posted
I was thinking about paradoxes of time travel recently, and I came up with the following scenario. And "scenario" is all it is--I don't claim that it's some great metaphysical question that holds a key to understanding the nature of time or paradox or anything else. There's nothing particularly clever or insightful or, I'm sure, even original about it. Nevertheless, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to toss it out and see if it generates any discussion.
Here it is:
A composer, whom we can call Mr. A, publishes a brilliant piece of music, which gains him all manner of accolades, bringing him fame and fortune beyond his wildest dreams.
Another man, an obscure, would-be composer, whom we can call Mr. B, is jealous of Mr. A's success and is painfully aware of the fact that he himself is a mediocre composer and does not have the talent to ever be more. So he takes a copy of Mr. A's score, travels back in time fifty years, and publishes it under his own name.
But fifty years earlier, the brilliance of the music is not recognized. It is too far ahead of its time, and it goes completely ignored. In despair, Mr. B drinks himself into oblivion and dies within a short time of the music's publication.
Time passes. Mr. A publishes the music. Eventually an archivist realizes he's encountered it before. He combs through his archives and comes across a copy of the music, published fifty years before. He goes public with the information. Confronted with the evidence, Mr. A confesses that he did not, in fact, compose it himself. He knows that he is a mediocre composer, and when he happened to come across this obscure piece of music by an unknown composer fifty years dead, he recognized its brilliance and had it published under his own name.
So, where did the music come from?
Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Mr A. It's a loop, but I suppose the loop has to begin somewhere. If A hadn't first published the music, B would never have become jealous. Even after B took it back in time, B still wasn't/isn't the original composer (regardless of what Mr. A believes). Since one of the two has to be the composer, and it isn't B, it has to be A.
--j_k's head hurts
[ January 06, 2007, 09:09 PM: Message edited by: James Tiberius Kirk ]
Posts: 3617 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Verily! I was just thinking about you the other day, and wondering where you were off to. How've you been?
I've been good. I know this last absence was even longer than usual, but ultimately I couldn't stay away. I swear I never make a conscious decision to leave Hatrack--I miss a few days and lose track of threads, and have other ways to kill my evenings, and before I know it time has passed. I'm almost afraid to look at how long it's been since my last visit. At any rate, at least I can say that nothing bad has happened, and though I've been busy with things that aren't ultimately very important, I have at least been having a good time.
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posted
The composer is A1. When B1 went back in time, he created a separate time line which led to the creation of a universe in which A2 lives, who didn't write the music but instead took it from an earlier publication.
I mean, at least that's how MY time machine works. Posts: 3852 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
I like Terry Pratchett's riff on "stories" -- they just are "out there" and need to be told. Same thing with music. Pachelbel's Canon in D was really just floating around waiting to be written by someone. Happened to be Pachelbel...this time.
In a world riding on the back of a giant turtle, supported by four giant elephants...etc., someone else will write it.
And the deal with time traveling crappy composers is that what would really happen in the paradoxical situation is that Composer A would stay just as brilliant and he'd write something else, even more innovative, because he'd be building on the example of the piece that he'd already written.
All time travel anachronisms really do is make certain things happen earlier in the timeline. And then you just get an accelerated timeline for awhile after. There'd be no external objective observer to note the effect.
Posts: 300 | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted
I guess since Mr. B traveled back in time and would have presumably encountered and influenced other people's lives an alternate of the future he came from would have been created as stated above and therefore in one universe Mr. A has the recognition and in another Mr. B has the recognition so it pretty much sucks to be Mr. B in any of them and Mr. A in just one of them. So if I were to base my conclusion on the better of the lives in the total number of known universes I would have to say that Mr. A really created the piece of music because at least in one of those universes everything is the way that it is supposed to be.
Well, at least that's how it makes sense in my head.
Posts: 871 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
I haven't read any of his books which ones are you talking about? I have only heard of the Hitchhikers Guide and that's cause of the movie.
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posted
Okay, so before I start worrying that I've inadvertently ripped off Douglas Adams, what did he say about it and where did he say it?
