I completely forgot that I wrote about the first story in this anthology.
I read a few pages of the third story, “Eugene,” before realizing I skipped the one in between. So here we are again. I wasn’t planning to write about this, but I feel I have to since this story is all about a recurring theme that I obsessed over for some time. The non-branching flavor of time travel that is the core common idea of Arrival, Tenet, Dark, Watchmen and so on.
I’ve exhausted the theme and I’m not even going to attempt a recap here, but I can offer a few more comments specifically on the story here. Again, the concept is exactly the same, just “dressed up” differently. What annoyed me the most in the stories like Arrival and Tenet, is that they implicitly embrace an ideology that makes science “magical,” going against the principle of what actually is good science (and good science-fiction, as an extension). Sure, science-fiction is not science, but I really dislike when it advocates openly for magical thinking. It feels like brainwashing propaganda. A complacent celebration of human stupidity.
My hope with Greg Egan, whose reputation I absorbed from the internet would be all about HARD sci-fi, is to find at least a clever perspective. Something I did not consider, and maybe something that could have broken down my certainties about this whole concept. Well, it didn’t happen in any way. But at least he goes a tiny step further. When the potential for this type of time travel is discovered within the story, it’s at least not automatically embraced as an unassailable truth, as it happens in both Arrival and Tenet. But IT IS actually getting tested. That’s what happens within science: you challenge the idea. You try to prove it false, so that the world shows it true.
To my disappointment, the story here doesn’t go further than that. It at least tries the scientific approach, but the result of those tests is just as magical and hand-waved away as in Arrival. The answer is once again a vague “feeling”:
“I couldn’t discipline my reflexes”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“At first, just …clumsy. Uncoordinated. […] I felt like opening it.”
In a similar way, and even more disappointing for me, Egan tries to at least address even the possibility of a purely mechanical experiment, so that human stupidity (of feeling) wouldn’t sully the results. But here’s all we get from that angle:
People have talked about automating the whole process […] but nobody’s ever done it, so perhaps it’s impossible.
Well, at least I appreciate this brutal defeat, rather than simply ignore these counter points. Where Ted Chiang FLEES the important questions, in order to sell his complete bullshit, Egan instead seems at least aware of implications, and he’s trying to tell a different story, despite the unsolvable imperfections at the core.
There are a couple of aspects that salvage this story into a decent one. The first is that he shapes the methodology so that it MAYBE could work. The idea behind this kind of mental manipulation comes from the concept of human consciousness as a secondary epiphenomenon to the activity of the brain. Basically means that your choices in life PRECEDE consciousness. What actually happens is that occluded processes in the brain make a choices, then that choice, already fully done, arrives into consciousness, and then consciousness works hard to “confabulate” a rational reason.
I could – almost always – find a good reason to write what I knew I’d write.
It’s as if consciousness is reverse-engineering a process it has no access to, and just guess an answer. Then fool itself into thinking that itself caused it, appropriating that process, its responsibility, even if in truth consciousness only arrived on the scene after the fact. For Bakker’s readers this is nothing new, and obviously more of an appealing idea to work with, here.
But again, my main criticism on this concept of time travel had nothing to do with consciousness. It has to do with simple physics. Information can’t be abstracted away, it has to be carried by some kind of medium. It needs existing in some kind of physical format. Ink on a page, impulses, binary data sent through light, electric signals. WHATEVER. It needs to be registered onto something. I’m not going all over this again, but when you deal with this type of recursive time travel, the SUBSTANCE that you bring back is substance that gets ADDED. I don’t grasp and pretend of even knowing the mathematical basis of all this, but I know enough to be able to wrap it up consistently.
Philosophy sucks compared to mathematics (and science in general) because it’s very imprecise. But mathematics often fails in front of philosophy because it’s very often PARTIAL (a good example is politics and economic theory, they are hard core mathematical models, but they all fail because they only slice and represent only a part of the world, they shine a spotlight that always loses the whole). The same happens here.
Same as what happens with representation of simple problems like the Liar’s Paradox (“this sentence is false”). Always assumed and analyzed as a PARADOX (contradiction), but only because you selectively removed something from the crime scene: time. The actual “solution” to the Liar’s Paradox, when you face it in its complete form, is that the sentence alternates infinitely between a true and false state. First run is true, second is false, third is true… And so on, as infinite recursion. This system, for obvious reasons, never closes. The recursion is infinite. But you can’t then stupidly COMPRESS it into a contradiction. Since you understand that it infinitely cycles through two incompatible states (true and false) you then hammer it down into a general incompatibility: true and false at the same time. A contradiction.
So again, it’s not that philosophy comes out superior to mathematics, but philosophy helps understanding that the mathematical model you applied to a certain scenario IS INCOMPLETE. Go get a better model.
At least Egan tries giving it a better shape. If in Arrival the signal was essentially visual (like a flash of memory, a richer experience), in this story the message is text. Therefore somewhat more plausible for avoiding contradiction. You would be told what you’re going to say that day, and you maybe would say it accurately, but there’s a lot of wiggle room between a textual description and the actual real image/video. You couldn’t PERFECTLY imitate something you’ve seen, even if you tried. But if it’s just text coming back, then the transition from signal to execution becomes SOMEWHAT more plausible.
