I’ve long believed we don’t really have free will. If choice takes place in our brains, and if our brains are made of matter and nothing else, our choices must be governed by laws which take their own course. There’s no room for anything else.
But this interesting thought experiment made me ponder. Suppose I got a chance to kill Hitler when he was six years old, would I do it? Since I don’t believe in free will, I’m pretty sure WWII would have taken place no matter how many times the scene was replayed (that is presuming random quantum effects don’t have an impact.) But if I could really stop WWII in retrospect, would I?
Of course, I needn’t actually kill the young Hitler to prevent the war. As the link above shows, I could perhaps show proof to his parents that I’m from the future and show them what could happen. They would take corrective measures. Or I could be more innovative and do something else. But do I really want to prevent Word War II from happening?
Sitting in the 21st century, I would say – no. I would not prevent the war. But that’s only because it’s all over and done with now and the hurt and pain that WWII caused are left behind us. It won’t happen again if I don’t change the past. Moreover, I would almost certainly not exist and then I won’t have the wonderful life that I do now. Chaotic effects pretty much guarantee that. India might not be a free country and nuclear war may have caused far more damage than the two Japan bombings. Who can say?
So two things are clear. First, free will doesn’t exist. If history were to happen again, nothing would change. Second, don’t mess with the past unless it’s just happened. For example if I stepped in shit 5 seconds ago, I don’t mind going back and stopping that! But if years have passed, I wouldn’t dare to prevent the shit stepping…who knows how the future would change.
What would you do?
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I believe this question has already been addressed in LOST. Someone kills little Ben, but then someone else saves his life. And now he’s really mad.
In reply to Adarsh Bhat
Yeah, I saw that :)
But Lost works on the premise that even if you try and change the future, you can't. And your efforts become part of the past that creates the future in the first place.
Let's imagine that you actually can change the future. After all, who knows anything about time travel right? We can imagine anything we want :)
Hitler was an Aries, his birthday should be sometime now…
I would not have killed him, maybe I would have worked for creating more awareness against prejudices, I would have warned more Jews to escape while they could. See, one couldn't predict he would succeed in what he did, maybe if his party had not been allowed to come in power ( they won by a very small margin, no?)…
I also feel he could not have succeeded without the support of all those who worked with him… :( But that's no justification for what he did, maybe he should have been killed to make sure so many others don't die such horrible deaths… undecided.
Couldn't vote… you need to add an option called none of the above :)
Going back in time and changing the past would in itself present a paradox.
Lets take your example and say you went into the past and, say, killed Hitler as a child and prevented WWII or did anything and did stop WWII. You would then have eliminated your motivation to travel back in time to stop WWII since WWII did not happen and would not have travelled back in time at all.
i wouldn’t want the war to have ot happend because we have an over population of humans
Say if you had killed Hitler and the Nazi party never had the charismatic leader they had to be able to come to power. Is it possible that the also popular Communist party in Germany could have gained power and changed the course of history with an alliance with Russia and perhaps defeating the rest of the allies in the Cold War?
Dear “Unknown” the second,
Are you referring to the Second World War? Because a) without a second world war there would not have been a Cold War (as more than 2 superpowers would have remained, and the atomic bomb would likely not have been developed) and b) there were no “allies” in the Cold War, just NATO versus the Warsaw Pact, and Germany was in fact a major Cold War battleground. Because of this I will proceed from the assumption that you were referring to the Second World War. So… Germany was initially allied with Russia in the second world war (in that, in return for Russia’s nonintervention, they got territory from Germany). They divvied up half of Eastern Europe and started the whole appeasement thing. Then Hitler invaded Russia and Russia switched sides early on. Also… the second world war was caused by the specific policies of the Nazi party, based on the ideas of Adolf Hitler. It was their idea to go start an “Aryan” empire. Nobody can really suggest any other party would have done such. It was the specifically nationalistic policies of the Nazi party that caused the expansion and the repression and extermination of certain minority groups (with Jews at the forefront). A communist Germany could possibly have resulted in a Cold War without a WWII (and possibly without nuclear weapons), with capitalist and communist countries squared off just as they were eventually anyways.
In short, it is difficult, good sir/madam, to engage in historical speculation when you can’t get your facts straight.
And to “Unknown the first”… 50-70 million people (according to Wikipedia) were killed during WWII. Assuming the worst, 70 million, compared to a current population of roughly seven billion, means that the war did ZIP to compensate for overpopulation. Even when we take into account that the majority of the deaths were male (even if we assume they ALL were), and therefore affected fertility in their respective nations, 140 million people out of 7 billion were out of commission. That’s 2 percent. The rest of them can make up for it by having 2.0000000002 babies apiece. (Actually, I exaggerate. Because of disease, war, and other things that interfere with fertility, the replacement rate for a human population hovers between 2.2 and 2.3 children per couple. But at any rate, ignoring mathematics completely, considering that a BABY BOOM followed the war, I think the war actually contributed to overpopulation rather than reducing it.)
As for myself, I can’t say I know how to answer this question. (I just know some of the ways not to.) Thanks for the moral and logical quandary.
And dear “A Skeptic”… you are awesome.
On a somewhat relevant note, how tragic are deaths that occurred in the past? 9/11, for instance, is fresh in everyone’s memory, since the people whom it affected are still alive; none of the wars that took place in the middle ages is. I think that as the generations separating us from past tragedies increase, and we cease to have a direct connection to them, they become tragedies only in the sense that we find the idea of such events taking place horrifying – not so much those events in particular. So I don’t think I would have much motivation to change events that occurred in the past – especially since it would change the present, with which I have a much closer connection. If I was aware, for instance, that killing Hitler as a kid and saving those six million Jews somehow meant that one of my friends would never be born, I wouldn’t do it.
In reply to Kaiserbot
Completely agree. The further history is, the more abstract an unpersonal it becomes…