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Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.

gregday posted:

I think I broke my brain thinking about the Blue team member that gets sealed up inside the wall at Stalsk-12.

So from his perspective, he’s trapped inside the wall. But from the red (forward) perspective, they exploded a wall and a guy emerges inverted and returns backwards to the blue helicopters. So in the winds of entropy, is this guy hosed or does he get out OK?

This created a new paradoxical question: if inverted people never revert, then from the forward perspective, where do they “come from”? That’s probably a question that arises from linear thinking and as the movie suggests I should just not think about it.

They come from a turnstile. If a normal person observed an inverted person (who never went back to normal) they would see them dead, then rise to life, then they would live their life in reverse until they walked back into the turnstile they originally used to invert. At the same time their "regular" self would have been living their life simultaneously and they would do so normally until they entered the turnstile. At this point both versions of the person would "vanish" and that would be that. The turnstyle would effectively be the end of their "future".

If nobody saved that guy then there's a corpse in the wall that (from a normal perspective) slowly get fresher, until a rocket hits the wall and a living dude pops out of it and walks backwards into his blue shipping crate and flies away.

Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 20:15 on May 6, 2021

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Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

pospysyl posted:

Here's the issue: what if Present Sator closes the box and opens it a minute later. Logically, there should be a gold bar there; in the inverted timeline Sator hasn't taken it out yet. Can Sator get unlimited gold in this way?

So David Lewis writes this about the grandfather paradox in four-dimensionalism. All the pieces of the paradox are "compossible," which means they're all things you can do (within our time travelling world). However, killing your own grandfather would create a paradox and is therefore logically impossible. This means that any attempt to kill one's own grandfather would have to be stopped by coincidence, like slipping on a banana peel.

So Sator returning to the time-post spot again and again is compossible. But he simply doesn't.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

If the film were playing fair, you would have an army of inverted skeletons. Tenet people could place them in strategic locations to undecompose and 'spring back to life' when needed.

Unfortunately, the film uses "winds of entropy" to say that the corpses just pop in/out of existence offscreen.

There is nothing fair about an army of inverted skeletons.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.
By the way just for interest's sake there's a classic SF story that SORT of plays by Tenet's rules by Ian Watson called the Very Slow Time Machine, I would be surprised if Nolan hadn't read it at some point. It won some awards IIRC and it's interesting, although thematically very far away from Tenet. It does feature people becoming Time Cultists but in a very different way.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Zaphod42 posted:

Except, here's where it gets weird.

What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT. This then means the gold is no longer sitting in the box, so Past Sator sees no gold.

I think that actually works?

Nope, because Sator cannot take any gold out of the box. He can only put gold into the box.

gregday posted:

I think there’s a few tiers of sensemaking in Tenet

Almost everything makes sense, if you accept that both inversion and uninversion are ‘contagious’ in ways that may as well be random. Like, just knowing about invertedness causes parts of Protag’s mind to invert.

What does not work at all are the instances of teleportation.

When the SUV “unhits” the car’s mirror, a chunk of glass flies up from the road and attaches itself. The logic is that the glass of the mirror ‘caught’ the invertedness of the SUV. But how did that particular chunk of glass end up on the road there if it initially, spontaneously, fell off miles away from that point? The mirror (and its components) may be going backwards in time, but it’s still moving forwards in space.

gregday
May 23, 2003

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

By the way just for interest's sake there's a classic SF story that SORT of plays by Tenet's rules by Ian Watson called the Very Slow Time Machine, I would be surprised if Nolan hadn't read it at some point. It won some awards IIRC and it's interesting, although thematically very far away from Tenet. It does feature people becoming Time Cultists but in a very different way.

I have a feeling Tenet is mostly because Nolan saw Primer and thought what if they could leave the boxes while traveling backwards, and also James Bond.

gregday
May 23, 2003

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Nope, because Sator cannot take any gold out of the box. He can only put gold into the box.


