My continuing obsession with "Lost"
As I confessed in an earlier post, this non-TV-watching dude is now completely obsessed with "Lost." The syndrome keeps getting worse.
Last week's episode, "The Constant," shows once and for all that the central mystery of the island, the DHARMA Initiative, and probably other aspects of the story all relate to time travel. I'm guessing that Jacob and Richard Alpert are also time travelers, and probably Ms. Hawking as well.
Although the whole Desmond/Penny love-story-across-time thing was exceptionally well-written and shifted the drama in an unexpected and cool direction, a couple of things bothered me about this episode.
First, it seems mathematically goofy to suggest that consciousness can travel backward and forward in time without also transmitting matter and/or energy. Desmond Hume, Eloise the lab rat, and George Minkowski all experienced this, and it just doesn't make any physical sense. I can dig the whole Stephen Hawking/wormhole idea that matter and energy can be transported through spacetime, but I don't see how a person's consciousness can be moved around without matter or energy carrying it. The physics of it just doesn't make any sense.
If they come along and posit some crazy theory that consciousness can be isolated from the brain it inhabits and the energy powering that brain, then maybe I'll be able to suspend disbelief on that point, but until then, it just strikes me as bad science. That kind of stuff tends to kill my interest in a sci-fi story pretty quickly.
Second, the show's writers have taken the easy way out in avoiding the grandfather paradox, which states that a time traveler could go back in time and kill his grandfather before the time traveler's parents were conceived; this would mean that the time traveler would never be born, which in turn means the time traveler could not go back in time to kill his grandfather, which means he would in fact be born after all and could then go back and kill his grandfather.
Whew.
The producers of the show have stated that, in terms of the mythology of "Lost," there is one past, one present, and one immutable future. Ms. Hawking said that the universe has a way of "course correcting" when fate is somehow cheated. Desmond kept trying to prevent his premonitions of Charlie's death from coming true by changing the future, and every time he did so, a new scenario of Charlie's death would emerge. Locke has talked endlessly of fate. All of these factors paint a very deterministic, Calvinist view of the world in which everything is predetermined and free will is nothing more than a conceit to make ourselves feel like we have agency, our lives have meaning, and our choices have consequences.
I hate to break it to them, but from a scientific, rational point of view, Calvinist determinism was trumped by Isaac Newton three hundred years ago, not to mention the topsy-turvy fallout of quantum theory. The universe is chaotic, random, and probabilistic; the idea that there is only one predestined future is scientifically silly. Determinism is the illusion here, not free will or chance, and three centuries of scientific observation have proven that truth. If they're going to create a show around the notion of time travel, they should stick to science and leave the half-baked theology to Pat Robertson.
I'll keep watching it, though.