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posted
They might be referring to this character (pasted from the Wikipedia entry on minor character's in the guide)
quote: Lallafa was an ancient poet who lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. His home inspired him to write a poetic opus known as The Songs of the Long Land on pages made of dried habra leaves. His poems were discovered years after Lallafa's death, and news of them quickly spread. For centuries, the poems gave inspiration and illumination to many who would otherwise be much more unhappy, and for this they are ususally considered around the Galaxy to be the greatest poetic works in existence. This is remarkable because Lallafa wrote his poems without the aid of education or correction fluid.
The latter fact attracted the attention of some correction fluid manufacturers from the Mancunian nebula. The manufacturers worked out that if they could get Lallafa to use their fluids in a variety of leafy colours in the course of his work, their companies would be as successful as the poems themselves. And so, they traveled back in time and beat Lallafa until he went along with their plan. The plan succeeded, Lallafa became extremely rich, and spent so much time on chat shows that he never got around to actually writing The Songs. This was solved by each week, in the past, giving Lallafa a copy of his poems, from the present, and having him write his poems again for the first time. But on the condition that he make the odd mistake and use the correction fluid. ... Lallafa appears in Life, the Universe and Everything and Fit the Fifteenth of The Tertiary Phase.
posted
I guess it depends on whose rules of time travel you follow. Since no one knows for certain what will happen, I guess each variant is as equally likely as any other.
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I misread the thread title as "The computer paradox". I thought this thread would be about Solow's observation.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Time travel can't make sense. But if you resolve the grandfather paradox so that the future can cause the past, then since the past can cause the future, you can have loops like this. Therefore things can spring into existence that never were before.
You can also have things pop into existence that never were in the future ("were in the future"!), because they eliminated their home timeline by appear in their own past.
Causality's out the window.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
I was actually thinking of the end of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency when all of a sudden this guy named Bach published a bunch of music that didn't exist before. I think it was actually the time traveling professor who did it, and he took the music from the alien spaceship, so it had a clear origin. Not really that much like your idea.
I'm also going to vote for the theory that says A1 wrote it, B1 took it back in time, and A2 ripped it off. Same guy, different time line.
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posted
Jasper Fforde does a version of this, too. In his universe, the big question is who wrote Shakespeare's plays.
Posts: 2849 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Eaquae Legit: Jasper Fforde does a version of this, too. In his universe, the big question is who wrote Shakespeare's plays.
I did. Then Shakespeare comes back to the future with Doc Brown and steals all my material. The hack couldn't even write a sonnet until I showed him how it was done.
I'm still waiting for the royalties on the sale of my plays. With interest, I'd bet that I'm up to 1 gagillion dollars at this point.
Posts: 413 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Verily the Younger: I'm almost afraid to look at how long it's been since my last visit.
About 11 months.
*cough cough* Wow, that's . . . I had no idea. From my vantage point in my ship, it's only been a couple of weeks! Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote: Confronted with the evidence, Mr. A confesses that he did not, in fact, compose it himself. He knows that he is a mediocre composer, and when he happened to come across this obscure piece of music by an unknown composer fifty years dead, he recognized its brilliance and had it published under his own name.
This, IMO, is your loophole. Mr. A, the brilliant composer that he is, would be aware that he did not steal the music from anyone else... the scenario opened with him composing something new and exciting. It would not be nearly the same experience, fifty years later, if Mr. A were to simply copy notes down on to a page, and call them his own.
Even in a crazy coincidence, where the music ends up being composed twice, Mr. A would not confess his theft of Mr. B's alleged piece, as it would simply not be true. The music still came from him.
I don't really see a way to get confused about its origin.
Posts: 7877 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
There is a short story by J.L. Borges called "Pierre Menard, the real author of the Quioxte" (or something like that)
The thing is this: The A composition, even though it's a copy, is different. The simple act of copying is, itself, original. And even if it were possible that that music sound the same to contemporary audiences, it would be different because of the intentions of the composer/plagarist. His efforts, his dilemmas, his angst, his hypocrisy - they all inform the performance and the reception....there is no paradox, only artistry!
MV, the real author Paradise Lost.
Posts: 575 | Registered: Jan 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Raia: Even in a crazy coincidence, where the music ends up being composed twice, Mr. A would not confess his theft of Mr. B's alleged piece, as it would simply not be true. The music still came from him.
