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Characters, Plot, and Themes / Deep dive on Robo, free will, and the nature of personal growth/change
« on: September 04, 2023, 11:31:57 pm »
My recently-posted short story, "Do You Believe In Fate?", (main thread here: https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=14219.0, text here: https://jacksonw.xyz/posts/chrono-trigger-short-story/, narrated video version here: https://youtu.be/SQQXScnte2I), tries to explore some philosophical questions about time and human freedom from the perspective of each one of Chrono Trigger's main characters, but really the meatiest part of the story is a big love letter to Robo, and the fascinating sci-fi complexity of his journey.
Here is a summary of the Robo chapter, which is the longest and final of the six perspectives that Crono considers when trying to answer the question "Do You Believe In Fate?":
Robo and Mother Brain. Like Robo, we are ultimately deterministic thinking-machines existing within the same physical universe that we seek to act upon. In light of this, how should we think about things like choice, freedom, control, and the process of personal growth/transformation? Are some mental experiences and personal changes less "genuine" than others, if they are caused by identifiable physical mechanisms like the influence of drugs or hormones, and how is this different from more legitimate influences which are also ultimately physical?
Robo's forest and the Entity. We can try to understand the world through science, but there will ultimately always be some limit -- whatever causes / creates / substantiates our universe with its rules of time, physics, and mathematics... must ultimately be beyond time, physics, and mathematics. How should we think about the ultimate question of what lies outside the universe?
And here is the full chapter!
Robo’s journey has been longer and stranger than any of the others’. Created as R66-Y by the Mother Brain of Geno Dome’s automated factory, Robo was originally designed for the sole purpose of bringing Mother Brain’s electric dream into reality: the last fragments of humanity overpowered, the world remade as a robot utopia of logic and steel. Then as now, Robo’s decisions were made freely by his own mind, acted out by his own will. But what does it mean to be free, if your very mind was moulded by another’s hand?
To live with a pre-programmed mind sounds horrid to Crono – until he considers his own circumstances. His parents, his friends, the culture and country and class and era of his birth, beyond that the impact of heredity and evolution, a chain of cause and effect stretching back millions of years, all the way back to Ayla, and beyond! At least Robo could hope to list the forces that had a hand in his genesis; Crono would never have a chance to fully comprehend the myriad influences on his identity.
But Robo’s premeditated destiny was not to be fulfilled – he broke down in Proto Dome, and lay there inert for decades until Lucca repaired and reprogrammed him. Since then he’s been living and adventuring with Crono, Lucca, and the rest. He’s made friends with everyone, and – though he joined their party merely out of gratitude for Lucca’s repair work – Robo is now as dedicated as anyone to stopping Lavos and saving humanity. Crono assumed that he was watching a change of heart – but was it really just a change of circuitry? Think back to when they visited Geno Dome: the other automatons called him defective, they said that his mind had been subverted, that he had forgotten his true purpose. Robo opposed them: he said he had not been subverted, but had merely traveled and seen farther than they – that it was new data, not new programming, which was responsible for his new behavior.
Why is the one respected, the other despised? It’s wonderful to “change one’s mind” after some new experience or re-consideration… but to be changed? To alter the very method of one’s thinking and not merely the content of one’s beliefs? That’s a different matter – indeed, it might even be a different person. In Robo, Crono can’t help thinking that a change caused by new data is somehow more real, more genuine, more earned, than a change caused by new programming. But in fellow humans, it’s different: to have a “transformative experience,” to be a “changed man,” for humans the deepest and most meaningful changes are closer to changes in programming. To alter opinion and behavior based only on new data is weak, shallow – mere flip-flopping.
And were Robo’s words even true that day? Crono knows that he had been reprogrammed, modified at least slightly. During her repairs, Lucca removed Mother Brain’s instructions, she said: that way, Robo would not harm us. When she did that, was she restoring Robo’s true self, reversing the pathology that Mother Brain had injected into the robots coming off her assembly lines? But the robots at Geno Dome weren’t mindless or insane – they were perfectly rational beings, albeit with some built-in predisposition towards a radical ideology. By what metric do we judge Robo’s mind superior to those of Mother’s minions? Perhaps it is impossible to speak of a “true self”; could it be that the thought of “repairing” a personality is, fundamentally, an absurdity?
