‘Story Of Your Life’ Is Not A Time-Travel Story

See the stories under the heading "There Is No Antimemetics Division (2015)": http://www.scp-wiki.net/qntm-s-author-page

It's part of a larger universe, but I think it suffices to point out that in the larger fictional universe in question, the organization that the website is told from the point of has ready and established access to drugs called "amnestics", which can wipe memories in much the same style as the Men in Black. The rest you can probably work out.

I think you might like Charlie Stross' "Antibodies" (short story in the anthology Toast). Without giving too much away, it deals with runaway AI as an infohazard, and provides exactly the "humans fighting back" thread you're interested in.

This is true for the heptapods (at least in the story), who do not require causal explanation for their actions, but not for Louise, at least in the movie, as her perception of time does have actual (and very significant) consequences, which kind of defeat the entire idea and turn it into a time-travel story. Actually, in the movie this is also not true for the heptapods, who do have a time-traveling causal explanation for their actions (they do what they do because they will need humanity in the future).

You don't need to actually remember the future for you to view life as teleological. In fact, the teleological point of view is central to some human philosophies (of fate and predestination) without turning its believers into p-zombies (at least, not as far as we know). Fatalism doesn't require that you know the future for you to act. In fact, you may believe that the past offers cause, but you believe that it is just a perception, while the "true" (and possibly unknown) reason is teleological.

That "memetic virus" is no science fiction, and has been a part of human philosophy since forever. What is Oedipus Rex (429 BC) or even the bible (esp. in Genesis) if not a teleological view of life? And, of course, the story of Cassandra, who is cursed with the power of prophecy. There's also Macbeth, which is a little different as knowledge of the future is what sets things in motion. I personally found Chiang's story to be a rather poor treatment of the subject compared to other, older and better known ones, and the movie, while better executed, destroyed the story's philosophical point, however simplistic in its treatment.

In any event, teleology provides a narrative for millions of believers to this day, and you don't need to know the future in order to be a fatalist.

I take the idea that we are capable of doing a lot of damage with our technology. I reason that once we discover the damage we are doing, we usually do something about it. However, that process of fixing our mistakes is much slower. So I reason that over time we will do more and more damage, because our technology is progressing at faster and faster rates. And the fixes will be implemented slowly. Damage will eventually accumulate and be catastrophic. After some major catastrophe, say a few hundred million people dead, we will then slow down introducing technology into the system and be much more precautious about it. However, even then there will be economists which will argue their way out of it, saying the damage caused by not growing the economy is much worse than any sort of damage caused to the environment.

I'm not at all sure that humans even understand the idea of free will either; I've certainly never heard a definition of it that made any sense. Locke famously observed that

> the question itself is altogether improper; and it is as insignificant to ask whether man's will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square

There's a separate question about whether or not volition is purely deterministic, but people don't value randomness, they value having (many of) the causes of their mental states be internal rather than external, and I don't think they're in much danger of disappointment there.

Agreed.

Unlike the movie, the story is vague on whether there are violations of causality. (The movie clearly features them, while the story is consistent with or without them). So I disagree that the interpretation is straight forward.

It would make a good pairing with many-worlds immortality, another ramification of physics known for it's unsettling qualities.

Like Fermat's principle of least time, it's really just an interpretation that falls naturally out of the best mathematics we have for predicting experiments.

If you believe that you have the ability to influence how to feel/react about something, then you must also believe you have the ability to influence the thing itself. Which would make a "zen" attitude negligent.

If you believe that you have no ability to influence either an event or the way you feel about it, then the idea of trying to respond in a zen way is as meaningless as trying to influence the event itself.

Now, you might, in fact, respond in a way an outside observer would categorise as "zen". But, within any personal, self-consistent philosophical system, wherein there is no free will, then you cannot categorise your reaction as such or as an "attempt" to do anything.

So yes, it is a time travel story, information being relayed to you from the future is information traveling through time.

I thought this was only in the Heptapod non-sequential point of view. Doesn't Louise say something to the effect of "if you think like a Heptapod, you see everything at once but don't have free will; if you think sequentially, like a human, you have free will but can't know everything at once. They are complementary points of view"? (or something like that, not an exact quote).

It's OK to notice the issues, but if you want to read in this genre you kind of have to get used to just noting them and moving on. Asking an author to write something that can hold up completely has three problems. Nobody could write a non-trivial completely self-consistent story that deviates from reality that much, nobody would be willing to read the resulting story that proves it out because it would require a lot of words to prove that, and in many cases it may not even be possible to be self-consistent in the first place. (Witness the problem we have just coming up with one physics that is consistent with itself and the real world, let alone creating non-trivial new ones from scratch.) It would not be a net benefit to not write those stories.

The movie does a better job of showing the progression of Louise's perception of time. At the beginning of the move, she can see her daughter (i.e., the destination resulting from the first contact mission) but not the journey (i.e., her husband or intervening events.) By the time she calls General Chang, she can see the destination and part, but not all, of the journey leading to that moment (i.e., what he told her during the call). By the end of the movie and the novella, her perception of time has improved to the point that she can see her daughter's entire life (the journey) in the instant she chooses to make love to her husband and thereby conceive her daughter.

(Note that the movie goes with the illness rather than the climbing accident because it's easier to convey to mass audiences. The movie is about Louise's choices and perception of time, not her daughter. However, the novella devotes a significant amount of text to emphasizing the daughter's free-spirited ways, suggesting that the daughter would have gone climbing even if her mother had told her how and when she would die. People like that actually exist, see e.g. BASE jumpers as a direct analogy.)