(urth) The argument for Intractability

[Jordon Flato]

Yeah, I think we will forever bang up against a wall if we are looking at
this linearly, with certain players crawling up the string, and other
players moving up and down the string to make it the string they want or
need.

When Malrubius tells Severian Time is like an ocean, not like a river, there
is a lot being said.  Free will is not moot in a intractable scenario.  The
development of Sev's 'soul' for lack of a better word is absolutely needed,
and is only possible because of the events of the book of the new sun,
which, in part, he helped created based on his future as conciliator.  The
refinement of his torturers soul is not a by-product of the process, it's an
intimate part of it.  I dunno.  I think it's a trap to think lineraly.  And
I can't see any textual evidence for some sort of time traveling Catherine
sent back to give birth to Severian with an engineered embryo.  Although the
part in Urth with the woman is an interesting paradox.

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>wrote:

> I don't think it completely eradicates free will.
> It's just that it's not linear. It's all happened already.
> inhabitants of the timeline just experience it moment by moment.
> I don't think "the exact genetic combination" is important. Severian's
> consciousness is what matters, not his body's cells. The book makes that
> point again and again.
>
> This is the territory where it becomes useful to realize that at a point it
> stops being a SCIENCE fiction book and is truly a Metaphysical Fictional
> Metaphor.
> This is why that Paradox is intractable. it's almost a metaphysical
> prequalifier to be a paradox.
>
> ~witz
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 22, 2008, at 10:43 AM, Dave Tallman wrote:
>
>  I don't believe Wolfe does intractable time loops, whether in "Free Live
>> Free" or in "The Book of the New Sun." (I don't think "Pirate Freedom" is
>> intractable either, though I haven't worked that one out as well).
>>
>> Intractable time loops imply no free will -- everything happens as it does
>> because that's the way it has always happened. Chains of events that are
>> built up from multiple iterations, carrying back knowledge from future to
>> past, can be done with free will intact. In "The Book of the New Sun" we
>> have an agency that can keep things on track -- the Hierogrammates and
>> Hierodules are time-traveling through history and fixing things. They can
>> create place-holders like a Conciliator-like religion, the autarchy, and the
>> Guild, if they deem them necessary as preconditions for the emergence of the
>> New Sun. Once a good candidate appears, they can fix up his life as much as
>> desired and splice him back into history to replace their earlier
>> bootstraps.
>>
>> The trickiest thing is his birth. Even if the Hierodules ensured the
>> meeting of Ouen and Catherine under similar conditions, the odds are
>> millions to one that the exact genetic combination will be re-created. Thus
>> it seems likely that Catherine was sent back in time already pregnant with a
>> cloned embryo of Sev1. (I believe Catherine is the woman we see under guard
>> in UotNS on the day of the deluge).
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Urth Mailing List
>> To post, write urth at urth.net
>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081222/9ff91fa3/attachment-0004.htm>