When they confronted Mother Brain – her menacing, holographic image flickered and sheared across the monitors like reflections in a shattered mirror – she claimed to reveal Robo’s secret, his special mission. She said he was a custom design, programmed to live like a spy among the humans and attempt to befriend them, the better to record and analyze their strengths and weaknesses, to understand the way they think.
Was she telling the truth? There’s every chance that Mother’s programming ran far deeper and more subtle than what Lucca thought she saw. But if Mother Brain’s programming survives inside Robo, then what Robo had seen of the outside world really was able to change him, because he opposed her boldly and without hesitation.
Or was it really just a desperate lie, an attempt to sow suspicion among their party and win Robo back to her side? If so, the ploy failed to save her – but it did not fail to demonstrate that she had developed a keen understanding of human psychology. For a long time after Geno Dome, Crono had watched Robo very closely. He had wanted to trust Robo, he knew that he had changed – but somewhere in the back of his mind, Crono couldn’t shake off the suspicion. For days after her death, thanks to those comments, Mother Brain had ruled a part of Chrono’s thoughts, making him fear that she might also be ruling a part of Robo’s. Maybe that’s the secret: for her, reprogramming wasn’t even necessary to gain control. Understand the program well enough, feed it the right data, and you can control the outputs without ever influencing its internal operations. Maybe that’s what fate really looks like, when you see it up close.
And to defy fate? Control the inputs, perhaps, to achieve the outputs you desire. But of course, those desires are merely the outputs of past cycles. In that case, iterate: take the old outputs and use them as inputs for the next cycle. You’ll certainly go somewhere, but how do you know if you started in the right place, and how do you tell when you’re headed in the right direction?
Ask Robo – he’s put in more cycles than anyone. Growing up, Crono had often heard the legend about Fiona, the woman who died in the middle ages trying to protect the forest near her home from Magus’s armies. After we had traveled to that time, stopped Magus, and actually met Fiona, Robo volunteered to stay behind and help her cultivate the fledgling woods. Crono left him there, and zipped forward to 1000 AD – in total, only a few hours for Crono and the other humans, but four hundred years for their mechanical friend. Working day after day, living alone like a hermit, in those many lifetimes he had turned the entire southern desert into a lush expanse of woodlands. They found his broken-down body preserved in a cathedral, venerated as a holy relic by those who came to celebrate the forest. When Lucca had finished rebuilding him for the second time, he told them his story – the things he had learned, the paths he had walked in his wandering thoughts, as the eons slipped by. He told of how, in his million hours of lonesome thought, many seemingly complicated things revealing themselves as simple and clear; other, seemingly simple things unfold into complex uncertainties. And he spoke of a puzzle which he had turned over in his mind for all those years.
It is possible to generate time-gates artificially, but apart from the one first spawned by Lucca’s experiment at the fair, all the gates they have encountered appear to have generated spontaneously and randomly, as if by some natural process. And yet, many of these gates link to moments of extreme significance in the history of civilization, of Lavos, and of the planet as a whole. Robo says that over the eons, he has sensed the presence of what he called “an Entity,” a conscious influence that may be using the gates, perhaps using even this very adventure, as a way of coming into being, of experiencing or re-experiencing the critical moments of its own existence – like how a dying man might see a vision of his life just before his death. The nature of this Entity, if it even exists, is a total mystery. But if a conscious force is alive and at work in the world in this way – if there is some invisible world-spirit guiding them, leading them on this tour through time, preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with Lavos – then Fate is surely the only word we could use to describe it.
But on the other hand, here’s Robo: an electronic automaton from the far future, designed originally by man, modified and manufactured to be a soldier for Mother Brain’s utopia, broken down for decades far from home, repaired and reprogrammed by Lucca to join an incredible adventure across thousands of years, finally a lonesome forest guardian, lost in thought for centuries, revered as a saint from a long-ago age… who would deny that such a being has transcended anything that fate might’ve had in mind?
Here is a summary of the Robo chapter, which is the longest and final of the six perspectives that Crono considers when trying to answer the question "Do You Believe In Fate?":
Robo and Mother Brain. Like Robo, we are ultimately deterministic thinking-machines existing within the same physical universe that we seek to act upon. In light of this, how should we think about things like choice, freedom, control, and the process of personal growth/transformation? Are some mental experiences and personal changes less "genuine" than others, if they are caused by identifiable physical mechanisms like the influence of drugs or hormones, and how is this different from more legitimate influences which are also ultimately physical?
