Rupert Read on the Absurdity of Time Travel

Greetings,

To celebrate the 101th post on Arete, it seems appropriate to discuss time travel. After all, if we could travel back in time to view the first post being written, would that not be an exciting event?

This post will largely be responding to a paper by Rupert Read found here. I would highly suggest reading it, although you should be able to get the gist without doing so.

I have several concerns about Read's arguments, and will address them here.

1. He asserts that "there seems no good reason to withhold the term
“time-travel” from healthy, body-renewing sleep, especially perhaps
if it is relatively dreamless. You really can travel to the future. You
can see the future.You can be there. Just by going to bed; just by
living long enough" (Part I, Section 8). I agree with this proposition-- we are, in fact, traveling through time. However, as you'll see, I believe his argument about the "why" is wrong.

2. Read asserts that what "in sleep is missing from time-travel is the essential element of any travel worthy of the name, of tourism and holidaying for instance: the ability, at least, to go there and back again" (Part I, Section 10). This is absolutely incorrect. It would be a radical sort of time travel to go far into the past without a method of return. This may be correct for future-oriented time travel (as the act of sleep would seem to imply), but this fails to account for the novelty of past-oriented time travel.

3. Read establishes a straw man in order to attack past-oriented time travel: he asserts as an axiomatic premise that "you already know that there is no record in the past of you having been there, nor of anyone else from the future, no matter how distant or technologically-sophisticated that future becomes" (Part II, Section 4). There is no need to assume this. Suppose that, in the present, you find clear signs that the time traveler changed nothing; they had already (and always) traveled back in time. Many fictional works, such as 12 Monkeys and Doctor Who, take this as essential.

4. Read asserts that, "in order not to have changed the past, and made it something other than the very thing that you wanted to voyage into, you cannot have had any impact at all, not even one so slight that it evaded all records and notice" (Part II, Section 6). This is a false dichotomy, as explored in my third argument. It's possible to have changed nothing in the past, and yet not evaded notice.

5. Read asserts that "travel back into the past is only possible if the “you” that does the travelling is entirely ethereal. Nonphysical. For the slightest impact upon the past will generate a 'causal loop,' and thus a familiar paradox of time-travel" (Part II, Section 7). The real substance of this paper should have consisted in explaining the "causal loop" and how it results in an absurdity. To hinge arguments upon this assumption is to assume something essential to the outcome.

6. Read's criterion of falsifiability seems to be as follows: "For what was necessary in order for us to be willing to call something “time-travel” (namely, its being meaningful to speak of travel “back into the past”) is just not available. Our relation to the past is necessarily spectatorial, in a doubled sense: We cannot interfere with it, and we cannot even observe it except from a temporal distance" (Part II, Section 15). This unintentionally raises a huge problem for Read. He states that we cannot call travel "time travel" that which we cannot interfere with, unless we can interfere with it directly. However, we cannot directly interfere with the future; we must wait for it to become the present. Thus, we do not travel through time into the future. This directly contradicts Part I, Sections 5-10, and limits the significance of his arguments against future-oriented time travel.

7. Read oversimplifies the complex issue of the indeterminacy of the future: "The past is very largely determinate, fixed, just by virtue of its being past: and “travelling back into it” requires that it not be fixed. The future is to a considerable extent open just by virtue of its being future" (Part III, Section d). This raises a host of issues, problems, and questions; if this is to be treated as an axiomatic assumption, it should be addressed at the outset, and the validity of his findings should noted to be contingent upon it.

So, what do you think? Am I being too hard on Professor Read, or are my critiques legitimate? Thanks for your comments!

This post has been edited to resolve potential formatting issues.

Traversing the Maze of Free Will

Arete's Editor-in-Chief, Andrea Lowry, sent me a link to an article by professor Galen Strawson of Reading University. Written for the New York Times, the article can be read by clicking here. It argues that one cannot be "ultimately responsible" for what one does, and that any actions will be "determined... by your genetic inheritance and previous experience." Bold statements, to be sure. He offers two arguments, the latter "expanded" from the former. Let's look at the former first:

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you then are.

(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.

(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.

(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

Is his argument sound? It seems to have problems-- for example, the first premise begs the question, because it assumes that you do what you do because of "the way you are", which implicitly denies any sort of volition-- and responsibility, presumably, requires volition. I don't want to spend too much time on this argument, because Strawson seems to desire us to consider it in light of his expanded argument:

(a) It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.

(b) It’s undeniable that these are things for which you can’t be held to be in any way responsible (morally or otherwise).

(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(e) And any further changes that you may become able to bring about after you have brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

I believe that Strawson errs in several of his premises. First, premise (a)-- that it is "undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience"-- is actually contradictory. The way you are initially (meaning, at the earliest moment of personhood) cannot result from earlier experience, which he said it does. Strawson might wish to make the conjunction apply only to post-initial status, but the premise loses its power, and it is clearly false that a person is how they are initially as a result of genetic inheritance (for example, because two individuals with the same genetic inheritance might not act the same way). The premise fails.

Premise (d) asserts that "both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience", but this to a large degree what needs to be proved. Strawson has constructed an elaborate format to beg the question, which is hidden behind a series of arguments whose foundation is problematic (the first premise). Of course, if Strawson had his way, his mistake would be seen as a result of experience and genetic inheritance. Personally, though, I think he should have known better.