Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. I never met him, and never expected to recently because of his ill-health, but whenever one receives news that a legendary human is no longer living somewhere in this spatio-temporal set, the world seems to be a slightly worse place for a short while.

I flicked onto some Olympic coverage last night and saw that there is such an event as Olympic Walking: speed walking to be precise. The race only lasted 80 minutes or so and the athletes involved didn't look like they were putting that much energy into it. But it got me thinking. There should be an Olympic event called Displacement, a very simple long-endurance race. They could have two every Olympics, one where the competitors have to cover as much distance (around the 400m track) in 24 hours and one where they have to cover the most distance in 1 week. Furthermore, the competitors are allowed to stop as many times as they like around the race, and eat and drink whatever they want, as long as they carry everything they need with them for the whole race. I expect in the 24 hour event the world record holders would run the whole event, probably never stopping once. The week-long event would require more strategy because everybody would need to stop and sleep several times. Somebody racing in this event would need to drink about 5 litres of water a day I imagine, so in the week-long event they would start off carrying 35kg of water, probably 40kg including their food and anything they need to sleep on. So the best strategy would probably be to walk the first few days and go faster as one's weight got lighter. I for one would consider the winners of this race to be the fittest athletes in the world.

I suspect (although I'm hardly an expert in these things), that the world record for the 24-hour event would be something like 150 miles, and the record for the week-long event would be about 500 miles. I remember reading that prior to the battle of Austerlitz Marshal Davout managed to move his corps 88 miles in 48 hours. Considering that they were carrying about half their own body weight again and wearing constricting uniforms and carrying heavy artillery etc, that is pretty impressive.

Red Dwarf is my favourite sitcom, and the series of novels might be my favourite literature, closely followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Dice Man, Enduring Love and the Earthsea Quartet. It strikes me that Red Dwarf contains so much philosophical content, much more than any other non-strictly-academic piece I have ever read. It touches on just about every area of philosophy one can think about. Here are just a few that I can think of and I will try to add more when I remember them:

What it means to lead a good life. In the episode with the Inquisitor, we are told that the Inquisitor travels through time judging everybody who ever lived and if finding them worthy of Life allows them to remain, and if finding them unworthy they are replaced by somebody who never got the chance to live. Furthermore, the Inquisitor allows each defendant to judge themselves by their own standards of whether they have deserved to live.

Personal Identity. The metaphysic of Red Dwarf seems to support the existence of souls. Rimmer, the Cat and Lister are said to swap bodies a few times with no brain transplant. Somehow their personality, memories and stream of consciousness is exchanged between the bodies. We are told that in Better Than Life, Rimmer is stripped of his body and becomes essentially a sound wave that appears to carry his soul. (Although even in Red Dwarf, better Than Life is a fiction so this doesn't tell us much). Rimmer himself is a psychologically identical reconstruction of a now-dead person, but he is always referred to, and refers to himself, as the original Rimmer. There are countless times in the series where the characters are somehow resurrected because of time travel. In the Inquisitor episode (I saw that last night, hence the recollection), Kryten and Lister are judged unworthy of life and deleted from history, replaced with alternates. Before they are deleted physically they manage to escape. The Inquisitor then chases them and kills the original Rimmer, Cat and both alternates. Lister then manages to erase the Inquisitor from history, bringing back the original Cat, Kryten and Rimmer. Lister is the only one who remains temporally continuous. Are the others now clones of themselves or psychologically continuous? In another episode the Red Dwarf crew are attacked by their future selves, who irresponsibly have used time travel to lead luxurious lives throughout history, and now they need some kind of Warp Drive from the original Red Dwarfers. They kill everybody but Rimmer, who ends the series by shooting their own Warp Drive. We learn in the next series that somehow the destruction of the Warp Drive prevented the crew from ever becoming the future selves they encountered and hence none of them were killed. But how did they still have the memories of their now-never-to-exist future selves? Lister dies on another occasion, and to resurrect him they take him to a backwards universe where he is re-born with a heart attack and leads a whole backwards life until he is collected by the crew and brought back to his original universe, with memories intact of his former forwards life, and backwards life.

Artificial Intelligence. Is Kryten a person? We are told that Lister helped Kryten to break his programming, making him somewhat autonomous and sporting several negative emotions like anger, jealousy and ambivalence. We are still told that Kryten is programmed not to kill, and has no desire to prolong his life.

