I am currently reading Charles Williams's 1931 novel, in which there is a very early discussion of the notion of "temporal paradoxes" - in particular a "time loop":
Supposing you willed to return a year, and to be again in those exact conditions, interior and exterior, in which you had been a year ago—why then, either you would have the Stone with you or you would not. If you had, you were not the same: if you had not, then how did you return, short of living through the intervening period all over again? Lord Arglay shuddered at the possibility. It would be delightful, he thought, to know again the thrill which had gone through him when he had heard of his appointment to the office he held. But to have to go again through all those years of painful appeals, difficult judgements, distressing decisions, which so often meant unhappiness to the innocent—no. Besides—supposing you did. When you reached again this moment you would again return by virtue of the Stone—and so for ever. An infinite series of repetitions of those same few years, a being compelled to grow no older, a consciousness forbidden to expand or to die.
In his biography of Charles Williams, Grevel Lindop suggests that this was the first clear discussion of temporal paradoxes/ a time loop in any fiction - and before the much better known examples from classic SciFi authors - since the subject was first broached by HG Wells in The Time Machine (1895).
If correct, this is indeed remarkable; in the sense that Charles Williams is very far from being the kind of author that I would have expected to consider and write-about such matters!
The most likely reason is that - like so many creative writers of that and later eras, including some of his later friends among The Inkling - CW had read and pondered the non-fictional work of JW Dunne; whose An Experiment with Time was published in 1927.
As someone brought up on Doctor Who, I have certainly had plenty of enjoyment from the fictional possibilities of imagining temporal paradoxes. But my understanding of the apparent fact that these paradoxes were not noticed or discussed until less than 150 years ago, is evidence that they are an artefact of particular modern scientific models of time - especially the idea that time is a "dimension" (as in the title of Williams's novel) that can be separated from space and mapped like a vector.
By my metaphysical understanding, this is just a model, not reality; and time cannot in principle be separated out in this fashion - without causing paradoxes, i.e. incoherence, i.e. self-contradictions. In other words, the contradictions and incoherence are reductio ad absurdum evidence that our assumptions are wrong.
My understanding is that the fundamental description of reality is of Beings, which are alive, purposive, conscious, self-sustaining etc; and that "time" is just a way of conceptualizing the linear continuity of Beings - that Beings exist dynamically.
So, I enjoy the mental exercise of temporal paradoxes, and these have often provided good plots for stories (albeit with a great deal of "hand-waving" in their explanations) - but these do not trouble me; any more than I am troubled by trying to predict what happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object. Or by such verbal tricks as: "suppose that I am not really me!
Such paradox is a product of abstract and artificially-discrete inbuilt assumptions, and these assumptions are arbitrary, abstract, and untrue.
The prospect of An infinite series of repetitions of those same few years, a being compelled to grow no older, a consciousness forbidden to expand or to die; is superficially spooky. But we are frightening ourselves with our own false conceptualizations.
It may be fun, but it isn't serious.
4 comments:
"By my metaphysical understanding, this is just a model, not reality"
I agree. Modelling time as analogous to a 4th spatial dimension doesn't capture what makes time distinctive from space.
The idea of higher spatial dimensions was considered by the Ancient Greeks and at least one Medieval writer (I think Nicole Oresme) but as far as I know it was just to rule out more than 3. But then starting around 200 years ago, there was an increased interest in more exotic ideas of space, for instance Non-Euclidean geometries, as well as a fourth or higher spatial dimension.
For instance, Edwin Abbot's Flatland (1884), which is about a fourth spatial dimension and then also Wells's novel explicitly refers to time as a fourth dimension.
Mostly, this has been fruitful in mathematics, because the focus is on the ideas themselves. You can study what objects in the 4th dimension would be, whether there are any or not. And some of these ideas have found applications in physics. But I wonder if there was more that could have been realized but wasn't. Whether this interest was associated with some other type of creativity that could have been expressed in a way that would go beyond just making models?
@NLR - I certainly acknowledge that this type of modelling of time has been fruitful in several domains - both in science and fiction.
But I regard it as a case of "Saving the Appearances" - and we need, increasingly, to be clear that this kind of stuff is not really true.
Indeed it cannot be true, because its assumptions leave our most of everything.
This is not directly relevant, but the Tolkien Estate have reprinted King Heidrek's Saga edited and translated by Christopher Tolkien in paperback. It is full of good things - the cursed sword Tyrfing, berserks, a woman warrior, a dialogue with a dead king in his grave mound surrounded by ghostly flames, a riddle contest and etymological studies of names from the distant past. Very much an inspiration for the Appendices of the Lord of the Rings, and those who like that side of JRRT will like it.
@PN - That's interesting. I've read it (in a library copy) and I agree it was a good read.
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