We've been told there is only one type of time travel on Lost: mental flashbacks into one's own past body [Darlton's self-described "paradox-free solution], but I think the evidence is very strong that there is a second *island mediated* physical spacetime travel e.g. Ben appearing outside Tozeur ca [u]October 24[/u], 2005, not January; and Ray washing ashore , dead, while "still" alive on the Kahana (though there are several theories for exactly what happened there, any way you slice it *something* traveled physically in time, relative to something else).
Though there is widespread speculation, which I believe, that The Island teleported in time at the end of S4, I think that the writers must, of necessity, restrict the use of that mode, so we must ask ourselves how they will employ the "flashback" mode to make it the *predominant -- and that's where Heraclitus comes in.
"You never step in the same river twice"; "a thing is both identical [in the root sense of "identity"] and not identical to itself at a different time"--to what does this apply, more than humans? I am indeed the same person I was last year or ten years ago or twenty, yet I change with every thought I have. I am both the dancer and the dance, the instrument and the music, a closed book, not to be judged by its cover, and the words within it, perhaps in multiple editions.
Did late-90s Desmond visit Faraday? No, he had no idea Faraday existed, much less his field of research and secret project. We saw w the flashbacks get him in trouble on the base, they very likely caused his court martial--led him AWOL, or left him confused and unaware of a key order which he therefore didn't obey.
When he was released, Widmore called him a coward. Did he know about the flashbacks [I'd argue "yes", but also that he wasn't aware of every specific]. Might he have meant "You are a coward, because you are fighting (on a scale you don't yet know) the price [e.g. deaths] that I feel must be paid in the grand temporospatial scheme?" or even "You are a coward because you cling to self-esteem and [delusions of] self-worth when taking the money/Penny and running would change the timeline, to the detriment of many, but (e.g.) leave Penny alive"? [is it an accident that this Croesus named his daughter Penny?] Widmore fancies himself a hard man who does what must be done, but would he be "hard" if he didn't truly feel the price that was paid by himself and others? No, Mr. Magoo or a two year old could do *that*.
I was long wary of this approach because it ties into my longstanding theory of how time travel *must* work if it is to work at all. Any theory that fits one's preconceptions must be distrusted.
I believe that only certain states and transitions would be allowed--the fundamental premise of quantum mechanics. You can't go back in time to kill your grandfather or show up at the wedding you missed, because then you wouldn't exist, or wouldn't have any motive to go back and make the change -- but *maybe* there are other equally self-consistent outcomes, determined by quantum fluctuations --say a millisecond difference in reaching the threshold of a synaptic gate firing-- that could have sustained themselves with equal physical consistency, had events played out differently under Heisenberg's veil. Maybe a trip back could nudge things into one such alternate path. Perhaps a transition that may be disallowed for a nudge that comes from the direction/force of Kahana in Dec 2004 is allowed for a nudge coming from the Philippines in 2008 or The Island in 1976.
The Bohr model of the atom can be crudely described as "only orbitals whose length is an integer multiple of the wavelength of an electron are allowed, because the electron wae will self-reinforce in a standing wave pattern. In any other orbital, the electron must inevitably be out of phase with itself, and therefore interfere destructively with itself. Since Electrons can't just disappear (conservation of charge, energy, spin, etc.), they can't cancel themselves out, and therefore cannot enter into such a disallowed orbital in th first place" Similarly, literary plotlines may only occupy certain self-consistent paths, and not intermediate mixtures, but may jump between equally consistent plotlines, if nudged, never occupying any state in between -- if you can just find a way to nudge them just right.
As Trance Gemini [of Andromeda] might say: we may be in the best of all possible trajectories at the moment, with certain other desirable transitions disallowed, but that doesn't mean "you can't get there from here". A transition may be disallowed at present, but not from all points on our current trajectory, or from all trajectories that are allowed from points on our current trajectory. The wheels on the [s]bus[/s] atom go round and round, until conditions line up and *poof* the electron reappears in a different energy state.
