Christmas and Time-Travel and Possible Worlds: Into the Scroogiverse

Not prior to A Christmas Carol, but Greg Egan’s short story, “The Hundred Light Year Diary,” is a unique take on the idea of prophecy. Briefly, Egan posits that we can detect distant stars after the beginning of the collapse of the universe, with reverse thermodynamics. Through technobabble (Egan is a physicist and engineer, so his technobabble is of the finest quality), we can use these stars to send messages from the future to the past.

Egan also uses a similar idea in The Arrow of Time, the third book in the Orthogonal trilogy, but his treatment there is less philosophical. Briefly, because we get no interesting scientific information from the future, scientists in the present find themselves unable to innovate.

In general, I strongly recommend Egan to philosophers and philosophically inclined readers. Egan couples rigorous science and mathematics with considerable philosophical imagination.

It seems like visions of what MAY happen is so obvious. When people go see a fortune-teller, or consult the oracle, they are looking for ‘actionable’ info they can use. Right?

Well, sure. It seems to me this is (sort of) implicit in the context of traditional divination. E.g., a king consults an astrologer or an expert in haruspication to learn what would be the best day to start a war, or marry his son off to some other ruler, or whatever. The expected result is something like “Well, if you do it on this day, bad things will happen, but if you do it on that day, you will have success.”

”So, for this individual, call him ‘O’, all roads lead to X = kill dad and marry mom. But various lives might be lived consistent with that sorry end.”

Which raises the question regarding ripples. In one universe O joins the army, kills dad, and marries mum; in another O runs away to become a travelling accountant, kills dad, and marries mum. But what about Agnostos, who in universe A was an “enemy” soldier O ended up killing? In the universe B is there a freak tortoise-related accident on that same day because he’s fated to die regardless, but never got to meet O? Or is determinism only for the “important people”, and the rest of us are background characters? When the fates get weaving, just exactly how much detail are they putting in the “jumper of destiny”?

“First, I make the point that prophecy stories are time-travel stories. Information sent from the future to the past.”
But what kind of information? If it is information about what is happening in the future, then Dickens is ruled out. If it’s merely probabilistic information about the various non-zero odds of various different things happening, then the weather report winds up time-travel, which strikes me as a reductio.
The Spirit allows that these are shadows of things that may be, not of things that will be. So does the Met Office.
I think the case for calling ACC time travel is very weak. He is never in the future. He experiences some visions which correspond to no future that ever occurs. The Spirit generates some scenarios that represent forecasts. That’s all.

Arguably, the idea of an inescapable fate is emotionally powerful because it mirrors, for lack of a better word, one of the most obvious and significant aspects of the human condition: namely, that humans live finite lives. In that sense, everyone eventually faces the same inescapable fate.

Because multiple-possible-futures stories often can be read, without too much of a stretch, as implicitly evading or circumventing or denying this reality, their emotional impact is lessened. On this view, it’s no surprise or accident that A Christmas Carol is a minor work of Dickens whereas Little Dorrit, for example, is a masterpiece. In the latter, the idea of mortality hovers in the background and sometimes does more than that, whereas in A Christmas Carol, although Scrooge is of course aware that he will die, it doesn’t play the same role. (Or if it does, the numerous dramatizations of A Christmas Carol, through which most people, including me, know the story now, don’t highlight it.)

oldster @ 7
The Spirit allows that these are shadows of things that may be, not of things that will be. So does the Met Office.

I think there’s some kind of difference between vague, descriptive near-term forecasts and vivid-in-every-detail presentations of the world decades in the future as the Spirit presents. Perhaps moreso in that Scrooge has been shown what he knows to be true presentations of the past.

Also, weather forecasts are not generally seen as things you could alter or prevent from happening — not even by drawing on the map with Sharpie. (Admittedly, we like to joke about how the universe is perverse enough to react to our actions in the case of weather forecasts: “I know that if I treat this seriously and bring an umbrella, I probably won’t need it; but if I ignore it and don’t bring an umbrella, then it definitely will rain!”)

