Posts tagged kurt vonnegut
I thought today that in order for you to be able to travel into the future, the future needs to be already written out.
You can think of this in terms of a consumable medium, such as a book. The start of a book is the beginning of time; the end of the book, the end of time. AS time goes on, you get further into the book. The present is whichever page you are currently reading; the past, the pages you have read from the start leading up to the present; and the future, the pages remaining to the end from the present. If you are on page 333 of a 777 page book, skipping to page 555 is traveling to the future. To experience that page of the future, it would have to have been written by the author, otherwise it is just a blank page - if you’re lucky, otherwise it’s not even a page yet.
As a tangent, this spawns three curiosities of interest to me.
First, if I traveled to page 555 from page 333, would I simultaneously learn the events between page 333 and 555?
Second, this analogy does not exactly work, because in this analogy where we are reading the book of time, we are the observers of the events of time, when more likely, we are the characters in that book, with no means to travel to any of the other pages, as our story book is the reality we live in.
And third, this theory of time gives much credence to Kurt Vonnegut’s tralfamadoreans: beings who exist in all times simultaneously, which teach a specific Vonnegut protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, to experience time in a non-linear way where he reads page 333 then page 666 then page 444… etc.
But lastly, there is the obvious contradiction of the multiverse. One particular multiverse theory assumes that there is a universe that spawns from results of each decision, in which time is not linearly scripted like a book, but more like a choose your own adventure book. After page 333 is page 334a, 334b, 334c, etc. and then 334aa, 334,ab, 334ac, etc. etc.
Maybe I’ve just thought up this theory to reaffirm my views. I believe in predeterminism. When I said the analogical book is written by an “author,” that may have made you think of “God.” When people ask if I believe in God, I say “yes” just to be agreeable, but really because I consider “God” to be a sequenced chain of events: time itself. the book. I believe the book exists?
Science has the answers, specifically quantum mechanics (QM). I apparently read QM in a way biased by my views on predeterminism, where QM supports that particles travel as predictable waves, predictable because their wave is already chosen. But oppositely, in QM there is still the prevalence of chaos theory where there is always that 0.01% chance where a predicted expectation goes awry; but in my predeterminism I believe time has already accounted for that.
End rant.
Anyone know if there have been people or dolphins with similar theories?
