Weekend Thought
Contemporary philosophies of mind and logic would be a lot less retarded if grad students were required to read Gödel.
The New Skeptic
The questions. The answers. The lazy and uninspired.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
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2 Comments:
Good morning,
I am a French student doing a Master in translation (Eng ->Fr) and I am stuck with a ridiculously short sentence about a "Gödelian closed loop"....grrrr would you mind helping me understand what the author refers too ?
Here's some context. The main character, Matt, travels through time and is wondering (in the given sentence)if he is the person who came back from the future to bail himself out of prison.
"Matt wondered. Could he have come back from the future to rescue himself? Maybe in some future, he learns how to reverse and control the process, and comes back in a Gödelian closed loop -- reappearing a week ago, making a million on the stock market."
I've made many research but couldn't find anything concerning time travel...
Thank you very much in advance
Laetitia.
It refers to the bidirectional causality of time travel. His future self comes back to make a million dollars, so that he'll have the money to bail himself out. If he hadn't gone back and made the money, he wouldn't have been able to bail himself out. If he hadn't bailed himself out, he'd never have had the chance to go back and make the money. Thus, if, having freed himself, he decides to go back, make the million dollars, and then not bail himself out...then he never had the chance to free himself anyway, and thus never had the chance to develop the time travel process necessary to make the million in the first place.
Seems like what the author was going for.
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