Robo's forest and the Entity. We can try to understand the world through science, but there will ultimately always be some limit -- whatever causes / creates / substantiates our universe with its rules of time, physics, and mathematics... must ultimately be beyond time, physics, and mathematics. How should we think about the ultimate question of what lies outside the universe?
And here is the full chapter!
Robo’s journey has been longer and stranger than any of the others’. Created as R66-Y by the Mother Brain of Geno Dome’s automated factory, Robo was originally designed for the sole purpose of bringing Mother Brain’s electric dream into reality: the last fragments of humanity overpowered, the world remade as a robot utopia of logic and steel. Then as now, Robo’s decisions were made freely by his own mind, acted out by his own will. But what does it mean to be free, if your very mind was moulded by another’s hand?
To live with a pre-programmed mind sounds horrid to Crono – until he considers his own circumstances. His parents, his friends, the culture and country and class and era of his birth, beyond that the impact of heredity and evolution, a chain of cause and effect stretching back millions of years, all the way back to Ayla, and beyond! At least Robo could hope to list the forces that had a hand in his genesis; Crono would never have a chance to fully comprehend the myriad influences on his identity.
But Robo’s premeditated destiny was not to be fulfilled – he broke down in Proto Dome, and lay there inert for decades until Lucca repaired and reprogrammed him. Since then he’s been living and adventuring with Crono, Lucca, and the rest. He’s made friends with everyone, and – though he joined their party merely out of gratitude for Lucca’s repair work – Robo is now as dedicated as anyone to stopping Lavos and saving humanity. Crono assumed that he was watching a change of heart – but was it really just a change of circuitry? Think back to when they visited Geno Dome: the other automatons called him defective, they said that his mind had been subverted, that he had forgotten his true purpose. Robo opposed them: he said he had not been subverted, but had merely traveled and seen farther than they – that it was new data, not new programming, which was responsible for his new behavior.
Why is the one respected, the other despised? It’s wonderful to “change one’s mind” after some new experience or re-consideration… but to be changed? To alter the very method of one’s thinking and not merely the content of one’s beliefs? That’s a different matter – indeed, it might even be a different person. In Robo, Crono can’t help thinking that a change caused by new data is somehow more real, more genuine, more earned, than a change caused by new programming. But in fellow humans, it’s different: to have a “transformative experience,” to be a “changed man,” for humans the deepest and most meaningful changes are closer to changes in programming. To alter opinion and behavior based only on new data is weak, shallow – mere flip-flopping.
And were Robo’s words even true that day? Crono knows that he had been reprogrammed, modified at least slightly. During her repairs, Lucca removed Mother Brain’s instructions, she said: that way, Robo would not harm us. When she did that, was she restoring Robo’s true self, reversing the pathology that Mother Brain had injected into the robots coming off her assembly lines? But the robots at Geno Dome weren’t mindless or insane – they were perfectly rational beings, albeit with some built-in predisposition towards a radical ideology. By what metric do we judge Robo’s mind superior to those of Mother’s minions? Perhaps it is impossible to speak of a “true self”; could it be that the thought of “repairing” a personality is, fundamentally, an absurdity?
When they confronted Mother Brain – her menacing, holographic image flickered and sheared across the monitors like reflections in a shattered mirror – she claimed to reveal Robo’s secret, his special mission. She said he was a custom design, programmed to live like a spy among the humans and attempt to befriend them, the better to record and analyze their strengths and weaknesses, to understand the way they think.
Was she telling the truth? There’s every chance that Mother’s programming ran far deeper and more subtle than what Lucca thought she saw. But if Mother Brain’s programming survives inside Robo, then what Robo had seen of the outside world really was able to change him, because he opposed her boldly and without hesitation.
Or was it really just a desperate lie, an attempt to sow suspicion among their party and win Robo back to her side? If so, the ploy failed to save her – but it did not fail to demonstrate that she had developed a keen understanding of human psychology. For a long time after Geno Dome, Crono had watched Robo very closely. He had wanted to trust Robo, he knew that he had changed – but somewhere in the back of his mind, Crono couldn’t shake off the suspicion. For days after her death, thanks to those comments, Mother Brain had ruled a part of Chrono’s thoughts, making him fear that she might also be ruling a part of Robo’s. Maybe that’s the secret: for her, reprogramming wasn’t even necessary to gain control. Understand the program well enough, feed it the right data, and you can control the outputs without ever influencing its internal operations. Maybe that’s what fate really looks like, when you see it up close.
