last time<\/a>: There can never be a true and complete history of the world, we concluded, because there is no place one can stand on to speak about what we see. We are always a part of the reflection, a part of the picture we try to capture.<\/p>\nWhat about our demon then? Where can he be located?<\/p>\n
A serious problem presents itself to us. Can the demon be outside time, free from any time constraints, able to travel back and forth from the future, and still be able to be inside<\/i> time, able to interact with me and my lucky lotto numbers?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s tricky.<\/p>\n
For what we try to picture is a demon who can both be a subject of time \u2013 in the sense that he is able to record and relay information, as well as interact with other beings of our world \u2013 and also<\/i> be beyond and above time, presumably operating in ways we cannot even begin to fathom. There is an antinomy here. The main problem can be located in the very way we combine concepts in order to form the question. It is as if we are trying to conceptualise a rectangular circle. Think about it for a second. How can this be? A rectangular circle. It\u2019s not a matter of imagination. You simply cannot have it both ways. It\u2019s either circular or rectangular. End of story.<\/p>\n
Similarly, at the exact moment that you will try to envisage a demon marching up and down the timeline of a world, all world-related and time-subjected notions \u2013 such as information, communication, or interaction \u2013, all collapse away.<\/p>\n
Like in the movie, where the spectators of the film are able to interact with the actors playing in it. It\u2019s a nice plot idea and it can work brilliantly, as Woody Allen showed in his 1985 Purple Rose of Cairo<\/i>.<\/p>\n
But it can only work there, in a movie.<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like in the moviesby Christos Tombras Negative boxes. | Author\u2019s mage. Early last year I offered a thought experiment involving a demon and a lotto jackpot. What if,\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1468,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102453"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1468"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102454,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102453\/revisions\/102454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}