A traveller journeys to his/her own past and presents the plans of the time travel machine used to make the journey to his/her earlier self, just as s/he was provided with as a younger person. This is best illustrated by the classic example of the non-invention of a time travel machine. if a ‘hardcopy’ representation of the information is sent. Cham: Springer, 2017.).Īlthough the Temporal Epistemic Anomaly could be achieved by sending some kind of modulated signal to the past, the complexity of the problem increases when information is conveyed by more tangible means, e.g. (eds), Nature of Time and the Time of Nature: Philosophical Perspectives of Time in Natural Sciences. “On Time, Causation and Explanation in the Causally Symmetric Bohmian Model of Quantum Mechanics”. Dyke (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Time. Kutach 2013 _ “Time Travel and Time Machines”. Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time. “No End in Sight: Causal Loops in Philosophy, Physics and Fiction”. “Closed Causal Loops and the Bilking Argument”. Riggs 1997 _ “The Principal Paradox of Time Travel”. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 48, pp. The contention that ‘backwards’ time travel is logically impossible has been shown elsewhere to be false (e.g. However, we should at this point, dispel the very common objection that the (alleged) self-defeating paradoxes of time travel demonstrate that sending messages to an earlier time (or indeed time travel to the past) is logically impossible and therefore that the Anomaly also is impossible. Other names used in the literature include “Knowledge Paradox”, “Epistemological Paradox” and “Bootstrap Paradox”, even though the depicted situation is not strictly paradoxical. This sort of scenario will be referred to as the Temporal Epistemic Anomaly. The gaining of knowledge from information ‘circulating’ a causal loop conflicts with the standard conception of the acquisition of knowledge because nobody ‘thinks up’ or gains the knowledge by physically probing the world. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 41, pp. “A Critique of Mellor’s Argument Against 'Backwards' Causation”. (Note that although a causal loop is required here, such loops are not themselves necessitated by ‘backwards’ in time causal influences, cf. The information must propagate completely around a causal loop in order for it not to be invented or discovered. Consider the hypothetical situation where an instance of information is received and understood by someone (thereby constituting knowledge for our purposes) at a time before the information is transmitted (by whatever means) but is not discovered or invented at any point in time. Let’s begin by laying out the specifics of the topic. INFORMATION AND THE TEMPORAL EPISTEMIC ANOMALY What will be examined here are the odd implications of information being propagated around a causal chain of events that is closed in time (called a causal loop) and whether this scenario will stand up to scrutiny. Instead, ‘information’ will be taken as implicitly understood. Journal of Information Technology 33, pp. “What is information? Toward a theory of information as objective and veridical”. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences, 465, pp. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, pp. “Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge”. No attempt will be made to define ‘information’ as this is beyond the scope of the current article (see the comprehensive discussions in: Lombardi 2004 LOMBARDI, O. information is contained in physical systems ( Landauer 1996 LANDAUER, R. Nonetheless, what counts as ‘information’ depends somewhat on context although all instances of information have to have physical manifestations, i.e. Information can be exactly duplicated so that the original recording of an instance of information (its initial information carrier) may be obliterated and yet the information remain in existence. The same information may exist in a variety of types including ‘hardcopy’, optical, chemical, and electromagnetic forms. Our ‘Information Age’ graphically displays that there are many ways in which (macroscopic) information may be found, extracted, created, stored, retrieved, transferred, merged, copied, sorted, manipulated, corrupted, and lost.
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