When I discussed the logic of time travel with a Lancaster University Philosophy lecturer, I propounded the following example. A vehicle arrives, appears as if from nowhere. A man steps out of it and prevents a meeting between the man and woman who would have been his parents. The lecturer immediately seized on a key question. He said, "Then memory has a strange status. Normally, when we speak of remembering something, we mean that the remembered events happened but this man apparently remembers an entire previous life that has not happened/will not happen." That is correct, I think. If we did live in that kind of single, discontinuous timeline, then we would have to learn to differentiate between two meanings of "remember."
But this generates a very strange paradox. Before I time travel from 2025 to 1925, I know that the world with which I am familiar in 2025 is real. However, as soon as I arrive in 1925, I do not know whether my "remembered" world of 2025 is a real future or is a future that will have been prevented.
But none of this stuff happens so maybe it does not matter. It is good that The Shield Of Time contains real history and authentic natural descriptions, not just logical paradoxes.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Or possibly, unbeknownst to us, alternate worlds are constantly splitting off from our universe/timeline due to changes that doesn't happen in our world. E.g., Archduke Francis Ferdinand was not assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914.
Ad astra! Sean
I rather like the idea of the infinite multiverse.
Of course, time travel plays hob with the conventional chains of cause and effect. An effect can become a cause and spring from 'nowhere'.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Frankly, I prefer alternate worlds/universes to time traveling. For the reasons you gave.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that human memory is very fallible. People often remember things that did not, in fact, happen.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Too true! I first clearly became aware of that in one of Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries where Lord Peter Wimsey and Charles Parker discussed how unreliable eyewitness testimony could be.
Ad astra! Sean
I studied that in law school. One tactic was to isolate the witnesses from each other; if you didn't, they converged on the memory of the most forceful personality.
Incidentally, one way a superior can tell if he's being blindsided is if all reports of an event are unanimous. That's suspicious in itself.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That makes simple sense, police investigators and intelligence officers questioning witnesses separately--and then comparing their stories.
In Chapter XV of TO TURN THE TIDE Marcus Aurelius and his advisers considered that the reports they got about Artorius and his grad students differing in some details supporting their honesty of their agents.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: ah, yes, I put that in as a mark of respect for Marcus Aurelius and his chosen advisors. MA was -smart-. And wise, too, if you read his "Meditations". He knew human nature to a "t".
FWIW when I witnessed a traffic accident a few years ago, the police got us to write accounts of what happened separately. Presumably to avoid such contamination of the accounts.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: I agree, everything I know about Marcus Aurelius tells me he was not merely highly intelligent but also wise (plenty of fools and monsters were smart). I've read George Long's translation of the MEDITATIONS. Yes, the Emperor had no tom fool illusions about human beings.
I use a bit from MEDITATIONS I.16 to test more recent translations. That section mentions how Marcus' adoptive father Antoninus Pius overcame "all passion for boys." Unfortunately, recent translations waters that down by substituting "joys" or "pleasures." For obvious Politically Correct reasons! (Snorts)
Ad astra! Sean
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