And to defy fate? Control the inputs, perhaps, to achieve the outputs you desire. But of course, those desires are merely the outputs of past cycles. In that case, iterate: take the old outputs and use them as inputs for the next cycle. You’ll certainly go somewhere, but how do you know if you started in the right place, and how do you tell when you’re headed in the right direction?
Ask Robo – he’s put in more cycles than anyone. Growing up, Crono had often heard the legend about Fiona, the woman who died in the middle ages trying to protect the forest near her home from Magus’s armies. After we had traveled to that time, stopped Magus, and actually met Fiona, Robo volunteered to stay behind and help her cultivate the fledgling woods. Crono left him there, and zipped forward to 1000 AD – in total, only a few hours for Crono and the other humans, but four hundred years for their mechanical friend. Working day after day, living alone like a hermit, in those many lifetimes he had turned the entire southern desert into a lush expanse of woodlands. They found his broken-down body preserved in a cathedral, venerated as a holy relic by those who came to celebrate the forest. When Lucca had finished rebuilding him for the second time, he told them his story – the things he had learned, the paths he had walked in his wandering thoughts, as the eons slipped by. He told of how, in his million hours of lonesome thought, many seemingly complicated things revealing themselves as simple and clear; other, seemingly simple things unfold into complex uncertainties. And he spoke of a puzzle which he had turned over in his mind for all those years.
It is possible to generate time-gates artificially, but apart from the one first spawned by Lucca’s experiment at the fair, all the gates they have encountered appear to have generated spontaneously and randomly, as if by some natural process. And yet, many of these gates link to moments of extreme significance in the history of civilization, of Lavos, and of the planet as a whole. Robo says that over the eons, he has sensed the presence of what he called “an Entity,” a conscious influence that may be using the gates, perhaps using even this very adventure, as a way of coming into being, of experiencing or re-experiencing the critical moments of its own existence – like how a dying man might see a vision of his life just before his death. The nature of this Entity, if it even exists, is a total mystery. But if a conscious force is alive and at work in the world in this way – if there is some invisible world-spirit guiding them, leading them on this tour through time, preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with Lavos – then Fate is surely the only word we could use to describe it.
But on the other hand, here’s Robo: an electronic automaton from the far future, designed originally by man, modified and manufactured to be a soldier for Mother Brain’s utopia, broken down for decades far from home, repaired and reprogrammed by Lucca to join an incredible adventure across thousands of years, finally a lonesome forest guardian, lost in thought for centuries, revered as a saint from a long-ago age… who would deny that such a being has transcended anything that fate might’ve had in mind?
2
Time, Space, and Dimensions / Timeline physics -- how do cute "stable time loops" arise in the first place?
« on: September 04, 2023, 11:22:53 pm »
Not only Chrono Trigger, but lots of time-travel stories, feature the common trope where some time-travel shenanigans seem to be self-causing (what TVTropes calls a "stable time loop": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StableTimeLoop). Of course, the question is always, "how did things ever get into this paradoxical state in the first place??"
To some extent, questions like this have no answer -- "in the first place" may have no meaning when talking about multiple timelines, and of course at the end of the day it's all just fiction and time travel probably isn't actually possible IRL.
However! In my short story, "Do You Believe In Fate" (see the full details here https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=14219.0 -- it's about lots of Chrono Trigger's philosophical themes, not just time travel physics), I have Lucca describe a kind of "timeline physics", wherein the events of a stable time loop must be some sort of "local minima" in some kind of extra-temporal causal landscape -- ie, they are "stable" in the sense that they're what you get if you iterate a timeline over and over:
1. go back in time to kill Hitler, thus preventing WW2 and changing the timeline
2. but then a future, different war (launched by the USSR a few years later, perhaps) eventually occurs. somebody from that timeline decides to go back in time to kill [whoever seems responsible for this alternate war] to avert it
3. but maybe killing this other person doesn't actually change the big-picture outcome very much, so you still get a very similar USSR-launched war. and maybe when a person from THIS timeline tries to go back in time to change the past, they consistently fail in their efforts, or they pick the wrong target, so the future hardly changes at all
4. after enough cycles of this, you get a perfectly stable self-causing time loop!
