8.3.2008
In my previous post
I have started to analyze some examples of time travel fiction, beginning
with elements of their narrative structure. Let's pause briefly at this point
to reflect on the status of such an analysis.
In what sense can we take time travel stories seriously? They are, after
all, basically a modern version of fairy tales. For all the speculation on
whether time travel would be logically consistent and compatible with our
recognized scientific picture of the world, there isn't really a clear
sense just how it would work - most of the discussion starts from a mere
'Suppose it were possible ...'.
Much of what is written about time travel is thus not actually thought
directed at the real world - it is rather about phantasy worlds, the creation
of imaginative writers and thinkers. What makes these fantasies so attractive?
Perhaps it is a certain romanticism which looms in the background and
generates a longing for the unreachable - both the past and the future are
unreachable indeed. Likewise, the idea of being able to change one's earlier
actions has a painful attraction; often enough we are aware only in
retrospect which option we should have taken. The promise of a remedy for
one's past mistakes is alluring, whatever the improbabilities might be.
The more austere writers on time travel take it for what it is (a genre of
fiction) and draw lessons about our ideas, concepts and assumptions from an
analysis of its depicting a markedly different reality. Seeing it this way,
time travel stories function rather like thought experiments. They
describe a world that is not actually so - for what point would there be in
experimenting in pure thought where we could equally carry it out in
actuality? Thought experiments describe arrangements that might be possible,
but cannot actually be experienced; that's why we have to perform them in
thought.
What we can gain from time travel stories, regarding them as thought
experiments, is this: they confront our thinking with hypothetical situations
of an extreme sort to test and reveal its limits; they encourage us to view
things from unusual perspectives; they shake up the deeply ingrained
convictions we have about causes and effects, the order of events, and the
identity of things and persons. That these beliefs are rooted so deeply is
unsurprising and probably a good thing; we have based much of our picture of
the world around us on it, and we certainly wouldn't want them destroyed -
but challenging them might still help us to gain a more deliberate stance
towards many of them.
