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TimeCrimes (or los Cronocrimenes) is an outstanding Spanish time-travel mystery. Therein,

the main character witnesses himself taking actions, and subsequently reenacts them according to his recollection of what he saw himself doing.

So where does the volition come into this? It's not enough to say

that he was simply carrying out what he'd seen, because this gives rise to an (nearly) infinite number of possible actions - for example, simply not raising his hands in the binocular fashion rather than doing so. But particular actions are taken, and not merely any action, so this implies volition - a human will to action.

Where did it come from?

It's an intriguing movie, and this is the primary question it left me with.

Chris B. Behrens
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2 Answers2

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tl;dr: It didn't "come from" anywhere; events happened because they had to happen in order to maintain a consistent timeline. The character did the things he did because he'd always done them, and because he knew he had to do them in order to avoid an even worse paradox.

This movie presents a fairly typical scenario involving a predestination paradox. This is a staple of time travel movies, where a character performs actions that he has already seen himself perform, because if he doesn't he will break the chain of events that led him to travel back in time in the first place.

The answer to your question then is that the original decision to take an action, for example,

Hector's decision to stab the girl in the woods

didn't "come from" anywhere. It happened because it had already happened, and always would happen, at that exact moment in time. If it did not, then

Hector would never have been chased to building and entered the time machine

and the time line would have been broken. He appears to understand this and acts to maintain the sequence of events, but there is no "first time through" the story where those actions of his future self didn't happen. They always happened.

To accept this requires a certain particular interpretation of how time and causality really behave. Since time travel, as far as we currently know, isn't possible, we have no idea how such an event would really play out. To understand movies of this nature you simply have to accept that cause and effect don't work the way we normally believe, and that it's possible for an event to happen without any "original source".

Among sci-fi fans you will often hear this phenomenon cited as the Timey Wimey Ball, based on a quote from The Tenth Doctor in one of the best Doctor Who episodes ever filmed. (Obligatory TV Tropes warning: you may lose many hours upon clicking that link.) In short, time in time travel movies doesn't work the way you think, and you'll give yourself a headache trying to make sense of it that way.

KutuluMike
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  • I can accept their presdestined nature...but why those particular events? Where did the choice to "predestine" THOSE particular events and not others come from? As you can see, "nowhere" is not an answer, because "nowhere" shouldn't prefer particular events to others. – Chris B. Behrens Nov 06 '12 at 18:33
  • @ChrisB.Behrens I think the idea is that those events are an immutable and fundamental aspect of the universe, like the value of pi. There was no choice in the value of pi, that's just the way things are; there is no choice in the actions of a time traveler in that situation, it's just the way things are. – Tacroy Nov 06 '12 at 19:50
  • @ChrisB.Behrens There's no particular preference for any one set of events over any other; there is just the set of events that did happen and everything else, that didn't. Hector #2 could have chosen to act differently when he encountered Hector #1 but then Hector #1 would have seen a different set of events and would have reenacted that set of events as Hector #2, etc. – KutuluMike Nov 06 '12 at 21:05
  • @MichaelEdenfield - that's more what I'm getting at, what I'm thinking about is an oscillator that eventually settles into a monostable state. What I'm thinking is that there might be a long series of round-trips where Hector didn't reenact the actions perfectly, and thus triggered a new cycle. We only got to see the last one, where he did reenact things perfectly, and closed the loop... – Chris B. Behrens Nov 06 '12 at 22:17
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There is no volition. Even without time travel your brain, like every other object in the universe, proceeds from one state to the next due to the forces acting on it in the previous instant. Your perception of volition is an illusion, and like all illusions its cause is incomplete information. You don't know all the factors that caused your brain to reach its current state. Nor can you ever know; besides random influences like cosmic rays, incomplete inferential power about the self is inherent in systems complex enough for self-reference. The collection of desires and inhibitions that we think drive our decisions are modified by forces both known and unknown to us. The illusion of volition is a post-hoc invention of a mind trying to construct a logically consistent self-story from limited information. You only think you have choices, the reality is that your actions are as fixed those of a boulder bouncing downhill.

Kyle Jones
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