[HPforGrownups] Who conjures the Prongs Patronus?

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 53498

On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Taryn Kimel wrote:

> Norm:
> The text (which I'll get to in a minute), seems more strongly to 
> suggest option 1). However, it seems to me that in order to be able 
> to go back later to conjure up a Patronus to save himself, somehow 
> Harry needs to be saved -- by himself, by his father, by Dumbledore, 
> by *someone* -- in the first place in order to survive to then come 
> *back* via Time-Turner to do it later. 
> 
> Me:
> You're not quite comprehending the version of time travel JKR is using.
> /Harry/ saved himself. By going back in time, Harry did not /change/ the
> past. He, in fact, /caused/ it. In this version of time travel (which
> I've seen in plenty other books and movies), you can't actually really
> change the past. You simply cause it. It's always been caused because
> you were in the past... It's a bit hard for me to say, I guess. ^_^;;

Another way to say this (though I'm not sure if it makes it any clearer)  
is that with time travel the order of cause and effect can be rearranged.  
We are used to thinking of time in a linear fashion where a cause *always*
preceeds its effect.  But if time travel is possible, then it has to be
possible for an effect to preceed its cause, whether the timeline changes
or not.  

Once you discard the notion that cause has to preceed effect, time travel
makes perfect sense.  You no longer have to go through temporal gymnastics
to force a situation where the future self's actions preceed the
consequent effects on the past self just to keep cause prior to effect.
You just have to keep in mind that the cause will occur (*will*, not
*may*) in the future.  The cause is still necessary, but it can occur
after the effect as well as before it.  It is actually a much simpler
theory; it's just not the way we are used to thinking about cause and
effect.

Basically, you have to look at time from a divine perspective rather than
a human one.  As humans, we are only capable of seeing time move linearly
in one direction (from past to present to future).  You have to imagine
instead that you are God and can see all of time at once.  If all eternity
exists at once, then all points in time are equal and the so-called past
has no special precedence over the so-called present and future.  The
future is just as capable of determining the past as the past is of
determining the future.  Cause can happen at any time.  It doesn't have to
come before its own effect.  Being human and having a limited perspective,
thinking this way makes our brains hurt, but it is logically coherent.

Yet another way of looking at the same idea: the appearance of moving
through time is an illusion.  Time actually stands still; it is only our
position relative to time that changes.  If I were riding in a car and
looking out the window at the scenery, it would be easy for me to conclude
that the world itself is changing, and changing in a particular order,
from shoreline to coastal plain to foothills to towering mountains.  But
actually, the world is the same as it has always been.  It is only my
position in relation to the rest of the world that has altered.  Someone
travelling in a different car going the opposite direction would see the
landscape changing in the opposite order, from mountains to shore, and it
would seem just as natural from that perspective.  Similarly, we see the
past preceed the future because that is the direction we are moving in,
but we could just as easily see the future preceed the past if we were
moving in a different direction (i.e. time travel), and doing so would not
change the timeline at all.  The timeline stays the same.  We just see
different points of it depending on where we are.

Now that I've thoroughly confused everyone, let me mention that this is my
first post here.  Hi, folks.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"