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Post by Hec Scrivener on May 12, 2007 0:15:53 GMT -5
Also, I'm pretty sure "traveller" only has one 'l'. Only in America. I've chosen to maintain HG's original British spelling for his title. You'll note that I speak of a "traveler" when it's uncapitalized. Quick to dismiss, quick to dismiss. The crux of the problem is that he has limited abilities to store and process information. Assuming he is human, he only has the human brain and human senses. Which are taylored for a short live span, not for sifting through billions of years of data. Padre touches the topic, but does not realize its significance: "I'm certain he's got a video camera that records his voyage, and a post-it note on the interior of the machine that says "Hey, you're the new me, watch the damn videos"." Well, watching the videos might take a damn looong time. By the time the poor sap is done with all of them, he already forgot most of what he saw. But even an all-powerfull AI has this crucial limitation. It can't store arbitrarily large quantities of data, and, more limiting, can't process them fast enough. Please realize that processing information must happen in some real time, because flipping bits fundamentally depends on the arrow of time. Thus the amount of operational knowledge our timetraveler has is just a little patch in the vastity of the universe. Yeah, he'll know more than any given human, but he'll know little at the universe scale. Does he need infinite information and processing power?
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Post by blue tigers on May 12, 2007 2:01:31 GMT -5
You want him to manipulate the causality chains. I give you chaos theory. Good luck!
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Post by Hec Scrivener on May 12, 2007 11:40:00 GMT -5
I give him precise instructions from his future self. And they will be precise enough, because even if he has to do some interpretation, or choose whether he should kill the rat at 9:01:45 or 9:01:47, he will act exactly the same way he did the "first time around," because this is the first time around.
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Post by danr on May 12, 2007 11:43:46 GMT -5
I give him precise instructions from his future self. And they will be precise enough, because even if he has to do some interpretation, or choose whether he should kill the rat at 9:01:45 or 9:01:47, he will act exactly the same way he did the "first time around," because this is the first time around. Why would he write a note to himself if he could simply go back there and do whatever S*** he is supposed to do?
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Post by Hec Scrivener on May 12, 2007 11:52:06 GMT -5
Because he just did it.
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Post by blue tigers on May 12, 2007 11:55:53 GMT -5
I give him precise instructions from his future self. And they will be precise enough, because even if he has to do some interpretation, or choose whether he should kill the rat at 9:01:45 or 9:01:47, he will act exactly the same way he did the "first time around," because this is the first time around. You just described an immutable laplacian 4d space. There is nothing in this formulation that allows the conscious manipulation of causality chains. In other words, there is no mapping from 4d-universe A where the traveler is a mortal being to a 4d-universe B where the traveler finds the immortality elixir, or the other way around.
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Post by Hec Scrivener on May 12, 2007 12:00:45 GMT -5
They're not different universes. There's only one universe. That's kind of the point.
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Post by danr on May 12, 2007 12:06:46 GMT -5
They're not different universes. There's only one universe. That's kind of the point. No. If it's only one universe, the guy wouldn't need to write to himself to do this thing in the past because he would have already done it / would already know how to do it / stuff. Or at least that's what I suppose
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Post by Padre Romero on May 12, 2007 16:04:55 GMT -5
They're not different universes. There's only one universe. That's kind of the point. No. If it's only one universe, the guy wouldn't need to write to himself to do this thing in the past because he would have already done it / would already know how to do it / stuff. Or at least that's what I suppose Okay, the problem a lot of you have is that you've read too much of the new science fiction and not enough of the old. In "The Time Machine" it's pretty obvious that space and time are absolute, and there's probably no universe forking (But since the time traveller doesn't actually change anything, it's tough to say...) I think to discuss HG's powers, we need to keep him within the relm of "The Time Machine", since that's obviously the kind of machine he's drawing his powers from. As for "chaos theory": You get a lot of this when dealing with time travel. By saying that HG cannot hope to bring about any desired destiny, you've run into a bigger problem: By saying the human mind cannot grasp the infinite causality chains that result from everyday actions, you're denying us something improtant...if the will is unable to select its own fate and bring it about, then free will does not exist (Or at least, it's not useful for anything, since we can never be certain with ANY degree of certainty that what we will will occur). Now, you may be fine with the time traveller not being the master of his own fate...but if he isn't, neither are we. Course, a lotta folks are fine with that (me included 1/3 of the time) On grounds of knowledge or power, I think the time traveller is god, or at least as close to god as the human mind can fathom. Ethically speaking though, it's hard to say: It really depends on which ethical system you subscribe to. Some have serious problems with the time traveller/god.