“I think the thing to say is that this sort of view implies a multiversal metaphysics…. these possibilities are real and we can have technological contact with these worlds via ‘experts’.”
I think this misunderstands how divination works. It’s much closer to weather forecasting: You can read the newspaper and then judge that if you go to the park on Saturday, you’ll get rained on; but if you go on Sunday, it will be sunny. No metaphysics needed to make sense of that: it’s just saying what will happen given what the present signs indicate (wind, air pressure, clouds, seasonal patterns etc.). Divination also just articulates what the present signs indicate: given that the entrails look like THIS, Mars is going to be having a strong influence at the time in question and so there will be a battle, etc. Divination handbooks are largely compilations of these sorts of sign correspondences. In metaphysicalizing them I think you’re back-importing a Christian view of providence, so that sign correspondences in nature must “really” be telling us about the divine will which governs the cosmos, but I think divination practicioners generally don’t believe in that sort of thing (or needn’t, at any rate). They’re not inquiring into possible/future world-wholes, just trying to infer from what’s in front of them to what isn’t in front of them.

Herod’s slaughter of the innocents not long after Oedipus, and much the same story.

Do stories like Oedipus insist too much? If everyone really believed in immutable fate, maybe there wouldn’t be much interest in stories showing its immutability. It seems as if there must be a belief in a branching, and potentially controllable future, to create the dramatic tension.

JH: “Do stories like Oedipus insist too much? If everyone really believed in immutable fate, maybe there wouldn’t be much interest in stories showing its immutability. It seems as if there must be a belief in a branching, and potentially controllable future, to create the dramatic tension.”

I have said elsewhere that there seem to be two basic time-travel stories: ones that loop to times that then from the time looped to may play out from that point differently in multiverse fashion (e.g., Back to the Future), or ones where there are loops that only play out as inevitably but requiring the loops to play a role in that inevitability (The Terminator series until the last version that went kinda BTTF). Each version of time travel is interesting, allowing BTTF to involve free will (libertarian?) to be a deciding factor in how loops are resolved in multiverse fashion, but Terminators insisting that the time-loops themselves are necessary causal factors in how things inevitably turn out in eternalist fashion (though I’d note that each is equally interesting as a time-travel tale, and in some ways I favor Terminator scenarios as more satisfying in terms of explanation; c’mon–Scrooge is scared into choosing a different path as opposed to Kyle becoming John Connors’ father?). In terms of theories of time, multiverse stuff is more Everett-Wheeler/presentist/growing block, and inevitability is more Einsteinian/Bohmian eternalist. ACC is a tough one, because the first two ghosts relate settled truth about the past and present as given, but present the truth of the future as something only as a warning that is not Terminator inevitable. So maybe growing block is the time theory most congenial with ACC, and thus more agreeable with a multiverse view. Wow–there’s 15 minutes I’ll never get back–depending on whether BTTF or The Terminator plays out for me. . .

Timely
now more than ever as introduced in fragments in recent years as CT comments. Act One’s opening lines follow below. Its closing lines show Our Hero escaping Fate. Or so it seems. Act One finally complete is at the subsequent link (fourteen plus pages typeset pdf).

<i>Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely artificial </i>
PHILOSOPHY AT PLAY
in the spirit of a trivial comedy for serious people


Scene: Hertfordshire July 1897. Mid-morning in the garden at Manor House Woolton. Under a large yew-tree are set basket chairs and a table arrayed with books and two muffins on a tray. Cecily, just turned twenty, awaits the imminent arrival of her Uncle John. Actually, she is his great-great Aunt—but nevermind. He is from the future and distant Singapore