Almost everything makes sense, if you accept that both inversion and uninversion are ‘contagious’ in ways that may as well be random. Like, just knowing about invertedness causes parts of Protag’s mind to invert.

What does not work at all are the instances of teleportation.

When the SUV “unhits” the car’s mirror, a chunk of glass flies up from the road and attaches itself. The logic is that the glass of the mirror ‘caught’ the invertedness of the SUV. But how did that particular chunk of glass end up on the road there if it initially, spontaneously, fell off miles away from that point? The mirror (and its components) may be going backwards in time, but it’s still moving forwards in space.

I think we have to just accept that for inverted events that require things to already be there (Neil's body in the hypocenter, the gun on the floor in the Oslo turnstile, the solider in the wall at Stalsk-12...) there is a point in the forward time perspective when objects just materialize where they will need to be in order to be (un-)moved there. This is why the film shows us the bullet holes in the Oslo proving window glass expanding right as they walk into the room. Those bullet holes are about to be unshot and disappear... but first they need to exist, so the universe creates them.



edit: Someone else pointed out it's kind of funny why TP is running so fast after he reverts in Oslo. Because the first time he was there and they fought the two "antagonists" the emerged from the turnstile, TP asked Neil what happened to the other guy, and Neil says "I took care of him." For all TP knows, Neil is about to loving kill him after he pops out of the vault.

gregday fucked around with this message at 21:14 on May 6, 2021

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Nope, because Sator cannot take any gold out of the box. He can only put gold into the box.

Uh.... why??

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.
The answer is actually clean-up squads, sent by an unknown entity. Possibly Doctor Who.

They send people back inverted to pick up all the corpses, guns, and other crap that's lying around after these inverted invents, because as we've definitely proven it's not possible for a normal person to interact with an inverted object outside of a handful of very specific ways.

So: We are to infer the damage to normal objects by inverted objects "heals" itself over time, unless the damage is done to normal living objects, in which case the "time radiation" causes the wound to be fatal. Of course, if you're inverted and stabbed by a lockpick in the arm, there is no "time radiation" (despite this being functionally an identical situation of a person being wounded by an inverted object, although in this case the polarities are switched) and instead you experience a wound that heals faster than normal but appears before you are stabbed. At the moment of stabbing it heals itself, sort of how the windows "uncrack" as the bullets fly backwards through them.

I really am coming around to SMG's take that it's not possible to actually truly understand what's happening here.

Zaphod42 posted:

Uh.... why??

If he takes inverted gold out of the box he's taken it out in the gold's past. But we know definitively that the gold's past was it sitting in a case in the ground, so it's a TIME PARADOX. It can't come out of the case in it's own past, as we know it was there the entire time. The method where the turnstile just randomly spits out a pair of gold cases and he buries one does not violate causality.

Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 21:22 on May 6, 2021

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

Zaphod42 posted:

Uh.... why??

So the inverted gold is travelling backwards in time, and is at some spatial location. Non-inverted Sator receives the package. He goes to pick it up forward-time direction. As he picks up the gold, forward-time moving, the gold at time T+1 is now at two overlapping spatial locations: where it was heading backwards and now how it is moving forwards.

I think there are a number of ways around that, but that's the basic problem.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

If he takes inverted gold out of the box he's taken it out in the gold's past. But we know definitively that the gold's past was it sitting in a case in the ground, so it's a TIME PARADOX. It can't come out of the case in it's own past, as we know it was there the entire time. The method where the turnstile just randomly spits out a pair of gold cases and he buries one does not violate causality.

The same gold existing at two different spatial locations at the same time slice is not, in and of itself, a problem. If all four dimensions are equal, it's no more of a problem than someone being in the same spatial location at two different times.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

If he takes inverted gold out of the box he's taken it out in the gold's past. But we know definitively that the gold's past was it sitting in a case in the ground, so it's a TIME PARADOX. It can't come out of the case in it's own past, as we know it was there the entire time. The method where the turnstile just randomly spits out a pair of gold cases and he buries one does not violate causality.

