Friday, August 06, 2004
The terminator's approach to the self
In the film Terminator, the character played by Arnold Schwarzzenegger inevitably fails to kill John Connors. Had he been successful, the story would have been inconsistent and paradoxical. The reason for this is that had John Connors died in the womb, the chain of causation would have led to a future where Arnold would not have had the task of coming back to alter the past. Arnold cannot, in the straightforward model of time we are looking at, (although this possibility would exist were we to consider branching time), both go back and not go back in time to kill Sarah Connors.
In order for one to speak of actions that occur in the future in the past tense, one has to make the distinction between personal and external time. Personal time is the time as measured, roughly, by any individual’s wristwatch, and resulting in the natural aging of a person. External time, however, is time as seen as the 4-dimensional plane as a whole, strung together in the chronological order of causation. Kyle speaks of Sarah’s future actions as occurring in the past. This is possible because in external time, he comes from a time where Sarah’s actions occur in the past. However, these actions occur in the future of her personal time (which, because she does not time travel, coincides with events in external time). The events that occur in the future of both Sarah’s personal time, and in the future of external time as seen from the vantage point of the year 1984. However, from the vantage point of Kyle’s personal time, these events occurred in the past, as he has memories of what comes to happen in external time and in Sarah’s personal time.
Sarah’s knowledge of the future presents a problem of freewill for her. She cannot continue to believe that she can freely act to change the future, because if she does, then the chain of causation will not proceed in a manner in which Kyle Reese would have travelled back in time to inform her of the events yet to occur. Should Sarah change the future, then there is no way in which she can have the foreknowledge of what will occur, thus, she is now logically bound to follow the path that is set out for her. For the events in Sarah’s future to occur differently, they have to be consistent with events that will occur and her knowledge of this. Thus, Sarah’s foreknowledge of the future is not compossible with events occurring otherwise.
Townsend argues that even though there is foreknowledge of the temporal order of things, this does not affect the causal order. Due to reverse causation, an agent can act freely in the present, as seen in the temporal order of things, to affect events in the past. Townsend uses the example of the ace-predictor, who has predicted that a free agent will choose a box containing one million dollars, if and only if that agent chooses that box only. Thus, he can act in a manner that will cause the ace predictor in the past to foretell that he will pick only that box. In this example, a agent would freely choose only one of the boxes, causing the ace-predictor in the past to foretell that he would choose that box. The same applies in any two-way communication in time – causal order need not occur only in one direction in a four-dimentionalist view of time.
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