I'm not sure where you're getting this from. The whole point is that it didn't come from Mr. A. He didn't compose it; he found it in an archive somewhere with Mr. B's name on it and foolishly assumed that because it was virtually unknown, he could get away with putting his own name on it.
Mr. A isn't a brilliant composer; he's a mediocre composer. The scenario may have opened with his publishing--I didn't say composing--a brilliant piece. But chronologically, as far as the timeline is concerned, the first time the piece appeared was when Mr. B appeared with it in his hands and had it published. Then it sat around unnoticed for fifty years, at which point Mr. A found it, put his own name on it, and re-published it. By the time Mr. A had anything to do with the piece, it had already existed for fifty years and had already been published. Mr. A never displays any brilliance; only stupidity at thinking he'd get away with plagiarism.
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posted
See, I understand what you are saying. You are saying that Mr. A didn't come up with the music that Mr. B stole- instead, Mr. A merely saw the music in the Archive, that Mr. B paradoxially put in there.
The question I have is, is what Mr. B stole from Mr. A the original sheet of music that the previous Mr. B put in the archives, or a copy of the sheet of music printed from the Archives?
The reason I ask is if there is only one physical existance of the sheet of music that is never "restored" or such, your paradox has the plausibility of an end. Over time, the sheet of music would tether and tear and disintegrate. If, on the other hand, Mr. A merely prints a copy of what Mr. B puts in there, then thats a problem averted.
My own type of paradox in the situation is different. What if Time Travel one day gets invented, and I get my hands on it at say, age 60 (me1). I (me1) travel back in time and give it to my 21 year old self (me2). My 60 year old self (me1) then continues existing in his past (or, better yet me2's present), which is now an alternate past for him.
Then after 5 years of time travel, I've (me2) had enough adventure, and decide to patent time travel with what I have. I then travel back to 1 hour before I had recieved the time travel device from 60 year old me (me1) and give a time travel device (remember, I now own multiple devices) to myself (me3) with instructions on when to patent the device, and how to come back to give a device to himself (me4) who would inturn follow the same instructions to give the device to himself (me5) and so forth.
Theoretically, from Me5's standpoint, timetravel is just inventing itself. But from Me1 and Me2's standpoint, there was a starting point of time travel.
posted
I've actually been thinking about this a bit recently. The way I've been thinking about it is that the reality that individuals perceive is actually a steady state after all time travel has been taken into account. I'm not sure that I can fully express it at this point, but I'll give it a go.
Basically, the idea is that you have some "base reality where no time travel has occured". From there, someone changes the reality via time travel. That intervention will quite likely create paradoxes that end up resulting in different time travel, which in turn results in different conditions, and so on through potentially many iterations. After enough iterations, it seems reasonable that one would eventually be stable enough that it no "additional" time travel is neccesary.
By additional time travel, I mean that all time travel that occurs will set up the conditions that existed before the time travel occured. So basically, you end up with a seemingly stable world, even though it may have these sort of loops in it. Reality as we perceive it, then, would be the final stable timeline.
In Verily's example, the piece of music could have originally been written by pretty much anyone. It is quite possible that it was actually written by some third party, and was then stolen and used in time travel until at some point it reached the self fulfilling loop that we see as the final result.
Of course, this whole idea has one huge flaw. It is possible to imagine time travel that would never converge into a steady state. For example, if you got a sequence that oscillates between different states, it would never converge. (ie. time travel in state A causes state B to occur, but time travel in state B causes state A to occur). Since this loop would be constantly changing, it is hard to envision what exactly reality would be.
Anyways, thanks for sticking through this rambling speculation. I suppose we'll probably never know, since if time travel ever is available it probably won't be in our lifetimes, but it is fun to think about.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Eaquae Legit: Jasper Fforde does a version of this, too. In his universe, the big question is who wrote Shakespeare's plays.
I did. Then Shakespeare comes back to the future with Doc Brown and steals all my material. The hack couldn't even write a sonnet until I showed him how it was done.
I'm still waiting for the royalties on the sale of my plays. With interest, I'd bet that I'm up to 1 gagillion dollars at this point.
Hey, Avatar300, can you tell us what you meant by that sonnet in the other thread? I can't figure it out! Thanks!
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