In the season 5 finale, Richard Alpert was referred to as "Ricardus". Coincidentally (?) Ricardus de Campsalle was a medieval philosopher who was interested in a paradox known as "Future Contingents".
The paradox of future contingents says that if I assert that something is or isn't going to happen at a specific point in the future, then it's either true or not true. By the rules of logic, if something is true today, then it was true yesterday, and so on to the beginning of time - i.e. it was always true, and it never could have been any other way. (For example, if I say "I'm going to get a million dollar check tomorrow" and then I don't, that statement was false today, so it has been false forever and will be false for the rest of time, and therefore could not have ever happened. This obviously conflicts with the idea than people can make choices and can influence outcomes.
Aristotle "solved" the paradox by saying that if something did or didn't happen today, it wasn't inevitable - only the POSSIBILITY of either outcome was inevitable. Ricardus applied that logic to explain God's omniscience with respect to His knowledge of the future - due to His gift of free will to humanity, God cannot know which future will occur, but He can know every possible future because He can know every possible outcome of every possible choice.
This subtle reference to the paradox of future contingents - that the only thing that's certain is the possibility of multiple potential futures - seems to imply not only that Faraday was right, but also may be a validation of Jacob's implied view that humanity can choose redemption. (At the very least, it suggests that Jacob is more correct than his black-shirted, Locke-impersonating adversary who feels that humanity was pre-destined to fight, destroy, and corrupt.)
Or maybe it's just to indicate that Richard's been around since people were using the Latin form of his name. :)
The paradox of future contingents says that if I assert that something is or isn't going to happen at a specific point in the future, then it's either true or not true. By the rules of logic, if something is true today, then it was true yesterday, and so on to the beginning of time - i.e. it was always true, and it never could have been any other way. (For example, if I say "I'm going to get a million dollar check tomorrow" and then I don't, that statement was false today, so it has been false forever and will be false for the rest of time, and therefore could not have ever happened. This obviously conflicts with the idea than people can make choices and can influence outcomes.
Aristotle "solved" the paradox by saying that if something did or didn't happen today, it wasn't inevitable - only the POSSIBILITY of either outcome was inevitable. Ricardus applied that logic to explain God's omniscience with respect to His knowledge of the future - due to His gift of free will to humanity, God cannot know which future will occur, but He can know every possible future because He can know every possible outcome of every possible choice.
This subtle reference to the paradox of future contingents - that the only thing that's certain is the possibility of multiple potential futures - seems to imply not only that Faraday was right, but also may be a validation of Jacob's implied view that humanity can choose redemption. (At the very least, it suggests that Jacob is more correct than his black-shirted, Locke-impersonating adversary who feels that humanity was pre-destined to fight, destroy, and corrupt.)
Or maybe it's just to indicate that Richard's been around since people were using the Latin form of his name. :)
