Closing Down On John C. Wright's Time Travel Article

For a time travel problem on Comics Appreciation, see here.

It has been great but we are nearly finished.

Wright quotes, apparently uncritically, the absurd idea in a Back To The Future film that a man whose birth has been prevented would fade out of existence but he does go on to say that this is absurd. If your birth is prevented, then you do not exist and fade out. You do not exist. I have yet to arrive home and find a teenage girl who fades out of existence, saying: "I am the daughter that you would have had if you had not successfully practiced contraception sixteen years ago." Exactly the same logic - consistency between propositions - applies to time travel scenarios as to non-time-travel scenarios.

I have been told that Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer is a good time travel novel but have not read it so I looked forward to reading Wright's plot summary. However, having read that summary, I now think that the novel sounds far too complicated and potentially contradictory to be interesting to read. I can be persuaded otherwise, of course, but, for the time being, Dinosaur Beach is not on my reading list.

Time Travel Is Sometimes Very Annoying... IV

See the previous post here.

In the Fritz Leiber story, if the man trying to prevent his own future murder keeps revisiting the events immediately preceding the murder, then surely he will run into and interfere with his younger and older selves?

Wright recommends David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself. I do not:

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold expounds a successive timelines scenario but immediately contradicts it in practice. Gerrold’s scenario: Moving either backwards or forwards in time takes a time traveler into a second timeline identical with the first except for any changes made by the time traveler, the first such change being his arrival. He leaves timeline 1 forever. If he continues to travel, then timeline 3 incorporates his arrival from timeline 2 and duplicates his arrival in timeline 2 unless this duplication is prevented by the time traveler after arriving in timeline 3, e.g., if he had arrived in timeline 2 during World War II but, then, in timeline 3, prevented World War II, then this would also prevent his arrival in the 1939-1945 period in timeline 3.

After expounding this scenario, Gerrold then describes the following transaction: the time traveler travels a short distance into the future, confers with his future self, then returns to the present to make use of his knowledge from the future. This could happen in a single timeline but, in Gerrold’s scenario, the transaction should be as follows:

the time traveller disappears forever from timeline 1;
no future self greets him in timeline 2;
he returns to the present in timeline 3;
later in timeline 3, he greets that timeline’s duplicate of his past self who had originally arrived in timeline 2;
that duplicate returns to the present in timeline 4 and there meets the duplicate of the self who had returned to the present in timeline 3.

Thus, by pulling this stunt, the time traveler should have unintentionally duplicated himself, although Gerrold does not realize this.
-copied from here.

Time Travel Is Sometimes Very Annoying... III

See John C. Wright's article, here.

In "Try to Change the Past" by Fritz Leiber, a man prevents his future self from being shot in the forehead only to see that future self killed by a micrometeorite puncturing his forehead exactly when the bullet would have. Poul Anderson presents this idea of inertia of events in "Time Patrol" but not on that unlikely a basis. In the Time Patrol universe, that man would have saved his future self. I have read little of Leiber's Time War series and have not liked the little that I have read. Too many ideas unrelated to time travel, and also insufficiently explained, are introduced. The time travel happens almost off-stage and the causality violations are not described coherently. I think that the narrator suddenly has a scar that she didn't have before (or something like that) but I am not about to try to dig out The Big Time to check the text.

Another Ad For Another Blog

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation:

I am continuing to read and discuss John C. Wright's article on time travel. See here. My second post on this topic refers to Alfred Bester, Charles Dickens and Superman but not to Poul Anderson so that post will remain on the Logic of Time Travel blog whereas its predecessor will probably be copied here since the page view count continues to indicate that more people read this blog than that one. I value discussions of time, logic, free will, Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and Anderson's There Will Be Time and want to share them as widely as possible.

In Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry sees his future wife draw a picture and tells her not to sign it because he has seen it unsigned in the future. See signs it. When he returns to the future, he looks for the picture on the wall and it is not there. It has fallen behind the fridge. When he retrieves it, it is unsigned. She had trimmed the signature off because she did not want to risk Henry returning to a future other than the one he remembered. In this novel, there seems to be only a single consistent timeline but the characters want to make sure of that.

