This will be a slightly obscure post, but hopefully I will make it less obscure in the future.

In “The Self and the Future”, one of the nice things Bernard Williams does is show us how a relatively pleasant sounding story (I move into a nicer body and get given bunches of money) can be retold as a nightmare scenario (I will be tortured, but before that all my memories and dispositions will be wiped away, and the memories and dispositions of a vain jock written into my brain) by just changing the perspective a little.

Do you think there could be time travel stories that sound quite pleasant at first that could be retold as torture stories by a Williams-style translation? I’m trying to write up some classes on time travel and personal identity, and it will be fun if I can think of such stories. But I can’t immediately see how to write them.

Perhaps more to follow…