The central “morally” problematic conundrum in Arrival is at least mentioned in one paragraph:
A residue of ‘seemingly avoidable’ tragedies remains, though, and the people who know that they’re going to be involved react in different ways: some swallow their fate cheerfully; some seek comfort (or anaesthesia) […]
There’s a note to this section I’ve scribbled that reads: filtering and grouping. I sometime wrote obscure stuff that is meaningful to me at that moment, only to later leave me in frustration when I can’t figure it out anymore. Thankfully this time I remember. It’s again fusing different layers together. If there’s future knowledge about some person dying in a car accident, then this knowledge, adhering to the initial concept, has to be precise. Down to the physical particles of the world. Physics. It’s all written down precisely. The ‘filtering and grouping’ in my note indicate that our recollection or description of an historical event, isn’t THE EVENT. But only a selective filtering and grouping of parts of reality that we deemed important. It’s a slice of time and events that have been CULLED of most of their details. “A person died”, sure, it happened. It was the sensible part of that event, but the circumstances are all written in, time and physics. The MENTAL STATE, atoms in the brain, the chemistry is ALSO part of this “picture.” Nailed down. So, the idea of “breaking a leg” and “breaking a leg while under anaesthesia” AREN’T the SAME event (“I broke a leg”). They can be in the vagueness and imprecision of human representation, or in the abstraction of human language (“that happened”), but they aren’t within the context of time travel that leaves no space for variations. In Arrival, and I assume in Tenet too, this is a giant unanswered and even unacknowledged problem. Here instead the idea is that reactions to future knowledge are already “embedded” in the fabric (the future HAS affected and modified the past, over and over again). Leading to the idea of a fully maximized and optimized world (same as the cycle of true/false in Liar’s Paradox, but we already know that this type of loop never reaches a “maximum”). An idea I already examined in the past and still doesn’t work, but that is at least less brittle compared to Arrival and Tenet.
Even the idea of human brain as a magical black box is addressed a questioned properly:
Knowing the future doesn’t mean we’ve been subtracted out of the equations that shape it. […] If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? […] Some mystical intervention called the soul… but then what, precisely, would govern its behavior.
There are no answers here (the concept is flawed), but at least there are QUESTIONS. Saying “the soul did it” isn’t an answer, it’s just a goalpost being moved. Just another screen hiding the answer.
Though there’s a passage that gave me the impression Egan didn’t quite “get it”:
The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our souls;
Correct: uncertainty. Knowledge of the future would erase uncertainty. And if the system is perfectly known, then human action is just another mechanisms embedded within. Fully mapped.
by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human. To them, ordinary people are literally the walking dead: meat puppets, zombies.
NO. This here is the same error I explained above about the Liar’s Paradox and how it gets wrongly abstracted (so losing detail, sliced) and then compressed and hammered down. From an alternation of true/false, into a superimposition of both, true/false AT THE SAME TIME. The same here because it’s a compression of implicit and explicit patterns. Tho I guess this needs a more eloquent explanation, of what I mean…
No one, absolutely NO ONE ever gets to decide between right or wrong. This is not a philosophical concept, only a practical one. Every single human being to ever exist has ONLY been able to choose right. “Wrong” is not an option. It’s not part of free will, and it’s been one giant, widespread silly misconception. If you are omniscient and were to navigate a system fully known to you, then you would automatically lose “free will,” because that omniscience compels you to always find the perfect optimized path matching whatever goal or desire you have. Like Bakker’s “Shortest Path.” As a good universal principle: omniscience precludes free will. This also causes very common dilemmas about omniscience and omnipotence. For example the typical “Could God create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?” Again, the “pattern” at the core of this all, is once again recursion (as will be repeated here below).
Knowing everything means you know what you want, why you want it, and the shortest path, given a system. Even if you try some path of avoidance, then the avoidance IS WHAT YOU WANT. For reasons that need to exist, even if you just want to contradict yourself. The non optimized path you deliberately decide to take is the OPTIMIZED path of your desire for following a non optimized path. You can’t escape this labyrinth. Omniscience is always a trap you can’t escape from. In a very similar way, back to the quote above, “right or wrong” are contingencies of reality that YOU FIND OUT. The reason you HAVE CHOICE is because you don’t fucking know if what you’re about to do is “right or wrong.” You find out after the fact. Do you bring the umbrella? Is it going to rain? You have a choice BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW. If you knew (akin to omniscience), then you’d bring the umbrella. Because you’d know that it is going to rain. You can’t be “stupid” about it.
Even when you try fighting the system, you’re still being played. Because you’re only thinking it’s the right thing to do. So you TRY doing the WRONG thing, because you think doing the wrong thing is THE RIGHT THING TO DO. You just can’t escape this labyrinth.
So again, the core of the concept that ENABLES free will is not choice between right or wrong. You are always compelled to do what’s right, or what seems right in that moment, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (including laziness). Free will is about choice due to outcomes being hidden away, by lack of information, and so drowned deep in UNCERTAINTY. You have free will because you don’t know shit, therefore you have to guess. And only later you find out what was the correct choice, and maybe regret a mistake. The MORE you know, the LESS choice you have.