MERRIMAN Your guest has just driven over from the station.
CECILY Ask him to come here.
MERRIMAN Yes, Ma’am.
Merriman goes off
CECILY I have never met a real philosopher. I feel rather frightened. Reality is so strange nowadays.
Enter JH, very plausibly
JH [raising his hat] You are little Cecily. So pleased to see you at long last.
CECILY You, I see from your card, are my pedantic American relation. I’m to call you Uncle John until we understand your place on the family tree.
JH I am not really pedantic, Cecily, and not at all stuffy. You mustn’t think so. I am on holiday.
He enjoyed being viewed as stylish yet non-conforming (never in women’s wear). A corseted professional life had even drawn out pure fancy when on his own. Now doubly innocent for the past is a foreign country as someone said
CECILY I’m the first Victorian girl to meet a man from two centuries beyond. Do you believe in life beyond the grave?
JH It’s much pleasanter being here with you. . . than b-be-ing—
CECILY—dead? Let me think. My family isn’t in favor of premature experience, especially mine. Your being here makes me queen of all premature experience! This is no way to enter the history books by forcing their rewrite.
JH I’m fond of paradox, the universe less so.
CECILY Or could we be meeting in the world of spirits beyond time? Oh! Let us not speak of such things, Uncle John. [Checks for her heartbeat. Relieved looks at him with familial concern] Let’s sit down while we wait for the others to return. A garden is so welcoming, beautiful and fragrant.
JH [drowning in scent] Why don’t we move closer? [Reflexively reaches for her hand. She frowns. There is a current of electricity in him as he covers it with his own. Her corporeality shocks his senses]
CECILY I have been married sometime, but I’m not quite old enough for adultery.
JH Oh! Let us not speak of such things!
CECILY On Sundays Dr Chasuble lays down the Higher Law. But I’ve found that passions depart before they can be arrested. Here in the garden as the seasons change, I reflect on that strange truth that it is the superficial things that last.
JH You try to ensnare me right off the bat. Wisemen almost to a man ponder the skull beneath the skin.
CECILY Oh! You are disenchanting.
JH Truth is beauty.
CECILY You touched on an obvious exception.
JH Heraclitus complained that the masses were blind to truth and didn’t know that one good man counts for more than thousands. Remember a good work may atone for a lie, or other sins.
CECILY I try to forget them as soon as possible. It is my only form of self-denial. I remember the past only as it gives pleasure.
JH Spoken like an amnesiac and a voluptuary.
CECILY It would be ideal to combine both, don’t you think?
JH To experience each repetition of a pleasure as a first impression?
CECILY Exactly.
JH [archly] For you that explodes the question of original sin by making all original.
CECILY Oh, nobody’s so vain.
JH Be careful or you will be found out. . . .

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7v65c5jtyo0700/73022P%40P.pdf?dl=0
[Link to Complete Act One. Skip sign up or sign in steps to go directly to file.]

If you buy the assertion that anything involving prophesy or future seeing is sufficient to pre-suppose a multi-verse and accordingly makes it SF than virtually all Shakespeare will qualify as SF. There are only a handful of plays in the entire oeuvre that don’t include witches, divination, faeries or some sort of deus ex machina that point to a possible fate which the characters may or may not avoid.

I myself am not really buying ACC as SF. I agree with those up-strand that note forecasting an individual’s death is actuarial not prophesy. Equally you pre-suppose that it was only the spirit of Christmas Future that changes Scrooge’s mind when the more immediate solution was that it was the entire body of past, present and future which provoked the change.

@24
I don’t have time to chase up all the references, but I recall a list from University days that was quite a bit longer than you are suggesting. Perhaps I’ll retract slightly to suggest that substantially all of Shakespeare’s major works and his most widely read works included prophesy or future seeing.

Shakespeare aside prophesy, fortune telling, the occult and the like is a pretty basic literary element that has been used to a greater or lesser degree in hundreds of well known works. Im as much a fan of SF as the next guy, but I don’t think you can co-opt that literary device to do the work of classifying all its users as SF writers.

Beyond that I’d propose the rhetorical question of exactly where does the literary device of foreshadowing (whether done by spirits, witches or simple verbal reference) cross the line to becoming ‘time travel’ as compared to simply being a tool to build tension and increase the rising action of the story line. Sometimes a tombstone is just a tombstone.

@12: Finally remembered a scrap of the possible title that enabled me to google something (“Ring”: first thought “Ringworld” but googling quickly dispelled that notion). I think the story I described above is Simak’s Ring Around the Sun, from 1952./1 So Simak described a multiverse/parallel worlds in the same sense as Moorcock’s 1963 concept 11 years avant la lettre.

1/ I did not click on any of the links in the OP, but did so just now, before clicking on ENTER, and I see that this story is mentioned in one of them

The Last Man (1826) has a weird frame-narrative where Mary Shelley discovers the Sibyl’s Cave, steals some prophetic writings, and uses them to construct the story. However, she suggests that it’s only one possible future:

“I have often wondered at the subject of [the Sibyl’s] verses, and at the English dress of the Latin poet. Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer. As if we should give to another artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration in St. Peter’s; he would put them together in a form, whose mode would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent. Doubtless the leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl have suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands. My only excuse for thus transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition.”