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Post by blue tigers on May 12, 2007 16:40:38 GMT -5
The old free will cop out. The favourite of religionists of all time. Which just happens to be a moot point for any being in an universe with a well defined arrow of time. Whether such being has free will or not is undistinguishable from within the said universe. There is no experiment that can be conduced in said universe that can prove or disprove the free will hypothesis. Only by arbitrarily postulating phenomenons outside of the time arrow you end up with the dilema of free will. This kind of circular reasonement has a name, reductio ad absurdum. For 2500 years logicians have picked the same solution to the dilema: the starting hypothesis it false.
By the way, HGW work is a strong social commentary using SF as a background. Seek wisdom in the SF part of if at your own peril.
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Post by Padre Romero on May 12, 2007 17:45:19 GMT -5
The old free will cop out. The favourite of religionists of all time. Which just happens to be a moot point for any being in an universe with a well defined arrow of time. Whether such being has free will or not is undistinguishable from within the said universe. There is no experiment that can be conduced in said universe that can prove or disprove the free will hypothesis. Only by arbitrarily postulating phenomenons outside of the time arrow you end up with the dilema of free will. This kind of circular reasonement has a name, reductio ad absurdum. For 2500 years logicians have picked the same solution to the dilema: the starting hypothesis it false. By the way, HGW work is a strong social commentary using SF as a background. Seek wisdom in the SF part of if at your own peril. It's not a cop out, I think you just read it wrong. wether the time traveller HAS free will or not is beside the point, what matters is, is it useful: Your problem with the time traveller seems to be that since he can only carry a finite amount of information around with him at any time, there is no way he can shape the fate of the universe, because he has literally an infinite number of variables to consider. However this means he's no different than us, We too are adrift in an ocean of probability and chance, it's just somewhat smaller (still imperceptably enormous). If WE can set down a course of action and follow through with it (dispite the chaotic nature of reality) so can he. It may be harder to do on a literally exponential scale, but that doesn't mean it can't be done...and if there is the merest sliver of a possibilty, the time traveller possesses the means to figure out how. I realize what Wells was trying to do, now I'm off to point out what HEC'S Trying to do. By grounding the time traveller in a wellsian perception of time, we don't have to deal with temporal paradoxes, chaos theory, countless branching dimensions of space and time, or a lot of the hairy problems people have proposed.
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Post by Hec Scrivener on May 12, 2007 19:31:24 GMT -5
Plus it makes more sense; forking and otherwise mutable timelines require a fifth dimension at right angles to time - call it "super-time" - along which the whole timeline moves. Only then can we speak coherently about what a timeline looks like "before" or "after" a time traveler has messed with it.
Of course, an immutable timeline does do nasty things to free will. Why can't HG kill his grandfather? Because he did not/will not choose to. This is a strange issue, as it doesn't seem difficult for us to choose differently than we did "the first time around" given foreknowledge of our actions. In the case of the grandfather, perhaps HG is restrained out of fear. But there's a purer test of free will that he could do: imagine he receives a note from himself that says "Don't send yourself this note!" How could the universe conspire to get him to send that note when he has resolved not to? And if he doesn't, where did that note come from? (Though I suppose this is no more puzzling a question than where any of his other information came from.) A forking timeline may, after all, be unavoidable - and, in a score for libertarianism, it seems to be made unavoidable because of free will.
But I digress. I think Padre's argument might better be stated in terms of personal agency than free will. Whether or not HG can freely choose to cause things, he can still cause things.
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Post by blue tigers on May 12, 2007 19:52:35 GMT -5
However this means he's no different than us, We too are adrift in an ocean of probability and chance, it's just somewhat smaller (still imperceptably enormous). If WE can set down a course of action and follow through with it (dispite the chaotic nature of reality) so can he. It may be harder to do on a literally exponential scale, but that doesn't mean it can't be done...and if there is the merest sliver of a possibilty, the time traveller possesses the means to figure out how. Our ability fo follow a course of action is drastically limited. We don't usually realize it because we filter-out wild goals as impractical at a very early stage. That, and winner selective syndrome. We are here because we won. But lots and lots of our siblings are not here because they lost. That's how probability-based systems work. The time traveller may win, but the odds are waaaay against him. Heck, having him win the immensely larger game of 'twiddle with the universe' seems just as probable as having spontaneous materialization of said notes
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Post by Hec Scrivener on May 12, 2007 20:03:06 GMT -5
So what will happen when he tries? What will happen when he sends himself a note that says "Don't send yourself this note!"?
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Post by Padre Romero on May 12, 2007 20:08:23 GMT -5
So what will happen when he tries? What will happen when he sends himself a note that says "Don't send yourself this note!"? Easy: He fails to get the note. (Another "Traveller" adresses a similar problem at one point...) It occurs to me that this situation looks more and more similar to groundhog day by the minute (and if you haven't seen that movie...SEE IT) ...in fact, even though Phil Conners is MORE limited than the time traveller, he's still able to make the argument that he's god (At least "A God...not THE god")
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