Alternatively, you could also have a local minima that bounces around between 2 (or 3, or 4...) different scenarios, where Scenario A causes Scenario B and in turn B causes A. For example:
A: an evil AI is developed, which starts a nuclear war and takes over the world. A brave resistance leader travels back in time to stop the development of the AI.
B: Thanks to the brave time-traveller, the evil AI is never developed. But now that the world develops normally, no brave resistance leader arises to travel back in time. So if anyone else ever time-travels in this world for any reason, the new timeline will pop back to the situation of Scenario A.
Anyways, this might be an interesting way to think about / critique / analyze time travel stories. It also has some interesting implications about the morality of time travellers' actions -- if you know you are stuck in some kind of mostly self-correcting local minima, you will want to think extra hard about how your plan might end up simply reinforcing the existing timeline, and how you might try to kick things over to an entirely different stable local minima.
Here's the relevant section from my story (which also comes in video form at this link! https://youtu.be/SQQXScnte2I):
Lucca is probably the expert opinion here. She opened the first time-gate, after all, even if it was an accident while she was trying to make a teleportation device. Since then, she’s spent all her spare time working out equations, trying to figure out as much as possible about how the gates work and what all their time-travel is doing to the world. She has concluded – well, honestly, most of it is way over Crono’s head; Lucca has mostly been talking to Robo lately since he’s the only one who can keep up with all the technical stuff. But Crono remembers right before they were about to make the jump into the deep, prehistoric past. He was afraid –they had all been afraid, even if nobody said it– that whatever they did so many millions of years back, it would probably have huge effects on all future ages. Their families and friends might be totally erased, replaced by an entire alternate history. But then, when they actually did return to the present, that’s not at all what they saw. For all they had done –defeating the Reptites, finding enough Dreamstone to repair the Masamune, recruiting Ayla, and saving the whole Iota tribe– the change in the present was completely undetectable.
All of these time-hopping adventures: to Crono it feels like they occur totally outside the normal bounds of causality, a mischievous meddling in the proper order of events. But Lucca points out that if that was the case, the present should be vastly altered whenever they return from visiting a past age. Instead the differences, if they appear at all, are minor and isolated. She says that the only way this makes sense is if the seemingly original, untouched world we grew up in was actually somehow already altered by our current time-traveling actions. Those actions aren’t changing the world but rather in a sense completing it, because somehow the world has always already been changed by them. So does this mean some other version of myself has already done the things I’m doing right now? Are there an infinite number of Cronos, each fulfilling the same destiny over and over? This is where Lucca starts to roll her eyes. “I mean kind of, I guess,” she starts, “But really that’s totally not the right way to think about it. See, you’re still trying to frame things as the result of a normal process of cause-and-effect –made cyclical because of our time-travel, of course, but still decidedly temporal in the ordinary sense. Really it only makes sense to think of the universe stabilizing itself through causal resonance on some unknown extra-temporal level. All of us time-travelers necessarily exist in such a way that our actions are not only self-causing, but also self-stabilizing in the case of variance, and as for how things got this way in the first place? Well, not through any normal process of revision, but instead via some kind of instantaneous extra-temporal harmonic resonance effect. So yeah, no infinite Cronos.”
And no fate? On the one hand, unlike most people in Crono’s time, Lucca doesn’t believe that a god designed the world to follow a special plan. And despite the drama of their adventure, she definitely doesn’t believe in fated heroes, days of judgement, or destined battles between good and evil. But on the other hand, she does believe that the universe is “deterministic”: if you knew what every particle in the whole world was up to during one particular instant, you’d be able to predict their future movement and interactions perfectly, so you’d know exactly what the whole future would be like. How did the particles happen to get like that, rather than being in some other configuration? Well, Lucca says that the world went through some kind of “extra-temporal settling process” of “self-stabilizing resonance,” which means our particular history is “cradled in some low-energy configuration: at least a local, or possibly global minimum within possibility-space.” Deterministic history – that means the future’s inevitable – settled into a stabilizing minimum – that means things couldn’t have happened any other way. Lucca might not call that fate, but to Crono it at least sounds pretty similar.
To some extent, questions like this have no answer -- "in the first place" may have no meaning when talking about multiple timelines, and of course at the end of the day it's all just fiction and time travel probably isn't actually possible IRL.