This is where the overlapping inverted and non-inverted objects get weird. The gold is travelling backwards from the future. Future people put it in the box. At some point, Sator removes it from the box. That's perfectly consistent with its backwards travelling life. Then, it is not in the box in the further past, and Sator doesn't see it.

The problem is you need to invert the gold while its still inverted, so like I said before the real solution is to collect the gold while you are inverted, then un-invert yourself while you have the gold with you. If you're travelling backwards synced with the gold when you dig it up, it works okay, right?

The only real problem is how does a non-inverted person remove the gold, given that it will take them non-zero amounts of time to do so.

The method where the turnstile spits out 2 pieces of gold works, but its not the only solution, and it requires more "something from nothing" than the scenario I'm talking about, which is closer to what the movie presents things as being.

gregday
May 23, 2003

Why are people assuming that there’s only one time capsule and dead drop location? I assumed every time Sator and the future exchange materials it’s in a new location with a different capsule.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

gregday posted:

Why are people assuming that there’s only one time capsule and dead drop location? I assumed every time Sator and the future exchange materials it’s in a new location with a different capsule.

We are assuming that too, that has nothing to do with the problem being discussed. This is all for a single drop, one single transmission of gold.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Zaphod42 posted:

Uh.... why??

Because, from Sator’s perspective, the box is always empty until he puts the gold into it.

His entire goal is to send the gold into the future. If he takes the gold out of the box at any point before the future happens, he is preventing that goal from happening.

To simplify, let’s replace the gold with a sandwich in a refrigerator. The Future-Mans want to keep the sandwich fresh for lunch tomorrow.

If Sator takes the sandwich out of the refrigerator and eats it today, the Future-Mans cannot eat it tomorrow. There is no way for Sator to ever eat the sandwich today and still leave it in the fridge for tomorrow.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Because, from Sator’s perspective, the box is always empty until he puts the gold into it.

His entire goal is to send the gold into the future. If he takes the gold out of the box at any point before the future happens, he is preventing that goal from happening.

To simplify, let’s replace the gold with a sandwich in a refrigerator. The Future-Mans want to keep the sandwich fresh for lunch tomorrow.

If Sator takes the sandwich out of the refrigerator and eats it today, the Future-Mans cannot eat it tomorrow. There is no way for Sator to ever eat the sandwich today and still leave it in the fridge for tomorrow.

You are responding to some completely different context than the conversation I was having and the post you quoted. We're talking about Sator receiving gold from the future, not sending gold into the future. You're on an entirely different page.

I understand how the time travel works read my last 3 posts. You don't need to waste time on a sandwich metaphor.

gregday
May 23, 2003

Just as a reminder they say in the commentary or maybe it’s the Making Of book that they did not sit down and meticulously map out all the rules and interactions for inversion. They mostly just went with what intuitively felt right and would make for a good visual.

It’s a super fun mechanic to think about but there are going to be things that just do not work.

pospysyl
Nov 10, 2012



gregday posted:

Just as a reminder they say in the commentary or maybe it’s the Making Of book that they did not sit down and meticulously map out all the rules and interactions for inversion. They mostly just went with what intuitively felt right and would make for a good visual.

It’s a super fun mechanic to think about but there are going to be things that just do not work.

Yes, obviously Tenet is not meant to be an accurate depiction of the phenomenology of time travel. What these flights of fancy are meant to do is convince the audience that time travel is a transcendent experience, beyond our normal comprehension. When the Protagonist is told that fire freezes instead of burns as he goes through the imposing threshold, it's meant to build suspense of entering a whole new realm of experience that hasn't ever been filmed before. If the Protagonist really was entering a world where fire freezes instead of burns, it actually would be incredibly different from normal life. The sun would cool him instead of warm him, his sweat would scald him, that kind of thing. However, such experience is beyond the Nolans' imagination, so all they have is reversed tape and the poorly thought out dialogue. When we talk about how the gold can't simultaneously be in and out of the time capsule, what we're actually talking about is how the Nolans have failed to depict an actual experience.

