The Predictor

[prog]

It occurs to me that Ted Chiang's very short story What's Expected of Us could be adapted into a really cool short subject or feature film. (Story discovered via jazzfish a while ago.)

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the one-second time machine in The Science of Sleep, have you seen that?

I wonder what Scott Adams would say about this story. He's been talking about free will a lot lately.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

The curious thing about this (very good) story is that it makes it obvious that the fact of free will proves that time travel is impossible, and makes one wonder why this is not more widely accepted.

Like many facts, we don't understand why or how it can be so that we have free will, any more than Renaisance mystics could understand how there could be more than seven objects in the solar system. There is a "refutation" of Galileo's observation of the moons of Jupiter to the effect that "there seven seas of the world, there are seven openings of the human skull, how can there be more than seven planets in the heavens?" (For those following along at home: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.)

But to deny the fact of free will and accept the possibility of time travel seems to me to be equivalent to denying the fact of the Galilean moons and accepting the possibility of the Second Coming.