turn out that you and I never had this talk today, that we and our whole world never were...'" (p. 31)

Here is the absurdity made explicit. They are having this talk today. There could be another timeline in which they are not.

"'It's harder to imagine and harder to take than the idea of personal annihilation when we die.'" (ibid.)

Is it? We can imagine a world in which we never were. We can reflect on this world as it will be after we are gone. But we are here and now to do the imagining and reflecting.

Later in The Shield Of Time, Everard warns Novak that, if he remains in a timeline that is to be deleted, then he will be deleted with it:

"'Then it'll never have been. You won't exist anymore.'

"'How's that different from the usual death?'"

-PART SIX, 1245beta A. D., p. 412.

The beta timeline will never have been? But it is now while they are in it, having this conversation. Novak won't exist in the subsequent timeline but he will live out the rest of his life in the beta timeline. Unlike Everard speaking to Tamberly, Novak does not see any difference between deletion and death. Someone who has died is in the past of the first temporal dimension. Someone who has been deleted is in the past of the second temporal dimension. The Temporal language will recognize this with two kinds of past tense.

Why Does Anyone Need The Time Patrol?

Remembering the distinctions made in the previous post:

If we merely live in a mutable timeline...

Even if someone departs into the past intending to prevent our births, we here and now need not be concerned about this because, even if the time traveller succeeds, that timeline in which we were not born will exist in the future of the second temporal dimension but cannot affect us here and now.

If we merely live in a discontinuous timeline...

There may have been discontinuous events (quantum fluctuations, including time travellers arriving from nowhere and nowhen) in our past but they did not prevent us from being born or from existing here and now so they are not a cause for concern.

If we time travel in a mutable timeline...

We might travel into the past and return to an altered present. If we want to prevent this from happening, then we will need the Time Patrol.

If we time travel in a discontinuous timeline...

This is the real anomaly. Someone who does not time travel or at least who has not time travelled yet has authentic memories of his life to date. (As authentic as memories ever are but that is a different issue.) Someone who has just arrived in what he thinks is his past does not know whether his memories are authentic. He might be one of those quantum time travellers who arrive from nowhere and nowhen with inauthentic memories. The Time Patrol tries to prevent events like this from happening but there is still a massive conceptual problem about memories being authentic before we depart into the past but not necessarily being authentic when we arrive in the past.

Three Kinds Of Timelines

The Shield of Time, 1987 A. D., pp. 26-33.

In this chapter, Manse Everard explains the need for the Time Patrol to Wanda Tamberly. As ever, I feel a sense of confusion. 

It is easy to think that there are just two logically possible kinds of timelines:

immutable, as in Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time.

mutable, as in the Time Patrol series.

However, analysis of Time Patrol texts shows that they refer to two kinds of timelines:

mutable;

immutable but discontinuous.

Confusion results when discussion oscillates between these two kinds of timelines.

"Mutable" means "changeable." Change involves a relationship between a state changed from and a state changed to. That is a relationship of before and after, in other words a temporal relationship. Any timeline is itself a single set of temporal relationship between spatially three dimensional states of the universe. We call these states "successive" precisely because they are related temporally, not spatially.

If one state of a timeline can change into another state of the timeline, then we must distinguish between temporal relationships within a timeline (these are between 3D states of the universe) and the temporal relationship between states of the timeline. In fact, instead of saying that one state of a timeline changes into another state of the timeline, it is simpler to say just that one timeline changes into or is replaced by another timeline. This difference is terminological. The two sets of temporal relationships (within a timeline and between timelines) are two temporal dimensions at right angles (ninety degrees) to each other as the three spatial dimensions are at right angles to each other.

On the mutable timeline model, a time traveller who "changes the past" arrives in the current timeline from the previous timeline. ("Current" and "previous" in the second temporal dimension.) On the immutable but discontinuous timeline model, there is only one timeline. A time traveller who "changes the past" arrives from nowhere and nowhen:

"'It's sort of like quantum mechanics, scaled up from the subatomic to the human level.'" (p. 30)

These are different concepts.