Android Apocalypse
Apr 28, 2009

The future is
AUTOMATED
and you are
OBSOLETE

Illegal Hen
I think people are confused/upset since Nolan's last 2 movies (Interstellar and Dunkirk) are relatively accurate in terms of science/history. Tenet is back to more Inception where the crux of the technology is not explained and now we have almost 30 pages of discourse over it.

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..
I'm not expecting any real perfection, I just think that time travel on four-dimensionalism makes for fun logic games.

pospysyl
Nov 10, 2012



Interstellar guy getting dumped in a wormhole probably wouldn't happen like is shown on screen, but at least it's portrayed as completely otherworldly and bizarre. In Tenet the future guys can apparently create alternate universes at a whim and all they do with it is bury treasure for a Russian mobster. The effect as told to us is so extreme and conceptual, but the actual event that we see is practical and that contradiction is a serious aesthetic problem.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.

gregday posted:

Why are people assuming that there’s only one time capsule and dead drop location? I assumed every time Sator and the future exchange materials it’s in a new location with a different capsule.

The problem is not that a non-inverted person can't interact with an inverted object. The problem is that an inverted object's past is a normal person's future, and that if you know the past you can't change it - it's totally deterministic

So if you see an inverted gold bar on a table in a room, you're free to walk in and pick it up just fine. If you see an inverted gold bar in a room with a post-it note stuck to it that says "MMJS put this here in 2041" and you walk into the room and pick it up, then the only logical explanation is that either a) it's not actually an inverted gold bar or b) the note is lying, because clearly it hasn't been sitting there for 20 years. In fact from the perspective of the gold bar you put it there and then walked out of the room backwards!

Another way to look at this is that if I were a regular person standing in a room with a turnstile and suddenly the turnstile activates and spits out an inverted SMG and a regular SMG there is nothing on Earth or Heaven that I will be able to do to prevent inverted SMG from entering that turnstile. I couldn't trip him or physically force him away from walking (backwards) into it because that's SMG's past, my future, and SMG's past definitively ends with them entering that turnstile. If I were somehow able to prevent them from entering the turnstile it's a TIME PARADOX.

gregday
May 23, 2003

Hand Knit posted:

I'm not expecting any real perfection, I just think that time travel on four-dimensionalism makes for fun logic games.

Exactly. I’m still not convinced that this is a great film by artistic standards (plot development, character motivations and arc). But drat I’ve had fun headaches teasing out all the what-if’s and wait how did that work?’s it’s out in my brain. That has to count for something.

gregday
May 23, 2003

If you were inverted would it be possible to rob a jewelry store?

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

The problem is not that a non-inverted person can't interact with an inverted object. The problem is that an inverted object's past is a normal person's future, and that if you know the past you can't change it - it's totally deterministic

There isn't actually a problem here. Sure it's improbably and implausible and narratively contrived that people don't interfere. But logically it works just fine. (And, as a side note, this isn't actually determinism that we're talking about. In fact, we're kind of trying to reconcile 4D time travel with a lack of determinism.)

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Zaphod42 posted:

You are responding to some completely different context than the conversation I was having and the post you quoted. We're talking about Sator receiving gold from the future, not sending gold into the future. You're on an entirely different page.

I understand how the time travel works read my last 3 posts. You don't need to waste time on a sandwich metaphor.

"What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT."

In this part, you're switching randomly between an inverted POV and an uninverted POV, while also skipping forwards and backwards in time.

If we arrange your paragraph in linear order, it reads like this:

"Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. He then TAKES GOLD OUT. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards."

But that is still flipping the POVs, which is why the logic is off. Fully corrected, it reads like this:

"Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. He then PUTS GOLD IN. Then Present Sator sees gold, closes box. Then sends email. Then future receives gold."

SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 22:24 on May 6, 2021

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Android Apocalypse posted:

I think people are confused/upset since Nolan's last 2 movies (Interstellar and Dunkirk) are relatively accurate in terms of science/history. Tenet is back to more Inception where the crux of the technology is not explained and now we have almost 30 pages of discourse over it.

Eh, Interstellar's monologue about "Love is the only thing that transcends time and space" basically invalidates everything else in it.

gregday
May 23, 2003

The movie doesn’t state with 100% confidence that changing the determined past is impossible. That’s certainly Neil’s belief, but if it were a known fact then they would know Sator will inevitably fail. Instead it strongly suggests the past is unchangeable and never shows us anything to the contrary. But it’s kind of a Nolan scifi trademark that we don’t completely understand the science we are using.

Right after they invert in Tallinn, befor TP heads out, he asks Neil:

“Sator threatened to kill her in the past. What happens to her here if he does?”

Neil is dumbstruck and hesitates before saying: ”That’s unknowable.”

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

"What if Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. He then TAKES THE GOLD OUT."

In this part, you're switching randomly between an inverted POV and an uninverted POV, while also skipping forwards and backwards in time.

If we arrange your paragraph in linear order, it reads like this:

"Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. Then closes box. He then TAKES GOLD OUT. Then Present Sator opens box, sees gold. Then sends email. Then future sends gold backwards."

But that is still flipping the POVs, which is why the logic is off. Fully corrected, it reads like this:

"Past Sator opens box. Sees no gold. He then PUTS GOLD IN. Then Present Sator sees gold, closes box. Then sends email. Then future receives gold."

This is an entirely pointless semantic argument that adds nothing functionally to the conversation, so I'm really confused what you think you're saying.

Yes, okay, from the gold's perspective Sator puts the gold in. But from Sator's perspective he takes it out. That changes nothing.

Yes, any conversation with inverted time can be phrased multiple ways based on the time perspective you're looking at. Arguing like one of those perspectives is "right" and the others are "wrong" is nonsense and pointless. Either you understand what I'm saying or you don't. You clearly do. So why argue semantics?

But Sator absolutely does take the gold out, from his non-inverted perspective. That's what we're talking about, and you haven't added anything mechanically to that discussion.

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

gregday posted:

The movie doesn’t state with 100% confidence that changing the determined past is impossible. That’s certainly Neil’s belief, but if it were a known fact then they would know Sator will inevitably fail. Instead it strongly suggests the past is unchangeable and never shows us anything to the contrary. But it’s kind of a Nolan scifi trademark that we don’t completely understand the science we are using.

I think this goes back to the point where changing thing is technically compossible but logically impossible, so for one reason or another it just doesn't happen. After all, if all times are equally real, then it was always the case that things were a certain way at T1.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.

Hand Knit posted:

There isn't actually a problem here. Sure it's improbably and implausible and narratively contrived that people don't interfere. But logically it works just fine. (And, as a side note, this isn't actually determinism that we're talking about. In fact, we're kind of trying to reconcile 4D time travel with a lack of determinism.)

Tenet is the block universe. It's 100% deterministic. The key scene for understanding this is when the Protagonist first inverts, he sees a puddle starts to ripple before he steps in it. He nonetheless steps in it, in the exact place where it was rippling. He could never have "chosen" not to step in the puddle.

gregday posted:

If you were inverted would it be possible to rob a jewelry store?

I've thought through it and I believe the answer is no. The issue here is that the un-inverted jewelry can only be in one place and must go back to the store at the end of the sequence (since the thieves are inverted, then from our "normal" perspective they are putting the jewelry back in the store and walking out backwards - from their perspective they are taking it and leaving normally). Much like our inverted gold, this knowledge of the jewelry's final location - in the store for sale - means that our inverted thieves can't do anything that wouldn't result in that outcome. My original thought was that the thieves could sell the gold to a fence, which the jewelry store buys the gold from - but that would require the gold to be in two places at once - in the inverted thieves possession, AND at the store being displayed for sale.

Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:31 on May 6, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Zaphod42 posted:

But Sator absolutely does take the gold out, from his non-inverted perspective. That's what we're talking about, and you haven't added anything mechanically to that discussion.

But he doesn't. From a normal perspective, he is putting gold in.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Hand Knit posted:

I think this goes back to the point where changing thing is technically compossible but logically impossible, so for one reason or another it just doesn't happen. After all, if all times are equally real, then it was always the case that things were a certain way at T1.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Tenet is the block universe. It's 100% deterministic.

That's another semantic argument, because it depends what you mean by saying it is or isn't deterministic.

I think Hand Knit would agree with you that its deterministic in that sense, but I think they're saying that since the past has to have "happened" simultaneously with the future, its not "determinism" in the classical sense which involves a cause-effect chain, but rather a single instantaneous state of the universe at inception.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

But he doesn't. From a normal perspective, he is putting gold in.

See this is what I meant when I said you're having a completely different conversation than the rest of the thread.

No, we are talking about the future sending gold back in time to Sator. He is going from a state of not having gold to having gold by gaining the gold that was sent to him from the future. Any observer would describe that as taking gold out.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.
Best example I can think of to illustrate Tenet's causality at the moment is if I were wanting to frame a house, I would say "I should go through a turnstile 80 times, once an hour, so that I have 40 helpers" and then immediately a bus would pull up and out would pour 40 versions of me, each two hours older than the last, who could help. (there's also 40 inverted versions of me, presumably hanging around in a blue-lit room reading Harper's Weekly and taking a nap or something). All 40 versions would have experienced an hour of helping 39 other versions of me frame a house.

Tenet's time travel does not allow for a world where one version experienced having no helpers, one version experienced having one helper, one version experienced having two helpers, etc.

There's also the idea that I think "I should go through a turnstile 80 times, once an hour, so that I have 40 helpers" and only 38 show up, with the 38th guy saying "oh I honestly am getting too tired to help". It's not deterministic in the way that stuff HAS to happen how I think it should. Subjectively I'm going to live out 80 hours of life going back to the same spot in a bus and helping frame a house and then going back into a turnstile to do it again, but in real time 40 time clones are going to show up and help each other for an hour.

Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:44 on May 6, 2021

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Tenet is the block universe. It's 100% deterministic. The key scene for understanding this is when the Protagonist first inverts, he sees a puddle starts to ripple before he steps in it. He nonetheless steps in it, in the exact place where it was rippling. He could never have "chosen" not to step in the puddle.

So this is going in to technical definitions that aren't necessarily going to contribute to anything else we're talking about, but what the hell. Why not?

Determinism is about cause and effect, and doesn't presuppose any particular theory of time. It just means that anything that happens can be entirely explained by antecedent causes. We should note that this is not necessarily incompatible with free will — a lot of people hold some version of what's called compatibilism. This is gonna involve something like using your decisions (which could have been otherwise, on some sense) as antecedent causes to explain your actions.

What we're talking about is something else. That fact that some state of affairs is the case at some particular point in time is 'timelessly true' because that's just what the state of affairs was at that point in time. This doesn't have anything to do with causation. Rather, the fact that some state of affairs is timelessly true just has to do with the fact that some state of affairs was the case at that point in time.

Altogether then, P could have chosen not to step in the puddle. But he didn't.

Megaman's Jockstrap
Jul 16, 2000

What a horrible thread to have a post.

Hand Knit posted:

Altogether then, P could have chosen not to step in the puddle. But he didn't.

First, thanks for engaging with me. I'm having a lot of fun discussing this with you guys.

So, to the point of the puddle: I do believe that he could not. The movie says "either way you made it happen" when showing the video tape, but it's lying. If the effect comes before the cause, the cause must occur, ergo there is no choice and no free will.

Think about driving the inverted car. In order to "start" it you would walk up and get in and depress the brake, then push the start button. From the inverted car's perspective, you just stopped the car, turned the car off, got out, and walked away (backwards).

