![]() ![]() As another replay proceeds, from the same starting point, he has a chance encounter with a walking fish. As one replay proceeds, Homer has a chance encounter with an insect. Okay, it’s a foregone conclusion that Homer will f**k up in some way or other, but not this way vs. Subsequently, things happen that might well not have. It rewinds back to the same point, and replays from there. Is this episode a case of (repeatedly) rewinding back to some point in the past and replaying from a slightly different, Homer-altered point? No. Namely, everyone has reptilian tongues and can lap up their food without need of fork or spoon. He keeps returning to the past, altering it in some way until the world is different, to be sure, but in a way that’s suitable to him. I wish, I wish I hadn’t killed that fish.” This time he returns to the present to find it pretty great overall except, horror of horrors, no one has heard of donuts. Made it.” Just then a dinosaur startles him, he stumbles backward and steps on a walking fish. Homer returns to the past to make amends for his previous alteration. He returns to the present to find a totalitarian world in which Ned Flanders is the dictator, carrying-out a brainwashing program of “Neducation” and lobotomizing everyone who doesn’t conform. Stupid bug! You go squish now! That was just one little insignificant mosquito. “Fine,” Homer reflects, “As long as I stand perfectly still and don’t touch anything, I won’t destroy the future.”īut of course he doesn’t stand perfectly still. ![]() Because the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can’t imagine. If you ever travel back in time, don’t step on anything. There he recalls the advice of his father: ?!”) that takes him back to the age of dinosaurs. The relevant scenes begin with Homer trying to fix his toaster and inadvertently transforming it into a time machine (“What the. Maybe it was the “altered” version that Matt Groening had in mind in the “Time and Punishment” episode of The Simpsons, with Homer altering the values of the variables. But again it’s just a thought experiment. Or perhaps we go back to some point in the past, characterized by some state of the world, and press “pause” while we alter the values of the variables somewhat, and then press “play.” Still fishy. A miracle! Well, it’s a thought experiment after all. Then, when we press the play button, the initial state is somehow different from the one we rewound to it’s slightly altered. But anyway.Įlaborating on the “altered” version, we’re supposed to go back to some point in the past, characterized by a particular state of the world – particular values of particular variables. In fact it sounds so much like sensitivity to initial conditions that one wonders why Gould didn’t just call it that (if that’s really what he meant). The “altered starting point” version sounds a lot like – really just like – sensitivity to initial conditions. “Alter any early event,” or alter any event “at the outset,” sounds less like replaying “from an identical starting point,” and more like replaying from a different (altered) point. Elsewhere he spoke of “alterations at the outset” (p. I’ll call this the “identical starting point,” or “identical” version.īut Gould seemed to contradict himself in favor of a weaker version when he suggested that we rewind the tape back to some point in the past, then “Alter any early event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel” (p. ![]() He strengthened this at one point, specifying that the tape is to be replayed from the same event at the same time and place to which it was rewound: “from an identical starting point” (p. Gould’s expectation was that “any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken” (p. Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original. I call this experiment “replaying life's tape.” You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past. Here’s the most famous, but somewhat ambiguous (in light of other things he wrote) version, from Wonderful Life: And the additional part fills a void that, left unfilled, is quite mysterious. ![]() I think Gould had something more in mind the replay experiment includes sensitivity to initial conditions, but there’s more to it than that. Stephen Gould’s influential thought experiment, “replaying life’s tape,” is commonly construed as a version of “sensitivity to initial conditions,” where slight differences in initial conditions lead to substantial differences in outcome. ![]()
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