Maybe the Island just doesn't have a Trance who can see them clearly. Maybe Jacob only sees dimly. Maybe the True Others are grasping at faint outlines of possible routes to their desired future -- [i]and maybe they, like Faraday, their meddling in time events has erased much of their memories, as a sort of temporal self-correction![/i] (i.e. if Faraday remembered Desmond, and told him to visit him, leading to the very memories he remembered, it would be a paradox, but if Faraday doesn't remember Desmond, and only deduces what must be done from logic, and his remaining memories of his own early work, well, that's not a paradox -- it's a reasoned attempt at a nudge.
How many times will this electron be nudged by photons, absorbing some (accepting) and allowing others to pass through without effect (rejecting), jumping from allowed state to allowed state until it settles in the desired one -- or a state (complete ionization resulting it it shooting off into space) that makes that state impossible? How many iterations through time -- flashback, and occasionally physical?
Let me cite a lesser example, not because I fully believe it, but because it recently occurred to me.
Cooper "stole" Locke's kidney, which led him to the Island, and also to his survival when Ben shot him. What if Cooper didn't need the kidney at all (or did, due to other events and saw a way to weave it into events). What if the Cooper who thought he was in Hell in "The Man from Tallahassee" was "naive" -- a first iteration unredacted Cooper -- but the Cooper who conned Locke for his kidney, or fled the hospital, or shoved him through that window was a more "enlightened" Cooper, flashing back with some awareness of the loops of events that came in later iterations -- events we ourselves may not yet know?
A great deal more could be said, but I want to avoid getting too far into specific possibilities, leading to a tangled Medusa's nest of theories in one post. I think it is best to post separate building blocks.
I'll just leave you with this: when we see a character in flashback, it may indeed be that person, but NOT the version who inhabited that timeline naively. Based on the pictures on the walls at the time of Alpert's test of young Locke, for example, it seems quite likely that he is already no longer "pure" and "naive" as he would have been in his first iteration, but has already been influenced by flashbacks from a Locke who knew (e.g.) teh Black Smoke. I have separate theories for how this may lead to emergent epiphenomena like "talking to the dead" [Miles], prophetic/intrusive dreams and hallucinations, etc.
Theory by Orpheus
Though there is widespread speculation, which I believe, that The Island teleported in time at the end of S4, I think that the writers must, of necessity, restrict the use of that mode, so we must ask ourselves how they will employ the "flashback" mode to make it the *predominant -- and that's where Heraclitus comes in.
"You never step in the same river twice"; "a thing is both identical [in the root sense of "identity"] and not identical to itself at a different time"--to what does this apply, more than humans? I am indeed the same person I was last year or ten years ago or twenty, yet I change with every thought I have. I am both the dancer and the dance, the instrument and the music, a closed book, not to be judged by its cover, and the words within it, perhaps in multiple editions.
Did late-90s Desmond visit Faraday? No, he had no idea Faraday existed, much less his field of research and secret project. We saw w the flashbacks get him in trouble on the base, they very likely caused his court martial--led him AWOL, or left him confused and unaware of a key order which he therefore didn't obey.
When he was released, Widmore called him a coward. Did he know about the flashbacks [I'd argue "yes", but also that he wasn't aware of every specific]. Might he have meant "You are a coward, because you are fighting (on a scale you don't yet know) the price [e.g. deaths] that I feel must be paid in the grand temporospatial scheme?" or even "You are a coward because you cling to self-esteem and [delusions of] self-worth when taking the money/Penny and running would change the timeline, to the detriment of many, but (e.g.) leave Penny alive"? [is it an accident that this Croesus named his daughter Penny?] Widmore fancies himself a hard man who does what must be done, but would he be "hard" if he didn't truly feel the price that was paid by himself and others? No, Mr. Magoo or a two year old could do *that*.
I was long wary of this approach because it ties into my longstanding theory of how time travel *must* work if it is to work at all. Any theory that fits one's preconceptions must be distrusted.
