posted
I know we've been over this before, but I've just had a few thoughts about how the Prophets might perceive time.
Someone (can't remember who) suggested that the Prophets got 'infected' with linear time after The Sisko vistited them in Emissary, so they then knew how to make sure The Sisko was born beforehand and could blah, blah...
Well, I was thinking, just because the Prophets don't have the idea of linear time doesn't mean they have no idea of time at all. We see time like a strand of string, where there's a clear sense of 'forward' and 'backward'. What if the Prophets see time more like, say, a sheet? No meaningful idea of 'past' or 'future', but still a sense of separation of events and that one thing can have an effect on another at a different time - like grabbing a corner and stretching the fabric, say.
Perhaps the Prophets knew that time could be linear - like rolling the sheet up - but didn't consider the idea seriously until The Sisko arrived. Sort of like us thinking about 2-D lifeforms (anyone read Flatland?).
Opinions?
[This message has been edited by Eclipse (edited April 11, 2001).]
posted
Well, that's not a bad idea. The problem is, completely non-linear time is something we can't perceive at all. Any way we look at things will always be influenced by some sense of before and after. In fact, without before and after, there is no time.
The closet we can get, IMO, is to say that the Prophets saw every thing in every state of it's existance at the same time. When Sisko showed up, suddenly he showed them that they could "reach out" and effect something at a certain point in its existance, thus changing it.
I don't know. It's too early in the morning to try and go there again though...
------------------ "The sons of the Prophet were valiant and bold, And quite unacustomed to fear. But, of all, the most reckless, or so I am told, Was Abdulah Boul Boul Ameer." Aban's Illustration www.alanfore.com
The ideas and picture are my own, though my ideas were probably indirectly influenced by stuff like Sliders, not to mention previous posts.
The concepts of time and multiple realities are inseparable in this context.
In a linear timeline, we see only two directions, the past and the future. However, the future is dependent on the past (where the past includes the present), and also dependent on events in the future determined by chaos. This means that from any point in our linear time, there are an infinite number of possible futures, each of which have a large number of points on the timeline (I think time is quantized into units of 10^-45 seconds), each of which has an infinite number of futures, and so on.
Although this speaks of an unfathomable depth of possiblities, there are some things we know which can simplify the situation.
Firstly, time itself was created at the birth of the universe. At this instant there was only one state, which, as soon as time began, ballooned out into an infinite number of possible states. So even the Prophets must be aware of one initial state, which cannot be changed. Eclipse's sheet analogy has a lot of merit, but it is necessary to account for the fact that the "sheet" begins from a single point, and expands, with all possible realities contained within some type of boundary, perhaps like a triangle, cone, or exponential surface of revolution (I prefer the concept of the last one).
Secondly, and this depends on your personal beliefs, there is only one actual reality, which the Prophets would presumably see as a convoluted line starting at the tip of the shape, and ending at the base of the shape, where each point on the base of the shape represents a possible state of the universe at a particular time. The fact that the base of the shape is bigger for larger (later?) times has nothing to do with the fact that the universe is bigger (this information is all contained somewhere else, with each point having unique information on its own 3-d state), but is due to the fact that the further through time you go, the bigger the number of possible states.
Getting on to the point of the Prophets affecting the timeline, if we can assume that they are godly entities (and this idea goes against every fibre of my being), and that they can "see" or perceive the shape in my picture, then it seems possible that they can manipulate or, more correctly, replace the "real" timeline as they see fit, in order to attain the desired pseudofinal state ( The question of the existance of a truly final state is left for another discussion ).
However, this requires a very thorough knowledge of the states themselves and their possible futures on the part of the Prophets if they are to be able to control the effects of their intervention. This picture is indicative of the Prophets' perception of reality ATS (After The Sisko), in agreement with the idea that the Prophets' perception of time & reality was somehow changed after encountering Benjamin.
------------------ "If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing."
[This message has been edited by Gurgeh (edited April 11, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Gurgeh (edited April 11, 2001).]
posted
Hmmm... When I said that the Prophets might see time like a sheet rather than a line, I was just trying to say that there are ways of visualising non-linear time (i.e. time for which there's no strict sense of order).
*Thinks it over a bit more.*
Actually, the more I think about it, if the Prophets don't perceive time with a sense of before and after, that necessarily implies either: a) they see time as one-dimensional, but discontinuous and unordered , or b) they see time as two- or more-dimensional.
posted
I wonder how the Qs feel about the Prophets. Because they've made it clear that they have emotions.
Since they think it's okay to mess around with ordinary humanoids, maybe communicating with, and annoying, the prophets would be even more fun, since they're more on the same level, in the same weight class.
One more thing, the Q seem to live and think in linear time but are 'born' with time traveling capabilities in their organism, so maybe they have the best of both worlds.
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