Now you're ready to drive, so you put the car in reverse and release the brake. From your perspective, the car would start rolling gently forward. From the car's perspective, it was rolling gently backwards, and you hit the brake to stop it.

Now it's time to drive the car. At this point all the inputs would be reversed and you will feel the effects of your driving before you actually performed the action. You would feel the suspension start to lean in the direction you were going to turn before you turned. And at no point could you feel the car start to accelerate (which meant that you were braking) and say "oh I'm going to step on the accelerator instead, I'm going to turn the wheel in the opposite direction from which the car's frame is leaning". That's simply not possible to do without a TIME PARADOX. That's why I say there's no free will.

Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:57 on May 6, 2021

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

First, thanks for engaging with me. I'm having a lot of fun discussing this with you guys.

So, to the point of the puddle: I do believe that he could not. The movie says "either way you made it happen" when showing the video tape, but it's lying. If the effect comes before the cause, the cause must occur, ergo there is no choice and no free will.

Think about driving the inverted car. In order to "start" it you would walk up and get in and depress the brake, then push the start button. From the inverted car's perspective, you just stopped the car, turned the car off, got out, and walked away (backwards).

Now you're ready to drive, so you put the car in reverse and release the brake. From your perspective, the car would start rolling gently forward. From the car's perspective, it was rolling gently backwards, and you hit the brake to stop it.

Now it's time to drive the car. At this point all the inputs would be reversed and you will feel the effects of your driving before you actually performed the action. You would feel the suspension start to lean in the direction you were going to turn before you turned. And at no point could you feel the car start to accelerate (which meant that you were braking) and say "oh I'm going to step on the accelerator instead, I'm going to turn the wheel in the opposite direction from which the car's frame is leaning". That's simply not possible to do without a TIME PARADOX. That's why I say there's no free will.

Think about where you are right now. Sitting in front of your computer, in your office or living room, reading this post. Now, there are a lot of ways this could have been different. You could've chosen to go somewhere else, you could've chosen do something other than sit in front of your computer, and you could've chosen to visit a different website instead of this one. So there's a lot of ways in which the state of affairs in which you find yourself at this time could've been different. But there's also another way in which they couldn't have been different. You must be in front of your computer now because you are in front of your computer now. You must be reading this post now because you are reading this post now.

The necessity which happens in Tenet is (by and large, there's obviously a lot of funkiness) of this second type. He steps in the puddle at time T because he stepped in the puddle at time T. There's no 'first pass' or 'second pass' by which things could be different. There's only one time T, and the way things were at that time is just the way things are at that time.And this is compatible with free will. P chose to step in the puddle at time T. It's not like time T ever stopped existing or was revisited. What happened at time T is 'timelessly true' — it's just a coordinate in time like your room is a coordinate in space.

Now what if P, enlightened about four-dimensional time, explicitly sets out to gently caress things up? Intentions present their own special weirdness. But for us, now, it's enough to say that what happened with the puddle is necessary not because it had to happen (it didn't), but because it did happen.

So what about the car? I mean, to start, we're probably going to have to attribute a lot of how the car works to movie magic. Like, if inverted fire is cold instead of hot, what exactly is happening with the car's engine?

As for the paradox you say you're identifying, I don't think I see it. There's definitely all sorts of contrived weirdness — what you press in what order in order to make the car go is a hell of a thing to figure out — but there doesn't seem to be anything logically impossible. There doesn't seem to be any point at which, for instance, you have the same object be at two interfering positions at the same time.

gregday
May 23, 2003

I don't believe there's any point where an inverted/normal person drives a normal/inverted car. All normal people are driving normal cars and inverted people drive inverted cars (TP stopping the SUV with his hand on the brake notwithstanding). So while the interaction between the car and the rest of the world is funky, I don't think there's any reason to think the interaction between car and driver in this movie would be anything unusual. I don't see any reason a person would have to put it in reverse to drive it forward.

Dalaram
Jun 6, 2002

Marshall/Kirtaner 8/24 nevar forget! (omg pedo)
Watched it twice on a plane. Disliked it, read some of the thread here, then watched it on the return flight and liked it better.