All this of course radically destroys all concepts of merit and self determination. But it’s just how the world works, and what human beings are. No one chooses wrong. No one chooses evil. Everyone tries doing the right thing, at all times, set by circumstance and the narrow point of view that makes limited information. You can once again abstract this with misapplication of language. You can say “I would have done differently compared to him,” but your circumstances are not his. You information is not his information. You’ve culled the data. You’ve created yet another perspective. A slice, partial. All whole systems are wholesome, because there’s no correct conceptualization of “wrong.” Nothing is ever wrong, same as contradictions can’t actually happen in the real world. It’s a perceptival abstraction, a culling, that makes things appear as wrong. Language. Otherwise things are just things. There is no morality embedded in the fabric of the world.
The meaning of all this is that free will is not some precious additional power. But a loss. Free will appears as a loss of information. A loss of knowledge. You are free (from the strictures of the system) because you lose the ability to see the chains. Those chains cease to exist, so you become free. And the IMPOSITION of this blindness FORCES the freedom of moving through the world as if independent. Because again you are blind to the force that moves you. So, if you can’t see the force that moves you how can you move other than choosing how to move on your own? There’s nothing else in sight that can help you.
I guess in the end Greg Egan did nothing to address and solve the central dilemma, but at least didn’t completely ignore it. But more importantly, there’s a story to tell here. I’m not going to spoiler it here, it’s a story just 18 pages long, actually quite rich of ideas. As you approach its conclusion you expect that something is going to challenge the status quo, as the story seems to drive there, a sort of act of rebellion. But the twist is completely different. It stops being a story about time travel to become a story about what humanity truly is.
This type of time-travel doesn’t work, yet appears endlessly fascinating simply because it’s built akin one of Dennet’s “intuition pumps.” Whereas classic time travel is a loop that split into new branches every time it comes back, this other “solid” type of time travel is fully built on recursion. The reason why it TRIPS our brains is because, think about it… What is the very first device conceptually and fundamentally built on recursion? The brain. Consciousness. Your own brain tries to conceptualize and think itself. I wrote about this so many times: the thinking you (subject) observing yourself as an (object) of observation. Creating the split in two subject/object (a delusion, because the split doesn’t truly “exist”, but is only perceived). The recursion, the “strange loops” in Hofstadter works. The same loops that are then inappropriately generalized through language into paradoxes. Language that is imprecise and inaccurate, a map that is not the territory, but only a parallel of perception. Representation. In this case, events recollected, versus events as they actually happened in their physical form. The idea that you can cull reality (through perception) without consequences. (and so the idea you can cull information through language, and create a paradox, or abstract away information in a time travel story so that when time loops back that information is either “intangible”, or already pre-embedded, culling away the notion of the recursion…) In the end, all bad “translations” between different human languages. Philosophy and mathematics, not “wrong” in themselves, but when moving concepts back and forth, stacking translation errors.
If in Arrival it was the “power of love” that lead to the avoidance of contradictions (abstracting away the moments of happiness and sadness in life, then hammering them down into a single whole, declaring, “that’s my life, I accept it”, so why don’t you ask that same question to an immigrant who drowned young while trying to survive, as an example, and see if they answer you in the same guise), here instead it’s more of a general compulsion (as seen above), an inner desire that feels itself already perfectly aligned with the desire “of the world.” So… TEST IT ON ME. YOU CAN’T COMPEL ME. I AM DESTRUCTION. I LIVE VISCERALLY TO PROVE THIS WRONG. And… see… someone with a truthful scientific mind like me just couldn’t exist in that world. The world itself has to conspire against yet another “tabu.” Avoidance. Magic.
I guess science-fiction writers aren’t necessarily good philosophers.
P.S.
As written in the book, the story here was originally published in January 1992. Ted Chiang story, according to the wikipedia, first appeared in 1998. There’s a very good chance that Egan didn’t invent the concept (it appears in Watchmen, at least, but it’s not as much of a close call as it is between Egan and Chiang). The other relevant story from Ted Chiang is from 2005, you can read the summary from the wikipedia, I read the full form and it’s not much longer. If it sounds completely stupid it’s because it is. I’m still in awe of how he could write and publish it…
Actually, I’ve now read again that story from 2005 (What’s Expected of Us), and the device there is perfectly coherent with the story by Greg Egan. So we now have both the context and the test. It’s disguised as a problem related to free will, but it has nothing to do with free will. It’s about causality. And it’s again proven wrong because it perfectly reproduces the Liar’s Paradox, both its erroneous representation (contradiction) and its solution (endless recursion, alternation of two states). One one hand you have the classic interpretation of time travel, where each loop back creates a new timeline, so a new “branch”, and, if you keep the recursion going, infinite timelines. On the other hand the “culling” and misrepresentation of the problem (the translation error), where information going back is added to one single loop, that is always the same loop. Therefore a paradoxical overlap, a contradiction.
