Poll - Time Travel and Moral Obligations.

R

reactor1967

Quantum Scribe
<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://www.timetravelinstitute.com/ttiforum/dopoll.php"><INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="pollname" VALUE="1237196995reactor1967">


Do Time Travelers Have A Moral Obligation to Society?
<input type="radio" name="option" value="1" />Yes
<input type="radio" name="option" value="2" />No
<INPUT TYPE=Submit NAME=Submit VALUE="Submit vote" class="buttons"></form>
 
Society?
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Define Word Society:

1-an organized voluntary association of people for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, militar, or other purposes.

2-is an economic, social or industrial infrastructure, made up of a varied multitude of individuals. Members of a society may be from different ethnic groups. A society may be a particular ethnic group, such as the Saxons; a nation state, such as Bhutan; a broader cultural group, such as a Western society; or even a social organism such as an ant colony.

3-is a group of humans or other organisms of a single species that is delineated by the bounds of cultural identity, social solidarity, functional interdependence, or intersociality.



Do Time Travelers Have A Moral Obligation to Society?
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In this question "Society" is not well defined..

Did you mean:
a- "their" Society?
b- "Our" Society?
c- "Particular Society?
d-"Alien" Society

They had their own Agenda...

/ttiforum/images/graemlins/devil.gif /ttiforum/images/graemlins/devil.gif /ttiforum/images/graemlins/devil.gif
 
To the society that their visting whether it be where they are from or not. See, if there was time travel and if a time traveler paid a visit to a society in the past even if it is just a few minutes or a day or more in the past and that traveler had knowledge of an impending event whether it was local or global does that time traveler have a moral obligation to warn that society of the impending event? If a time traveler visted America the NSA, CIA, FBI and no telling who else would want to immediately detain that time traveler and debrief that person about what she/he knows. Then immigration would want that person if that person were human and from earth. So, it seems that in America our goverment would believe that time travelers do have a moral obligation though it may be somewhat forced. But, I am more interested in how the general public would feel about the issue.
 
Reactor,

An interesting question. And thanks for expanding on what the moral obligation is that you are asking about in the poll.

The question is particularly interesting for me because the first TT thread that I posted on (~Aug-Sept 2000) was on Bell's Post-2-Post forum. The thread title was something along the lines of "Moral Implications of Time Travel". Javier Cortez (TimeTravelAdvocate, TTA) was the OP.

Over the ten years I've decided that the moral obligation would be not to disclose future events.

The current state of theoretical physics is that the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) view of Everett's Relative State Formalism of QM is not widely accepted (nor is Everett's paper for that matter). It appears that there is but one universe.

Given that that is the state of the art today then changing past history, especially one where people die as a result of the event(s) to be changed, results in an entirely new future history. That history is populated by a different set of people and a new set of events. There's no guarantee that the change would be an improvement nor is there a guarantee that it won't be for the worse. What does appear to be guaranteed is that some people from the original history randomly disappear from the new history. Among the people who no longer exist in the future could include the TT and, assuming that the event visited preceded the time that the invention occured, the person(s) responsible for inventing time travel itself.

History itself is problematic. History as an academic pursuit generally falls under the Department of Social Sciences and spills into the Department of Political Science. But it isn't a science in the strict sense. At best, if we want to compare it to a hard science, it is somewhat like thermodynamics. It's statistical in nature and we can never have access to all information concerning historical events. We can describe, somewhat crudely, the results of events but we can't completely describe the events themselves in detail. We really don't know enough about the exact nature of those events thus we really don't have sufficient information to explain the actions taken by individuals affected by the events. With that in mind, tinkering with history simply results in another random "thermodynamic" outcome. We would not know the result of our actions.

If it's the case that "the event" is avoided and no longer a part of the future history where does the thought arise in the future to prevent an event that from that perspective never occured?

Based on your explanation of the intent of the question in the poll I voted no. There is no moral obligation to disclose future events even with otherwise good intentions.
 
"Moral Obligation" is a feeling that the time traveler would have based on his belief.

It can be stretched to cover anything that the TT didn't like. Best approach, Look, but don't interfere. The residents of any time period are likely to resent anyone from outside coming in to reform them.
 
Packerbacker,

Maybe it can be looked at as does the TT have an ethical obligation rather than a moral obligation.
 
Darby:

All else being equal I suppose it would be hard to keep oneself from warning a person or group about an unneeded loss of life. Maybe the key lies in not initiating change(an intrusion without historical precedent).

If time travel is possible, then it exists in the future, and that culture would probably make the rules, which would include monitoring past time travelers who threatened to screw things up. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/devil.gif
 
If time travel is possible, then it exists in the future, and that culture would probably make the rules, which would include monitoring past time travelers who threatened to screw things up.
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In the future humanity has evolved beyond politics. :D

(i hope)
 
The problem is that in a world that has the sort of time travel we're talking about, virtually unlimited travel to any point in time, there are no rules. At a minimum the idea of "memory" makes no logical sense in such a world. Anyone at any time - tomorrow or a million years later - could affect a change in any and all historical events. If the change occurs "in the past" what is it that causes them to have a recollection of it that involves some notion of a necessity to change it?

It's a pretty strong suggestion on the metaphysical level that this sort of time travel does not exist. We aren't being visited by time travelers and should be experiencing rather confused senses of memory as we should if unlimited time travel was possible.

It isn't sufficient proof to say that it's impossible - only experimentation can resolve that issue.

But if we return to our assumptions for this thread and admit the possibility as reality we're still faced with the moral issue of "save a few lives - destroy the world as we thought we knew it".
 
mr. darby watch this video.

video

the fifth dimension is the imaginary one, this is what existed before the big bang. now
the sixth dimension is the multiverse dimension of every existence, and you right now are a sixth dimension to someone elses third-fourth dimension.
 
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