I believe that only certain states and transitions would be allowed--the fundamental premise of quantum mechanics. You can't go back in time to kill your grandfather or show up at the wedding you missed, because then you wouldn't exist, or wouldn't have any motive to go back and make the change -- but *maybe* there are other equally self-consistent outcomes, determined by quantum fluctuations --say a millisecond difference in reaching the threshold of a synaptic gate firing-- that could have sustained themselves with equal physical consistency, had events played out differently under Heisenberg's veil. Maybe a trip back could nudge things into one such alternate path. Perhaps a transition that may be disallowed for a nudge that comes from the direction/force of Kahana in Dec 2004 is allowed for a nudge coming from the Philippines in 2008 or The Island in 1976.
The Bohr model of the atom can be crudely described as "only orbitals whose length is an integer multiple of the wavelength of an electron are allowed, because the electron wae will self-reinforce in a standing wave pattern. In any other orbital, the electron must inevitably be out of phase with itself, and therefore interfere destructively with itself. Since Electrons can't just disappear (conservation of charge, energy, spin, etc.), they can't cancel themselves out, and therefore cannot enter into such a disallowed orbital in th first place" Similarly, literary plotlines may only occupy certain self-consistent paths, and not intermediate mixtures, but may jump between equally consistent plotlines, if nudged, never occupying any state in between -- if you can just find a way to nudge them just right.
As Trance Gemini [of Andromeda] might say: we may be in the best of all possible trajectories at the moment, with certain other desirable transitions disallowed, but that doesn't mean "you can't get there from here". A transition may be disallowed at present, but not from all points on our current trajectory, or from all trajectories that are allowed from points on our current trajectory. The wheels on the [s]bus[/s] atom go round and round, until conditions line up and *poof* the electron reappears in a different energy state.
Maybe the Island just doesn't have a Trance who can see them clearly. Maybe Jacob only sees dimly. Maybe the True Others are grasping at faint outlines of possible routes to their desired future -- [i]and maybe they, like Faraday, their meddling in time events has erased much of their memories, as a sort of temporal self-correction![/i] (i.e. if Faraday remembered Desmond, and told him to visit him, leading to the very memories he remembered, it would be a paradox, but if Faraday doesn't remember Desmond, and only deduces what must be done from logic, and his remaining memories of his own early work, well, that's not a paradox -- it's a reasoned attempt at a nudge.
How many times will this electron be nudged by photons, absorbing some (accepting) and allowing others to pass through without effect (rejecting), jumping from allowed state to allowed state until it settles in the desired one -- or a state (complete ionization resulting it it shooting off into space) that makes that state impossible? How many iterations through time -- flashback, and occasionally physical?
Let me cite a lesser example, not because I fully believe it, but because it recently occurred to me.
Cooper "stole" Locke's kidney, which led him to the Island, and also to his survival when Ben shot him. What if Cooper didn't need the kidney at all (or did, due to other events and saw a way to weave it into events). What if the Cooper who thought he was in Hell in "The Man from Tallahassee" was "naive" -- a first iteration unredacted Cooper -- but the Cooper who conned Locke for his kidney, or fled the hospital, or shoved him through that window was a more "enlightened" Cooper, flashing back with some awareness of the loops of events that came in later iterations -- events we ourselves may not yet know?
A great deal more could be said, but I want to avoid getting too far into specific possibilities, leading to a tangled Medusa's nest of theories in one post. I think it is best to post separate building blocks.
I'll just leave you with this: when we see a character in flashback, it may indeed be that person, but NOT the version who inhabited that timeline naively. Based on the pictures on the walls at the time of Alpert's test of young Locke, for example, it seems quite likely that he is already no longer "pure" and "naive" as he would have been in his first iteration, but has already been influenced by flashbacks from a Locke who knew (e.g.) teh Black Smoke. I have separate theories for how this may lead to emergent epiphenomena like "talking to the dead" [Miles], prophetic/intrusive dreams and hallucinations, etc.
Theory by Orpheus
