As I’ve thought about the chronophone, a big part of the trouble with it is that we can’t successfully transmit any idea where we already know what result we want. Thus to pick something desirable now that will be translated into something desirable then is essentially impossible, since if I already know it to be desirable, I must know enough of the result to know it’s desirable, hence tainting all my thoughts. At best, I can tell Archimedes about things I’m working on now that are non-obvious and hope that they translate into something similarly non-obvious that would have generated from the same motivation in his own time. That is, if my motion to have fun causes me to research mathematical topic X, his motivation to have fun will cause him to research topic Y in his favorite field. X and Y may not even be analogues, just generated by the same kind of line of thinking.
As I’ve thought about the chronophone, a big part of the trouble with it is that we can’t successfully transmit any idea where we already know what result we want. Thus to pick something desirable now that will be translated into something desirable then is essentially impossible, since if I already know it to be desirable, I must know enough of the result to know it’s desirable, hence tainting all my thoughts. At best, I can tell Archimedes about things I’m working on now that are non-obvious and hope that they translate into something similarly non-obvious that would have generated from the same motivation in his own time. That is, if my motion to have fun causes me to research mathematical topic X, his motivation to have fun will cause him to research topic Y in his favorite field. X and Y may not even be analogues, just generated by the same kind of line of thinking.