|
-
Hivemind social net
-
News
- Features
- Blogs
- Events
Calendar
- Editorials
- Monthly
Zine
- Offworld
Report
- Our Daily
RSS Feed
- Google Toolbar scifi
- Movie/TV
Reviews
> Recent movies
> Movies by year
> Movies by title
- Book
Reviews
> Recent books
> Books by year
> Books by title
- Home
- Worlds
- Biography
- Bibliography
- Appearances
- Reviews
- Blog
- Community
- Press
- Links
Become
an Advertiser
- Web
Site Directory
- Search
the Net
- StephenHunt.net
- WoodenRocket.com
- Check
your E-mail
- Non Sci-Fi
News
|
Paradoxes on seeing the future
01/07/2007 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Longtime member Frank Leisti and I have been discussing the ideas of Philip K. Dick. Two of Dick's stories: Minority Report (adapted into a film of the same name) and The Golden Man (adapted into the film NEXT) have involved people with the ability to see into the future. This is not so simple as it might sound because when you can see a bad future you can prevent it. But then what you saw was not really the future. The real question is at what point the future is set. That is really dependent on your viewpoint. Buy Minority Report in the USA - or Buy Minority Report in the UK  The *real* story "Minority Report" by Dick, inaccurately presented in the film, has three different psychics seeing three different futures because knowing a future supposedly allows one to avert it and bring about a different future. That was really the point of the original written story. The story is largely a lead-up to making that point at the end. Apparently Steven Spielberg liked the lead-up to the end of the story, but not what it was leading up to. He removed its whole point of the story and instead -- disappointingly -- turned it into a hackneyed corruption-in-high- places plot. Dick's ending was better. Spielberg did very well with the body of the beheaded Philip K. Dick story.
My suspicion is that Dick got it wrong. There is at most one real future. Either the future does not yet exist or it does. If it does not exist there is no point in talking about it. You would not be able to see it. If it does exist there would be only one immutable future. But that is not really very cinematically dramatic. In a film you can film three or four alternate possible futures. But if it really is a FUTURE, there cannot be more than one to your universe. Maybe other universes may be in a similar pickle to yours, but they are OTHER universes.
You can tell that I am not really keen on the theory that every time somebody wins a battle another universe forks off from ours. That also makes for a fun story, but I am sceptical of the physics. I don't think that once you have seen the future, if it really is the bona fide future, that you can avert it. If you can avert it, it is not the future, it is only a possibility. But that is not very cinematic.
What is more the power to see that future would seem even to the person possessing it as a sort of omniscience. Consider you were someone who sees one minute into the future as facing two doors, one hiding a lady and one hiding a tiger. (Apologies to Frank Stockton.) It would not occur to you even to go to the tiger- door for your power to stop you. Choosing the tiger-door would simply not be one of your futures. Your only future would be the lady-door. So if you head to one door and do not see yourself going through it, you change doors. You essentially immediately know which one is the lady-door because it is your only possible future.
But let us say you are faced with one lady-door and 10,000 tiger- doors. Would you still immediately know which one was the lady- door? If you see yourself walking through a door at all, it will be the lady-door. I suppose a second possible future is you see yourself standing there in total bewilderment because so many of the doors you can think of to go through you don't actually see yourself going through. The best strategy is to head to one door intending to go through and then do just what you see yourself doing one minute in the future. If you see yourself walking to the next door then do that with an intention to enter it. (Of course you do not have any choice in the matter since you are seeing the real future.)
Eventually you will see yourself entering a door and it will be the lady-door. Shortly thereafter you will do it. You will never even see yourself going through a tiger-door. Let us prove that like a mathematician would. Assume that you have as your vision of the future a scene of you going through a tiger door and you really do not want to do that. That means in one minute you actually would go through a tiger door involuntarily having seen that in your one and only future. But you would never be stupid enough to do that. So we have reached a contradiction and our assumption that you might see yourself going through a tiger door had to be false.
So if you walk around to all the doors intending to walk through the first one you see yourself going through, that has to be the right one. But you have to really intend to go through each door. If you just walk around waiting for inspiration, looking into the future you only see yourself walking around waiting for inspiration.
All this leaves the question of what happens if you try to avoid doing what you see yourself doing in one minute. You will not be able to avoid a future that is already set and seen. The question is what happens if you try. I think the best explanation is that you cannot see the future. That is sending information backward in time and the universe probably does not allow that. I think that people can have the illusion of having seen the future, but I don't believe that it actually can happen. I know people can have the illusion because once I did. It was nothing really dramatic.
I was at summer camp and tried to remember when someone on the volleyball court called to me and waved his arm in a certain way. I seemed to remember it. As I wondered it seemed to happen just as I had seen it. I cannot explain this illusion, but I did have the illusion. Or perhaps it is possible to see the future occasionally, but not to know it is the future. I think the resolution to the paradox is that the situation does not arise because you cannot knowingly see the future.
Mark R Leeper
(c) 2007 Mark R Leeper
|
|
