Kevin's Watch

TC has all these memories from the AOT, but they are all of the past. Does that mean there is very little future left?

I had thought that maybe at the start of AATE there would be another time travel into the past, as the only way to avoid immediate destruction.

This has made me wonder whether the AOT is something that has to break all in one go, or whether it can break partially, so that there is a moment where the world ends and time is broken but that other times before that moment would continue to exist.

If that was so then there could be some sort of (pretty desperate I suppose) plan to devise some way of repairing the pratial break of the AOT.

Simanent wrote:TC has all these memories from the AOT, but they are all of the past. Does that mean there is very little future left?
No...it simply means one cannot have memories of events that haven't happened yet.
I had thought that maybe at the start of AATE there would be another time travel into the past, as the only way to avoid immediate destruction.
That would make for a boring book. LA "must" charge forth, doesn't she?
This has made me wonder whether the AOT is something that has to break all in one go, or whether it can break partially, so that there is a moment where the world ends and time is broken but that other times before that moment would continue to exist....An excellent point/question...I suppose whatever the author decides will dictate that one.
If that was so then there could be some sort of (pretty desperate I suppose) plan to devise some way of repairing the pratial break of the AOT.

....There's nothing in any of the text to confirm / deny my following theory: The Arch is such that, if it breaks, it's 100% broken & gone. Only way to "fix" it, is to build a new one.[/b]

Caesures are described as rents in the fabric of time. his sounds like a kind of danage to the arch. This implies the arch is not either all whole or all gone.

Simanent wrote:Caesures are described as rents in the fabric of time. his sounds like a kind of danage to the arch. This implies the arch is not either all whole or all gone.

I thought it was kinda like metal fatigue, or weathering concrete on a bridge...there is damage, but it's still a bridge.....until suddenly, it isn't.

But a bridge is covering the gap in space. If a part of the bridge breaks away in one place it still can covers space in another place.

The AoT covers a gap in time. So if this can be seen as an analogy, if it breaks away in one part of time it might still be there in another part of time.

Vader wrote:But a bridge is covering the gap in space. If a part of the bridge breaks away in one place it still can covers space in another place.

The AoT covers a gap in time. So if this can be seen as an analogy, if it breaks away in one part of time it might still be there in another part of time.

Good point, but functionally it is no longer a bridge: it can't do it's job, the traffic can't flow.

Up to the point where it broke in space the traffic can still flow. If you couldn't see the damage you would still perceive it as a bridge until you dropped through the whole - same could be the case with a bridge in time.

I think we are now entering a very interesting field. Do things exists as such or just because of the way we perceive them? Is it a phenomenological or an ontological/metaphysical question?

Vader wrote:Up to the point where it broke in space the traffic can still flow. If you couldn't see the damage you would still perceive it as a bridge until you dropped through the whole - same could be the case with a bridge in time.

It could be...but the question is [and I sure don't know the answer] because the bridge IS time...does its destruction only stop time from happening from break forward? or does it erase all that happened within it before? [and does it make a difference if the Arch actually IS time, or just sets the rules for time-ness?]

Vader wrote: I think we are now entering a very interesting field. Do things exists as such or just because of the way we perceive them? Is it a phenomenological or an ontological/metaphysical question?

It is interesting [at least to me]. My "fallback" position is: Things exist. But if they exist in a metaphysical [absolute/changeless] is-ness, nothing means/does anything. It's a clock counting emptiness. [I'm gonna use that phrase for something]. OTOH, perception means the is-ness is incomplete/unknowable/contextual.
What I struggle with often is: are the "rules" of interaction, thing to thing, themselves things? Or properties of the things themselsves? [and this all gets even more complicated once you postulate intelligences that are self-aware/self-reflective]. writer-word-reader: all ARE, what is real when they encounter each other?

There seem to be two different ways that the AOT might be broken.

One way is by changing the past in such a way that the future is also changed in way that means the journey into the past could not have occurred. This would be like distorting the arch into an impossible shape and would seem to mean destroying it completely.

The other way is by an expression of an excess of power. It is not obvious to me why that would destroy the arch- but it has been made clear many times that such power would indeed destroy the arch.

Perhaps these two types of destruction would have different consequences?

Simanent wrote:TC has all these memories from the AOT, but they are all of the past. Does that mean there is very little future left?

The simple answer is that: (a) within the universe of The Last Chronicles, the future has yet to be decided and its final shape will be determined by the choices and decisions of the characters in the story, so as yet there isn't a single future but many possible futures; (b) within our universe, SRD is obviously not going to pack a whole lot of spoilers into Chapter One of AATE.

Fragments of knowledge about the future could have been described in such a way that they are more teasers than spoilers, so that need not be a final reason for TC post-TW not to have any future knowledge.

I think you are correct though about freedom. There must be a principle of freedom that overrides even the law of time.

If you say that this is achieved by saying that the future does not yet exist, this makes the AOT an unfinished structure.

Perhaps it's not so much an arch of time as an arch of causality.

In FR, the Mahdoubt implies that the Theomach has knowledge of futures of the times he exists in.

Simanent wrote:Fragments of knowledge about the future could have been described in such a way that they are more teasers than spoilers, so that need not be a final reason for TC post-TW not to have any future knowledge.

Good point, and makes me think of some of Linden's "visions" when she's translated to the Land at the beginning of ROTE.