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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19278 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time.

The original work is very interesting although I’m not sure it’s very good. It raises some interesting philosophical questions. The story is probably the best possible story you could write about a form of pseudo-precognition in hindsight that makes immediate, near-term sense to a reader.

But its deliberate ambiguities exist more to paper over the questions than to answer them. Gwern presents the most plausible explanation which is that nothing physically / cosmologically interesting is going on, the protagonist is basically just ‘reflecting’ on her life, in the standard past tense, in a kind of holistic way enabled by the alien language. But that also makes the story a lot less interesting.

Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will.

I don’t think it even does this. I think it just lets you view your life, in hindsight, in a way that projects memories of the future you actually experienced (in normal linear time, you’re old now) onto your younger self.

I'm not even sure there is any difference between those explanations but still:

Was it actually possible to know the future? Not simply to guess at it; was it possible to know what was going to happen, with absolute certainty and in specific detail? Gary once told me that the fundamental laws of physics were time-symmetric, that there was no physical difference between past and future. Given that, some might say, “yes, theoretically.” But speaking more concretely, most would answer “no,” because of free will.

I liked to imagine the objection as a Borgesian fabulation: consider a person standing before the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future (...) The Book of Ages cannot be wrong; this scenario is based on the premise that a person is given knowledge of the actual future, not of some possible future. (...) The result is a contradiction: the Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she’ll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled?

They can’t be, was the common answer. (...) The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

(...)

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

Even though I’m proficient with Heptapod B, I know I don’t experience reality the way a heptapod does. My mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it. My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod.

Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death.

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