"...you're not a suicidal type. Would you actually want the you of this instant never to have existed? Think for a minute precisely what that implies.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 9, p. 107.
It implies nonsense. The Denison of this instant does exist. Everard is talking to him. The proposition that the Denison of this instant exists and the proposition that the Denison of this instant has never existed cannot both be true - in a single timeline. There might be two timelines or there might be a single timeline in which Denison does not exist at the moment to which Everard refers. However, they are not in that latter timeline because Denison does exist in the moment to which Everard refers.
I can consistently think that all my memories until the present moment are false but I cannot consistently think that, when in the future I remember my present experience, that memory will be false because that implies that I am both having and not having my present experience. Logic is consistency between propositions and applies to any possible experience.
10 comments:
I think time-travel and mutable time of the Time Patrol type implies that you can have true memories of things which did not happen -- that is, in terms of your own duration, they did, but now exist nowhere else but in the molecules of your brain.
If Everard were to go back and have the same conversation with the false Cyrus at one year into his reign, then the one he had the first conversation with would now exist only in Everard's mind -- or in the memory of his camera, if he'd taken a picture.
The technical term for this is "infinite discontinuities in the world-lines" which Poul uses a couple of times in that series.
Just as you can go back and prevent your parents from meeting. Since you're the one who did it, you exist in that time -- but you were never born, and if you return to the future, nobody has ever heard of you and all the chains of causation which result from your existence simply aren't there.
You have memories of a life, and of a world in which your existence caused things, but those memories now no longer correlate to anything accessible outside your head.
Likewise, in the history in which the Neldorian adventurers helped Hannibal destroy Rome, those blast-rays they took back and used to kill the Scipios were never manufactured. They exist, but they have no past.
This is an example of what I mean when I said you have to be careful of the 'deep structure' of the English language; it contains assumptions about causality which time travel grossly violates.
Mr Stirling,
I think that what we have here is (partly) different ways of saying the same thing.
"...the one he had the first conversation with would NOW exist only in Everard's mind..." (my emphasis)
"Now" is a temporal word contrasted with "then." The "now" and the (implied) "then" are not two different moments in a single timeline. They can only refer to two different moments/timelines in a second temporal dimension. At least I think that that is the implication of such temporal terms, whether or not it is made explicit. Poul Anderson did indeed discuss the matter in the terms that you suggest. At one stage, he used a phrase like "meta-moment" which again implies a temporal sequence distinct from (thus at right angles to) the sequence of events along the familiar temporal axis.
Paul.
You're assuming that there has to be a meta-duration which encompasses both, an "objective" time. This is not necessarily true.
Mr Stirling,
Well, ok. Then we fall back on what I call the "counter-intuitive" account. Some passages in "Brave To Be A King" describe not events that did happen (I would say in a previous timeline) but only events that would have happened if they had not been prevented. But I still think that there is a contradiction when Everard asks Denison to contemplate the possibility that "...the you of this instant never existed." At this instant, it is true that either he exists or he does not exist and it is also true that he exists.
Paul.
Mr Stirling,
"...those memories now no longer correlate to anything accessible outside your head."
But they did correlate before? At this stage, I do not think that I am assuming meta-duration but rather am drawing out the implications of the words used. To say that a particular situation exists "now" is to imply that a different situation existed earlier than/before "now." Before and after are a temporal relationship, thus a temporal dimension.
If we apply the single discontinuous timeline scenario to the Time Patrol series, then we have to avoid language that implies a (temporal) succession of timelines and it is difficult to do this because the Patrollers themselves continually anticipate divergent timelines that are yet to come. It is their task to prevent such divergences but is their way of speaking about and conceptualizing this task adequate?
Paul.
"At this instant, it is true that either he exists or he does not exist and it is also true that he exists."
-- not necessarily in the -next- instant. The continuity of consciousness that Dennison-seven-years-King embodies may make a decision that will result in his ceasing to exist... rather like suicide, but retroactively.
Mr Stirling,
We seem to be approaching an unresolvable disagreement. I agree that Denison can cease to exist at any moment. (This is logically possible although it contravenes an empirically discerned conservation law.) But I do not think that, at any moment, he can cease having existed until that moment.
There can be a timeline in which Denison exists until time t1 and a second timeline in which he does not exist until t1 but not, I think, a single timeline in which he both exists until t1 and does not exist until t1.
I am realizing that readers have very different understandings of what is happening with the variable reality in the Time Patrol series. And "Star of the Sea" is not consistent with my "second temporal dimension" understanding.
Paul.
To say that a particular situation exists "now" is to imply that a different situation existed earlier than/before "now."
- the crucial factor to tease out of that sentence is "now" -for who-?
Is there a "now" (and hence a "past") that applies to everyone, or are there only individual world-lines, so that my "now" is not necessarily connected to yours?
Mr Stirling,
I don't know! I'm losing it! - this time, anyway.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Still, it was an interesting discussion, even if I knew/know too little about these matters to attempt contributing anything.
Sean
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