However! In my short story, "Do You Believe In Fate" (see the full details here https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=14219.0 -- it's about lots of Chrono Trigger's philosophical themes, not just time travel physics), I have Lucca describe a kind of "timeline physics", wherein the events of a stable time loop must be some sort of "local minima" in some kind of extra-temporal causal landscape -- ie, they are "stable" in the sense that they're what you get if you iterate a timeline over and over:
1. go back in time to kill Hitler, thus preventing WW2 and changing the timeline
2. but then a future, different war (launched by the USSR a few years later, perhaps) eventually occurs. somebody from that timeline decides to go back in time to kill [whoever seems responsible for this alternate war] to avert it
3. but maybe killing this other person doesn't actually change the big-picture outcome very much, so you still get a very similar USSR-launched war. and maybe when a person from THIS timeline tries to go back in time to change the past, they consistently fail in their efforts, or they pick the wrong target, so the future hardly changes at all
4. after enough cycles of this, you get a perfectly stable self-causing time loop!
Alternatively, you could also have a local minima that bounces around between 2 (or 3, or 4...) different scenarios, where Scenario A causes Scenario B and in turn B causes A. For example:
A: an evil AI is developed, which starts a nuclear war and takes over the world. A brave resistance leader travels back in time to stop the development of the AI.
B: Thanks to the brave time-traveller, the evil AI is never developed. But now that the world develops normally, no brave resistance leader arises to travel back in time. So if anyone else ever time-travels in this world for any reason, the new timeline will pop back to the situation of Scenario A.
Anyways, this might be an interesting way to think about / critique / analyze time travel stories. It also has some interesting implications about the morality of time travellers' actions -- if you know you are stuck in some kind of mostly self-correcting local minima, you will want to think extra hard about how your plan might end up simply reinforcing the existing timeline, and how you might try to kick things over to an entirely different stable local minima.
Here's the relevant section from my story (which also comes in video form at this link! https://youtu.be/SQQXScnte2I):
Lucca is probably the expert opinion here. She opened the first time-gate, after all, even if it was an accident while she was trying to make a teleportation device. Since then, she’s spent all her spare time working out equations, trying to figure out as much as possible about how the gates work and what all their time-travel is doing to the world. She has concluded – well, honestly, most of it is way over Crono’s head; Lucca has mostly been talking to Robo lately since he’s the only one who can keep up with all the technical stuff. But Crono remembers right before they were about to make the jump into the deep, prehistoric past. He was afraid –they had all been afraid, even if nobody said it– that whatever they did so many millions of years back, it would probably have huge effects on all future ages. Their families and friends might be totally erased, replaced by an entire alternate history. But then, when they actually did return to the present, that’s not at all what they saw. For all they had done –defeating the Reptites, finding enough Dreamstone to repair the Masamune, recruiting Ayla, and saving the whole Iota tribe– the change in the present was completely undetectable.
All of these time-hopping adventures: to Crono it feels like they occur totally outside the normal bounds of causality, a mischievous meddling in the proper order of events. But Lucca points out that if that was the case, the present should be vastly altered whenever they return from visiting a past age. Instead the differences, if they appear at all, are minor and isolated. She says that the only way this makes sense is if the seemingly original, untouched world we grew up in was actually somehow already altered by our current time-traveling actions. Those actions aren’t changing the world but rather in a sense completing it, because somehow the world has always already been changed by them. So does this mean some other version of myself has already done the things I’m doing right now? Are there an infinite number of Cronos, each fulfilling the same destiny over and over? This is where Lucca starts to roll her eyes. “I mean kind of, I guess,” she starts, “But really that’s totally not the right way to think about it. See, you’re still trying to frame things as the result of a normal process of cause-and-effect –made cyclical because of our time-travel, of course, but still decidedly temporal in the ordinary sense. Really it only makes sense to think of the universe stabilizing itself through causal resonance on some unknown extra-temporal level. All of us time-travelers necessarily exist in such a way that our actions are not only self-causing, but also self-stabilizing in the case of variance, and as for how things got this way in the first place? Well, not through any normal process of revision, but instead via some kind of instantaneous extra-temporal harmonic resonance effect. So yeah, no infinite Cronos.”
