As anyone who has ever tried to make copies of copies of paperwork can tell you, after a certain number of iterations, the copy is completely illegible and nothing like the original. Every time we try to recall something, we are creating a copy of a copy of the original event. This holds true with what psychologists have discovered about human memory – that when we pull a memory file to examine, we recreate it from scratch.
#Story of your life by ted chiang pdf download series#
Grandma Monica’s absence caused a great deal of scandal amongst your aunts and uncles, but you don’t remember that you have created a series of causes and effects that make sense to you: Grandma Monica always gave you a poster for Christmas Grandma Monica was not there for that Christmas Grandma Monica died around that time in your life Grandma Monica must have been dead for that Christmas. Her death wouldn’t occur until the following February. You assume that her absence means that she had died before that Christmas occurred, when, in fact, she’d decided on a whim to go on a cruise with her new boyfriend that year. You remember that, sometime in your early adolescence, your Grandma Monica died in a car accident. Your Grandma Monica always gave you a framed poster of your favourite movies for Christmas, but that year, for some reason, Grandma Monica wasn’t at your family’s Christmas party. When you were twelve, you loved Transformers. Consider this scenario: Someone asks you to recall a very specific Christmas, say the one when you were twelve years old. The C-series makes a case for humans imposing a timeline, a sense of cause and effect on an otherwise random set of events. The C-series is an interesting thought experiment, but has no bearing on reality. But that doesn’t really matter, because in the real world, cause leads to effect. They simply exist in an order things like “before” and “after” depend on which side of the event line you are looking from. In a C-series understanding of the universe, World War I and World War II are related, but neither was the cause nor effect of the other. In other words, while both the A-series and the B-series rely on previous events and their effects on later events, the C-series is under no such constraints. If I were to attempt to put his ideas graphically, it might look like this:Įarlier_M_N_O_P_Later (B-series) And they are therefore not in the order M, O, N, P, or O, N, M, P, or in any other possible order… And the C series, while it determines the order, does not determine the direction.
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They are, let us say, in the order M, N, O, P. He described it thus:īut this other series – let us call it the C series – is not temporal, for it involves no change, but only an order. However, McTaggart, who coined the terms A-series and B-series in his essay “The Unreality of Time” also briefly mentioned the C-series. You would, of course, be correct, assuming we exist in a universe where only the A-series and the B-series are valid perceptions of events in Time. If I were to say to you that the extinction of feudalism led to the pandemic of the Bubonic Plague, you would tell me that I was wrong and that I had gotten my facts backward: the outbreak of the Plague led to the eventual extinction of feudalism and the invention of a middle class.