Post by Padre Romero on May 12, 2007 17:45:19 GMT -5
bluetrolls said:
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.