Note on “The Art of Time Travel: An Insoluble Problem Solved”

Abstract

In their contribution to the first part of this special issue Craig Bourn and Emily Caddick Bourne claim to have solved a puzzle I put forward in my 'An Insoluble Problem' (2010). Here I argue that their attempt fails. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________On p. 2 of my paper I ask, in the case of the works of the fifth-rate 20th century artist, "Where is the artistic creativity to be found?" And I say that this problem has no solution. Caddick Bourne and Bourne say, at the bottom of p. 306 of their paper: "The role which artworks play in McCall's story would not raise any question we could not already ask about, for instance, the plans for a time machine in a version of the information paradox in which the time traveller delivers the plans for her time machine to her younger self, who uses the plans to build the time machine which is used to deliver them. No act of designing the plans

Artefacts from tomorrow: Future dilemmas of the parahistorian

“…The parts of the loop are explicable, the whole of it is not",(Lewis, 1976, p. 149). For aesthetic problems posed by causal-loop artworks, see the exchange McCall (2010),Bourne and Caddick Bourne (2016),McCall (2017) and CaddickBourne and Bourne (2017), plus McAllister (2020).10 "Time travel appears to allow knowledge to flow from the future to the past and back, in a self-consistent loop, without anyone or anything ever having to grapple with the corresponding problems. What is philosophically objectionable here is not that knowledge-bearing artifacts are carried into the past-it is the 'free lunch' element.…”