And no fate? On the one hand, unlike most people in Crono’s time, Lucca doesn’t believe that a god designed the world to follow a special plan. And despite the drama of their adventure, she definitely doesn’t believe in fated heroes, days of judgement, or destined battles between good and evil. But on the other hand, she does believe that the universe is “deterministic”: if you knew what every particle in the whole world was up to during one particular instant, you’d be able to predict their future movement and interactions perfectly, so you’d know exactly what the whole future would be like. How did the particles happen to get like that, rather than being in some other configuration? Well, Lucca says that the world went through some kind of “extra-temporal settling process” of “self-stabilizing resonance,” which means our particular history is “cradled in some low-energy configuration: at least a local, or possibly global minimum within possibility-space.” Deterministic history – that means the future’s inevitable – settled into a stabilizing minimum – that means things couldn’t have happened any other way. Lucca might not call that fate, but to Crono it at least sounds pretty similar.
3
Fan Fiction / "Do You Believe In Fate?" Six characters' perspectives on time & free will.
« on: September 04, 2023, 10:52:47 pm »
Inspired also by the videogame "Braid" and the books of Italo Calvino, I've written a short story that explores our experience of time and the nature of human choice -- from the perspectives of Crono, Marle, Ayla, Lucca, Frog, and Robo, all in turn! The full name of the story is:
Thoughts in the mind of Crono, upon his arrival at the Town of Enhasa in The Empire of Zeal, Having Been Asked The Question, “Do You Believe In Fate?”
Here is a link to the text of the short story: https://jacksonw.xyz/posts/chrono-trigger-short-story/
And here it is in narrated, fanart-animated video form! https://youtu.be/SQQXScnte2I
What follows is a short summary of the ideas from each character's section of the story:
2:45 -- Our story begins as Crono considers the question of Fate. In some ways, the idea that certain things are destined to happen (or at least nearly-certain), is embedded into our fundamental, everyday, common-sense way of thinking about the world. But equally, it seems absurd and superstitious to believe in the stereotypical "mystical" concept of fate, a world where magic prophecies come true and "everything happens for a reason". But to really understand the question of fate, we need to go far deeper than trivial considerations like these. (music: Castle Rock, by JigginJonT)
4:55 -- Marle's tale. The princess gets tied up in a classic time-travel paradox when she inadvertently stops her own parents from being born. But what might it actually feel like to be part of a circular cause-and-effect loop like this? Imagine if every hour, your "soul" actually hops into a new body in a new parallel universe. Presumably you'd never notice that you were constantly changing lives -- your new body in each new universe would come complete with a brain and memories of its own unique childhood from that unique universe! Marle's story combines this idea with Lucca's concept of a "minimum-energy", resonant / self-stabilizing timeline, which is described in her story. (Manoria Cathedral, by William Carlos Reyes)
8:45 -- Ayla's world shows us that, in a preindustrial civilization, the notion of linear time is less intuitive -- events seem to repeat circularly, with the continuity of human lives stretching endlessly into both the past and future. And furthermore, why is it that we care so much about the future in the first place -- we know little about it, yet we seem to care much more about the future than we do about the past, or about spatially far-away places in the present moment. (Cave Girl, by zyko)
11:30 -- Lucca's analysis of Chrono Trigger's time-travelling lore. Since the world doesn't seem to change much even when we intervene in the past, that means that there is no "original timeline" -- we are already living in a timeline that was influenced by our future actions. This seems paradoxical from our perspective, but needn't be -- our timeline must be the stable outcome of some gradient-descent process, analogous to an attractor state in a chaotic system, or a sort of "path of least resistance" through history. (Memories of Green, by SixteenInMono)
15:30 -- Frog's journey. Is it possible to truly know yourself completely -- to know which parts of your personality are fixed and which are changeable, to know which ideas about yourself are mistaken and which are accurate? To what extent is it possible to transform oneself into someone else, whether via deliberate effort or the mere passage of time? (Wind Scene, by Yasunori Mitsuda & Millenial Fair)
19:50 -- Robo and Mother Brain. Like Robo, we are ultimately deterministic thinking-machines existing within the same physical universe that we seek to act upon. In light of this, how should we think about things like choice, freedom, control, and the process of personal growth/transformation? Are some mental experiences and personal changes less "genuine" than others, if they are caused by identifiable physical mechanisms like the influence of drugs or hormones, and how is this different from more legitimate influences which are also ultimately physical? (Atom Heart Machine, by WARK!)
