= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Salivanth comments on Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme. - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (74)
I'll have to check out that comic if the Chrysalis argument comes up, I suppose.
I'm not sure what you mean by trying to exploit closed-loop time travel through travelling to the future. Do you mean using future sight to see a desirable future and then trying to get there?
As for time travel, in this particular fic, my best answer is simply "Hell no." If it comes up, Twilight and the alicorns can simply decide it's a Really Bad Idea to use it, and they're right, since nobody actually understands how the hell it works, because it violates causality in that fashion. Alternatively, I borrow an answer I saw in a fanfiction once: It can only be used once in a pony's lifetime. And, obviously, the alicorns being immortal and all wouldn't use up one of their precious uses of the spell for anything short of "The situation is hopeless, and Equestria is now 100% doomed." (That is to say, I assume Celestia would have used it IF her attempt to jog Twilight's memory against Discord had failed.) The second I saw that time travel episode, I was like "Oh crap." because I knew that it would add a new layer of complexity to any realistic fanfiction I tried to write, in the sense that I would have to come up with some way to write it off. I am not smart enough to deal with time travel. I am nowhere near smart enough. As HPMOR points out, even stable time loops are ridiculously complicated and drive people stark raving mad with regularity.
My favorite explanation: since causality tries to avoid paradoxes, most time-travellers get squished by large rocks or natural disasters before they can act, because they would have tried to change things. Even if they were going to try and avoid changing the past, they would have inevitably made mistakes, so the only consistent result is either ignorance and co-incidence or dyeing almost immediately. Or the time spell failing due to unforseen problems, if you're feeling generous.
As far as I understand it, causality is just the relationship between cause and effect. If I'm right, saying it tries to avoid paradoxes is like saying gravity acts whenever someone falls off a cliff to prevent them from flying.
If I really needed to explain away time travel in this fic, I'd probably have a future Twilight show up and say "Whatever you do, do NOT use time travel. I don't care how bad it is. Even if Equestria is going to be destroyed if you don't. DO. NOT. MESS. WITH. TIME."
Fortunately, I don't see any situation in this fic where Twilight would even want to use time travel. Arguments aren't one-time only things, you can always come back with another counterpoint later against a rational opponent who's arguing for the sake of finding out who's right, rather than to win social status or something. And any losses of social status that may occur in the fic are nowhere near worthy of time-travel to fix them, it'd be like cleaning a house by burning it to the ground and building a new one.
That was a somewhat anthropomorphic allusion to the Novikov self-consistency principle. But yes, it is.
Fair enough.
EDIT:
You realize the canonical example of time travel was a stable loop, right? As was that pinkie-sense business.