My comment would be: in a single consistent timeline, logic dictates that, if the artist were the sort of person who would not have trimmed off the signature, then Henry would have seen her draw the picture and would not have told her not to sign it because he would remember having seen it signed in the future. This has taken us away from Poul Anderson but it remains relevant to the kind of time travel in his There Will Be Time.

Time Travel Is Sometimes Very Annoying But Not Always II

I am continuing to read John C. Wright's article on time travel. See here.

Wright refers to "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester, which I have not read. If you change the past, then you become insubstantial and unable to change anything. Why?

Wright writes:

"...you can change the past, but if you do, the only thing you can do is eliminate yourself."

I find this contradictory. If you can change the past, then you do more that eliminate yourself. Also, to become insubstantial is not to be eliminated.

There was an idea that, from the moment of arriving in the past, you would be an insubstantial observer as in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol or in Superman's first Kryptonite story - although not in subsequent Superman stories. However, insubstantial viewing of the past is not time travel.

Time Travel Is Sometimes Very Annoying But Not Always

See "Time Travel is Always Annoying" by John C. Wright, here.

I will try to summarize:

how can time travel coexist with the appearances both of free will and of cause and effect?;

in Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," free will is an illusion;

free will seems to exist when you are acting but is seen not to exist when a later you travels to the time of your action;

when you try to change an earlier event, you will find that you have a good reason not to;

this is unsatisfactory because the story stars a robot programmed to think that he has free will although he does not;

each scene makes sense but the whole picture does not;

the character has to be drunk, forgetful, mistaken, ignorant of crucial facts or provided with an artificial reason why he does not want to change the past;

Wilson does not notice that the other guys whom he meets have the same face;

in any such story, the main character makes no decisions and is a passive observer.

I disagree. By "free will," I understand only absence of constraint. "Free will" in this sense is compatible with causal determination of all our decisions and thus of our subsequent actions. Indeed, how else can decisions and actions be explained? Maybe by an uncaused random neuronic interaction, like a cerebral quantum fluctuation? OK. But we do not choose to have one interaction/fluctuation rather than another occur inside our brains. We have no more control over this than we do of any of the external and internal causes that affect our mental processes. So we are "free" only to the extent that we are not constrained. When we make moral or legal judgments about past actions, our own or others', we think of ourselves as agents who could have acted otherwise for a practical reason: we want to influence future actions. On a past occasion, I was tempted, so I "sinned"/offended. On a future occasion, I will again be tempted but this time I will also fear punishment/disapproval so I will be less likely to offend.

A time traveler is just as free or unfree as anyone else. He cannot prevent from occurring an event that does in fact occur but nor can anyone else. Wilson decides to change the course of a remembered conversation by reciting a nursery rhyme but cannot, in the stress of the moment, remember a single nursery rhyme so he instead says something that is appropriate at that stage of the conversation and we can confirm by turning back a few pages that that is precisely what was said at that stage of the conversation.

Wilson I is tired and drunk and thinks that he recognizes Wilson II but cannot place him. Wilson II recognizes Wilsons I and III. None of them recognizes Wilson IV because he is older and bearded  with an air of authority. When he finds that he has good reason not to change past events, then Wilson freely chooses not to change past events.

In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, Jack Havig changes not known events but their significance. Thus, the Eyrie recruits Havig and Boris in Jerusalem. When Havig breaks from the Eyrie and organizes against it, he sends Boris to Jerusalem to infiltrate the Eyrie. Havig and his colleagues use their time travel to facilitate the beginnings of a dynamic civilization and to kick-start interstellar travel, not just to manipulate a static society on Earth. Their story moves outward, not just round in its groove.

John C. Wright On Time Travel

http://www.scifiwright.com/2019/05/time-travel-is-always-annoying/#more-23360, here.