25:47 -- Robo's forest and the Entity. We can try to understand the world through science, but there will ultimately always be some limit -- whatever causes / creates / substantiates our universe with its rules of time, physics, and mathematics... must ultimately be beyond time, physics, and mathematics. How should we think about the ultimate question of what lies outside the universe? (The Brink, by Super Guitar Bros)
29:15 -- Crono's answer to the question of Fate. Crono considers the sweep of historical ages, and the succession of short-sighted tyrants that seem to recur again and again. He contemplates his own journey and the ultimate limitations of his own human perspective. (The Beginning of the Future, by Yulia Nechaeva, and Stratosphere by MAYA)
You can see artist credits for the images used in the video here: https://tinyurl.com/3yh9vjdx
Thoughts in the mind of Crono, upon his arrival at the Town of Enhasa in The Empire of Zeal, Having Been Asked The Question, “Do You Believe In Fate?”
Here is a link to the text of the short story: https://jacksonw.xyz/posts/chrono-trigger-short-story/
And here it is in narrated, fanart-animated video form! https://youtu.be/SQQXScnte2I
What follows is a short summary of the ideas from each character's section of the story:
2:45 -- Our story begins as Crono considers the question of Fate. In some ways, the idea that certain things are destined to happen (or at least nearly-certain), is embedded into our fundamental, everyday, common-sense way of thinking about the world. But equally, it seems absurd and superstitious to believe in the stereotypical "mystical" concept of fate, a world where magic prophecies come true and "everything happens for a reason". But to really understand the question of fate, we need to go far deeper than trivial considerations like these. (music: Castle Rock, by JigginJonT)
4:55 -- Marle's tale. The princess gets tied up in a classic time-travel paradox when she inadvertently stops her own parents from being born. But what might it actually feel like to be part of a circular cause-and-effect loop like this? Imagine if every hour, your "soul" actually hops into a new body in a new parallel universe. Presumably you'd never notice that you were constantly changing lives -- your new body in each new universe would come complete with a brain and memories of its own unique childhood from that unique universe! Marle's story combines this idea with Lucca's concept of a "minimum-energy", resonant / self-stabilizing timeline, which is described in her story. (Manoria Cathedral, by William Carlos Reyes)
8:45 -- Ayla's world shows us that, in a preindustrial civilization, the notion of linear time is less intuitive -- events seem to repeat circularly, with the continuity of human lives stretching endlessly into both the past and future. And furthermore, why is it that we care so much about the future in the first place -- we know little about it, yet we seem to care much more about the future than we do about the past, or about spatially far-away places in the present moment. (Cave Girl, by zyko)
11:30 -- Lucca's analysis of Chrono Trigger's time-travelling lore. Since the world doesn't seem to change much even when we intervene in the past, that means that there is no "original timeline" -- we are already living in a timeline that was influenced by our future actions. This seems paradoxical from our perspective, but needn't be -- our timeline must be the stable outcome of some gradient-descent process, analogous to an attractor state in a chaotic system, or a sort of "path of least resistance" through history. (Memories of Green, by SixteenInMono)
15:30 -- Frog's journey. Is it possible to truly know yourself completely -- to know which parts of your personality are fixed and which are changeable, to know which ideas about yourself are mistaken and which are accurate? To what extent is it possible to transform oneself into someone else, whether via deliberate effort or the mere passage of time? (Wind Scene, by Yasunori Mitsuda & Millenial Fair)
19:50 -- Robo and Mother Brain. Like Robo, we are ultimately deterministic thinking-machines existing within the same physical universe that we seek to act upon. In light of this, how should we think about things like choice, freedom, control, and the process of personal growth/transformation? Are some mental experiences and personal changes less "genuine" than others, if they are caused by identifiable physical mechanisms like the influence of drugs or hormones, and how is this different from more legitimate influences which are also ultimately physical? (Atom Heart Machine, by WARK!)
25:47 -- Robo's forest and the Entity. We can try to understand the world through science, but there will ultimately always be some limit -- whatever causes / creates / substantiates our universe with its rules of time, physics, and mathematics... must ultimately be beyond time, physics, and mathematics. How should we think about the ultimate question of what lies outside the universe? (The Brink, by Super Guitar Bros)
29:15 -- Crono's answer to the question of Fate. Crono considers the sweep of historical ages, and the succession of short-sighted tyrants that seem to recur again and again. He contemplates his own journey and the ultimate limitations of his own human perspective. (The Beginning of the Future, by Yulia Nechaeva, and Stratosphere by MAYA)
You can see artist credits for the images used in the video here: https://tinyurl.com/3yh9vjdx
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