A couple thoughts or Q’s

- Is the whole algorithm drop meant to put the fully assembled algorithm in a known position, so the future could one day get it, and reverse time flow?
-Does Neil know he dies? How? And If Neil knows enough to go back and take a bullet to open the gate, then why does he also “change gears and fruitlessly try and warn P about the trap?
- it’s implied that Sator is visiting the turnstile in Freeport 3-4 times a year; but is he actually inverting, or just collecting future poo poo?
[spoiler] - and there doesn’t seem to be a way to “speed up time”, so if you invert, how do you revert, and get back to before invert? Or can you? Because if Sator was inverting, how does he ever get back to current time?
- to further pull on that, if P and Neil have known each other for years, did than imply that P reverted and just... hid for years until the right time, where he could start tenet? And does that mean he kills himself just before his past self joins post opera?
-when they agree to hide the pieces, are they going inverted, then burying them to put them further in the last, or leaving them in forward time, to be possibly found in the future?
- at the final battle, how do you ensure that future bullets that were shot aren’t killing your inverted team as they pass; or vice versa? Or is that just solved by having both parties in the same time flow, so don’t shoot your backward moving buddies?
-Also, will red team and blue team ever be in the same time zone again, if blue reverts?
- ALSO; why not have blue team revert, and charge back in with red?


Overall, I kind of agree with an earlier comment. If you pay just enough thought, but not too much, this is enjoyable. Not as good as inception, but just intriguing enough to make you think

Dalaram fucked around with this message at 00:16 on May 7, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

So, to the point of the puddle: I do believe that he could not. The movie says "either way you made it happen" when showing the video tape, but it's lying. If the effect comes before the cause, the cause must occur, ergo there is no choice and no free will.

Things go out the window when you see the famous trailer shot of the building simultaneously exploding and unexploding - which means that building has only ever existed for the fraction of a second where neither rocket has hit.

You would assume that the building could not be destroyed without first being built, but there's effectively a God in the film who intervenes to ensure the consistency of the universe - by destroying the building offscreen so that it can be later undestroyed. If the protagonist doesn't step in the puddle, the puddle will just settle down.

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Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Hand Knit posted:

The necessity which happens in Tenet is (by and large, there's obviously a lot of funkiness) of this second type. He steps in the puddle at time T because he stepped in the puddle at time T. There's no 'first pass' or 'second pass' by which things could be different. There's only one time T, and the way things were at that time is just the way things are at that time.And this is compatible with free will. P chose to step in the puddle at time T. It's not like time T ever stopped existing or was revisited. What happened at time T is 'timelessly true' — it's just a coordinate in time like your room is a coordinate in space.

Right, basically TENET exists in the same universe type as Watchmen's Manhattan. Everything is always happening, simultaneously, all at once. Time is an illusion, everything is a frozen moment. They all are happening and will happen and have happened. As you say, there's no "first pass". It all just IS. All at once. It always was and always will be. So there can't be paradoxes. But it means that anything that would be a paradox, you didn't do. You can't do.

Hand Knit posted:

So what about the car? I mean, to start, we're probably going to have to attribute a lot of how the car works to movie magic. Like, if inverted fire is cold instead of hot, what exactly is happening with the car's engine?

Well, it depends upon if the car is inverted, if the driver is inverted, if the fuel is inverted, if the spark plugs are inverted, etc. etc.

Clearly Nolan didn't think too hard about how cars work.

The big problem being that cars are aspirated, they breathe air from the environment. That air wouldn't be inverted. So that means you can't use inverted gasoline. So then you have a car that sucks up heat instead of producing it? Yeah its weird.

I guess you could maybe get away with having inverted gas in an inverted engine with normal air and using hand wave of "temporal friction" or whatever to say the air gets inverted by contact.

But otherwise all inverted cars would have to be carrying MASSIVE air tanks, to the point where they may not even be able to drive.

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