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Old 2010-12-31, 04:29   Link #539
Gamer_2k4
Anime Cynic
 
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: USA
Age: 35
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sackett View Post
On, and for those complaining about future Kyon saving past Kyon being a paradox, it actually is not, because he had already done it.

You are falling into linear time thinking. This is because time is linear in reality (for humans anyway). If however, if time is no longer linear, then there is no paradox in a future self acting in the past, thus creating the possibility for the future self to exist.
Oh boy. This is starting again, and the last time it came up, no one had a decent response to the point I made (you can see the discussion in "The General Discussion of Haruhi Suzumiya" subforum. But, to save you the trip there, here's the gist of what I was saying.

Mikuru says that there's no continuity between time planes, and I'm sure this is where you're getting your "time isn't linear" notion. The problem is that this is simply ridiculous to say. First of all, time travel would NOT be a simple insertion into a particular time plane, but rather the start of a series of insertions into the destination time plane and all those following it. If Mikuru thinks of herself as an extra drawing in a flipbook, that drawing would need to be made on every subsequent page as well. That has some serious implications for the power and scope of a TPDD.

Adding to that, if time truly isn't continuous or linear, then EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE of time travel in the Haruhi series SHOULD be utterly futile. Kyon goes back in time and inspires young Haruhi to go to North High? So what? Time isn't linear, right? Those changes don't carry through. In fact, Mikuru herself says, "Even if I attempted to change history in this age it would not affect the future, because there is no continuity between time frames. Everything would stay in this temporal plane."

So yeah. If that's true, Kyon shouldn't have been able to do all the things he did in Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody and Disappearance. If it's false, then there IS continuity, and time is linear after all (meaning that once again, Kyon shouldn't have been able to do much of what he did). Someone tried to explain it by saying that Haruhi breaks time travel, but that can't be the case. Time travel only exists BECAUSE Haruhi wants it to. They follow the rules that she sets up. Besides, she's not even tangentially related to any of the time traveling that goes on, so it's not like she breaks it in specific instances. So far, the only influence Haruhi has exerted on time travel (besides its inception) is that she sets the boundaries on when time be traveled (only after three years ago, or, in the case of E8, only within that two week span).

Furthermore, unless somebody knows something to the contrary, the time travelers have only ever been shown to go back in time to set events in motion as they remember them. In other words, their WHOLE POINT is to do the one thing that Mikuru says can't be done. Now, don't misunderstand me here; I'm not blindly trusting in Mikuru's explanation. It just seems that if she's wrong (and time IS linear), much bigger problems arise (paradoxes, etc.).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sackett View Post
In fact God claims to Moses that He is this very type of being. "I am that I am", or in other words "I am the self-existent one", or "I exist because I exist".

Wow... I just had a semi-blasphemous thought. Does creating the conditions for his own future existence make Kyon a "Self-Existent One"?
There are some pretty substantial differences between God and Kyon, but for the sake of brevity, I'll only deal with the most relevant one. Kyon exists in multiple instances in a single time plane because he keeps getting inserted into it from different time planes. God doesn't "travel" through time at all; he exists completely outside of and apart from it. To him, the past, present, and future are all occurring at the same time.

Also, "I exist because I exist" is distinct from "At some point in time, I performed an action that resulted in my current existence." Heck, everyone does the second one whenever they eat, breathe, or do some other self-sustaining action. "I exist because I exist," simply means, "The point of my existence is the existence itself." Kyon, on the other hand, fulfills the alternate interpretation of, "My current existence would not be possible if not for another existence of mine." That's a very different concept from self-existence.
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