"Free Will," or "Fire at Will"

A thought occurred to me as I was reading over others' blog posts. A good number of them concerned whether or not anyone in Dune had free will because Paul could see into the future. This got me thinking back to The Time Machine - it's also set in one future, so did anyone in the intervening millions of years have free will? Are we destined to be, you know, crabs? I find it at least interesting, if nothing more, that we had no discussion of free will when we first talked about time travel. After all, Paul's mind is just time-travelling - same idea.

Or let's go over to First Contact - the Borg changed the past, which changed the future, and then the Enterprise fixed it... fate? Had to be? Or do our actions dictate our future? Well, it's easier to think of it in the past.

Is it that the Time Traveller saw what would happen without intervention on his part? What if he had come back and somehow overthrown society and changed everything - would we still end up as crabs on a beach? Creepy crabs on a beach? Wheat. Fields of wheat. A tremendous amount of wheat. Soon we shall be covered by wheat. "Did you say wheat?" "Wheat." (Please tell me that someone got that reference.)

If Paul hadn't seen the future, would he have led the revolution? Ah, the old self-fulfilling prophesy. It all comes back to Oedipus, just as any talk of time travel ends up in a paradox. (Unless it's paradox-correcting - I'm assuming that more people will get that reference.)

Well, I don't have an answer, but if we are observing this as a "bible," without regard for the moment for whom it was written, then it makes perfect sense that it's ambiguous.

That third appendix, though. What do we make of that? Is there, in the Quantum Leap parlance, a GTF up there in the higher dimensions that has this all planned out and is actively manipulating events? Or is GTF merely an incredible equation that takes in every variable in the universe and can spew out the future with 100% certainty? Of course, it doesn't matter in a practical sense, since the illusion of free will is the important part.

But I was destined to write this, so I guess it doesn't matter much. Damn! Paradox again.