Feeding My Ignorance

I received an email the other day that widened my thinking on the subject of "we are what we are". Previous blog entries have already delved a bit into my thoughts about there being no room for any consideration of going back and "changing history" by making different decisions the second time around. This email added a new "dimension" to this issue.

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It is, I firmly believe, foolish to think that you can ever "change just one thing" - however, for many people there is (at least) one point in their past that they made a decision that - in retrospect - seems to be absolutely the wrong choice and they would dearly love to have the opportunity to go back and "fix" that mistake. They do so because they can pinpoint something that "went wrong" as a result of that decision. For me, I think that is a very blinkered view - and have discussed the reason why in If Only and other posts.

One of the "blind spots" that arise due to the blinkers is the assumption that you can treat that "moment in time" in isolation. That is never true - there are always adjacent moments that have a huge say in, or are impacted by, that single moment. Additionally there are always long chains of trigger events that can be seen to have led to that "moment in time" and a huge number of resulting effects.

I have described before the 'angst' that is caused when a decision that you make - in all good faith - turns out to be something that leads to an unexpected - and unwanted - effect that causes a really significant problem for you - or perhaps worse - for someone else. Sure the initial reaction could well be - I wish I could go back and undo that - but that - as I explained before - would only open up the whole raft of uncertainties that lie around the "what happens next" question.

This is - as already discussed - bad enough - but here is where that email pushed my thinking further - what if there is another, related decision? What if going back and changing things to avoid the "bad" outcomes makes it impossible for you to make another, subsequent, decision? What is the "solution" if there are two "bad" decisions that you would like to make amends for, but you can only 'fix' one?

These are not unlikely situations. Without trying too hard, I can identify similar conundrums in my own history. I can see 'connected' decisions where changing the first decision precludes some of the choices for the second. Indeed, it is likely that this will be the case for every decision we make - our future options are changed.

Such 'bad' decisions can be looked back upon now - with the benefit of hindsight and understanding - as sub-optimal - they 'could' be improved on. There is a problem though - even if the time-machine was available and it was possible to go back and change the decision - sometimes there is no way that more than one can be changed! Or at least, no way that they can be changed to provide a high likelihood that "bad" outcomes don't happen anyway.

This is, perhaps, a much more compelling argument as to why we should be more content with our current lot and avoid "wishing" that we could change the past. Changing the past can only be done knowing what we know now - and that will - inevitably - present us with far more variables to consider than the 'simple' decision was back then. In particular we will be aware of the 'actual' outcomes of our past decisions - and of at least some of the consequences (I would argue that we can never know all the consequences of even a simple action).

There are many decisions that we make during the course of our lives that are "once only" in the sense that having chosen A over B there is no way that B can then occur in the future. Most often these are not choices between just two options, but choices between hundreds or thousands - choosing A over B does not 'just' preclude B - it also precludes C and D and E and.... you get the picture....

In all time travelling adventures there is always an unwritten rule that you cannot change things that might create a paradox - so, you cannot, for instance stop your father and mother from meeting each other since that would mean that you could not exist! We are looking here at a similar - but I would say much more complicated set of relationships.

Anything that you change has the potential for setting up such paradoxes. This can be directly or indirectly since there is no way of knowing all the later consequences of any change that you make. There would seem to be no way that you could conceivably change ANYTHING in the past and ensure that everything else stayed the same.

Of course, all that this is saying is that, on the balance of probabilities, if you had made (or could make) any different decisions in the past it is likely that you would find yourself in a worse place now. Some people may think "could it be any worse" - and I would say that it is very likely. If you are looking at your own situation and thinking it is bad then it may be that you can point to a particular choice that you have made that contributed to being in a bad place now - you may even place all the blame on a single action or choice. However it is unlikely in the extreme that there is only ONE cause or contributor.

• So - we are identifying a number of "reasons not to go back and 'fix' things"
• For every "better" place you might end up there are thousands of "worse" places
• Fixing one thing might not fix everything
• You cannot "change just one thing"

It may not be possible to fix more than one because they mutually preclude each other

There are probably more, but that is where we have got to at the moment. The last point above was the one that triggered this post, as I hadn't previously thought about the (quite obvious in retrospect) problem of having to make a choice between "fixing" it for one or other aspects which are mutually exclusive in the sense that fixing one makes it impossible to fix any of the others.

As I have been writing a related thought has come to mind - even IF (and yes it IS a big if) you can make things "better" by changing the past (a slim chance at best) making such changes to the equilibrium will almost certainly result in making it "worse" for many other people. Is that a price worth paying? If you balance your own health, wellbeing and happiness with that of the rest of the world - why should that balance tip in your favour?

Laying aside the selfish bit - if you are changing things to "improve" the lot of someone else - what right have you got to inflict the resulting "deterioration" on many others as a result? Especially when you can reason (as mentioned before) that any change that you make is only a removal of one of the causes of the "bad things" that happened to another.

Its strange how often my "thoughts" are mirrored in TV plots - a fictional/fantasy programme I watched recently discussed the issues of both the possibilities of the 4th dimension and time travel and the question "it you could go back and change things - knowing that it turned out how it did - would you?". I was re-assured by the fact that despite the "bad situation" that had resulted the answer was the same as mine would be "no - wouldn't change a thing" - although the reasons were necessarily more 'superficial' than those I have been outlining.