Excerpt on 'if you knew your future'
EZRA KLEIN: So you have a few different stories around this question of, if the future’s already happened, we could potentially know it. And what would knowing the future do to a person? So in one of your stories, it inspires people to act to bring about that future, to play their assigned role. In another, it leads many to stop acting altogether, to fall into this almost coma-like existence. What do you think it would do to you?
TED CHIANG: I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can know because I don’t think the human mind is really compatible with having detailed knowledge of one’s future. I should clarify that I believe in free will. And we can talk about that in a minute. I don’t want my stories to be taken as an argument that human beings lack free will. I believe that human beings do have free will, if you think about the question correctly.
However, what some of my stories address is, the idea that, OK, given that Einstein seems to have proven that the future is fixed, if you could get knowledge of the future, what would that do to you? This is not a situation that any of us need to worry about because we’re never going to get information from the future. But for me, it is a very sort of philosophically interesting question as to how would a mind cope with that. Could a mind cope with that? I don’t think that there are any really good solutions to that situation in terms of trying to reconcile sort of logical consistency with our experience of volition. I think that would be very, very difficult.
EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you a question that I think about fairly often, I think partly because I’m Jewish culturally. If I could tell you, if you could know with certainty the date of your death, would you want to know it?
TED CHIANG: Yeah, I probably would. I probably would.
EZRA KLEIN: Really? Oh, I would not, under any circumstances, want to know.
TED CHIANG: I mean, it seems like it might be useful so that you could make some preparations. It might be good to get your affairs in order. We’re not talking about a lot of detailed information because I think the more information you have, yeah, the more that it’s going to mess with you. The more information you have, the closer we get to this situation that I sometimes write about, where, yeah, if you have perfect knowledge of what’s going to happen to you, yeah, that, I think, is kind of incompatible with human volition. But very limited pieces of information could be helpful.
EZRA KLEIN: I think the rationally correct response is yes. I mean, if I knew I was going to die 10 years from now as opposed to 50 years from now, I would live the 10 years differently, or I think I would. At the same time, I think if I knew that, the problem is I would be overwhelmed by anxiety for many of those 10 years. So, however I wanted to live them, it might be hard for me to approach them in that way, which may be simply a psychological failing on my part. But it’s that collision between the information would be good, and the mind does not feel built to handle the information that I always find fascinating about that question.
TED CHIANG: I don’t think anyone would claim that it would be easy to have this information, that it would be fun or pleasant. But we do have examples of people who have some idea that they will die in the near term, and it’s no cakewalk. But I think largely, people are able to cope with it. And it doesn’t seem like it’s permanently debilitating. It is difficult in the short-term, but I think people are mostly able to cope.