Determinism. Is the sort of time travel in Red Dwarf consistent with Determinism? We are told that to ensure his necessity, Lister has a child with Kochanski and they go back in time to leave the child where Lister himself was found as a baby. Hence Lister is his own father and son, and Kochanski is his mother and mate. Quite often characters do things because they believe they have to in virtue of what has already happened. When they are in the backwards world they do things like regurgitate food. They put a lot of effort into detaching heavy engines from the ship and carrying them into the woods and burying them, because they work out that actually the engines fell off the ship and they had to go and dig them up and re-attach them, which is what they were doing by detaching them. When they regurgitate rabbit, Kryten makes sure to re-attach the meat to the bones and bring it back to life, and then he goes out and un-makes the trap that he found it in. What would have happened if he didn't bother doing that? Did they have any Free Will while in Backwards World?

Ignorance and Happiness. Is virtual reality any less insignificant than actual reality? Is living in Better Than Life a worthy and fulfilling life? In one episode (although it is a dream), we are told that the characters are actually just "losers" in a totalitarian society who decided to play a virtual reality game called Red Dwarf for several years while on life support machines. When they come out of it they are told that they performed badly on the game, hardly scratching the surface of what was possible. Does our own future hold this sort of life for our own children? Is it a worthwhile use of life?

Is there any value whatsoever to having a cake and not eating it? Let us define "having the cake", as being in possession of the cake. The primary function of the cake is to be eaten, so to have a cake and not eat it would seem to render the cake worthless, at least to us. So we could sell the cake. Obviously we could only sell it to somebody who could both have and eat a cake, otherwise it would be worthless to them as well. But what if they discovered that we cannot eat the cake? They would infer that it is worth very little capital to us, perhaps none, and they could force us down to giving it to them for free. That is, if the cake is worth absolutely nothing to us. A cake does have other functions other than being eaten. You can use them as comedy weapons to make others filthy, or use one as a door-stopper until it starts decomposing, or use one like this [NSFW]. Or maybe you could break it down and make something else out of its components. Depending on our theory of identity over time, we could argue that THE cake has ceased to exist and in its wake has appeared a cake-like biscuit. Does "eating the cake" mean eating the entire cake, or eating from the cake? If the former then we could eat all but a few atoms of the cake, and we wouldn't have eaten the whole cake. Presumably nobody has ever eaten a cake if that is true, because there are always microscopic crumbs left on their shirt or hands. Or rather, they have eaten cakes, but not the same cakes that they bought. The cake they bought was composed of parts C1-C10000000000000, and the cake that they ate was composed of parts C1-C9999999999999, and therefore a different cake to the former. Of course the former cake no longer exists, but it wasn't eaten which is the important thing. What happened to it then? Well, it was dissected into lots of smaller cakes, and part C10000000000000, and each of those smaller cakes were eaten. Even if we adopt a perdurance theory of identity then the cake still exists after most of its components were eaten, and yet the whole cake has not been eaten. The same cake is now located in two places, mostly in somebody's stomach and wherever C999999999999 is, on the shelf, sleeve or in the hoover. So being in possession of a cake and not being able to eat it is virtually identical to being in possession of a cake and being able to eat it.

Perhaps we have now discovered the truth in the otherwise stupid idiom that "you can't have your cake and eat it". The cake is logically edible, but it's not very easily physically edible.

Picture this. A good-looking young guy is sitting at the desk mindlessly surfing the internet and is clearly bored. In the background an attractive, slim woman is pottering around the house/flat doing whatever her business is, like moving washcloths from a shelf to a cupboard. She says something to him, perhaps "Do you want a cup of tea?" and he affirms. As he looks back at his monitor and moves the mouse, the cursor goes off the screen and into real life! The cursor is no longer on the monitor and is floating around in mid-air. Amazed, he moves the cursor around a bit to get a good look at it. He then double-clicks on a book on the desk and it opens obediently. He right-clicks and a white little screen comes up giving him the option to close the book or go to a certain page.

He then looks elsewhere around the room, and left-clicks on a piggy-bank or something recognisably cute to the viewer. Nothing happens. He keeps the button down and moves the cursor and lo and behold the piggy bank rises out of the air and across the room, seemingly at his command. Then he places the piggy bank down carefully somewhere, and the attractive woman re-enters the room, perhaps holding a cup of tea. The camera then pans to an angle whereby we see the man's face in the background and the woman's back in the foreground. He is sporting a cheeky facial expression and accompanies it with a suitable eyebrow gesture and we see the cursor heading towards the woman. End of ad.

This idea is so good it could be used to sell anything in my opinion.

For some reason I'm not allowed to use the word "a-d-v-e-r-t". Fucking fascists are everywhere now.

Doesn't the brain-in-a-vat possibility render Elga's account of Dr. Evil's best strategy false? Surely Dr. evil realises that there are already infinitely many psychological duplicates of Dr. Evil in logical space? So what would be the effect of adding one as close as the Philosophy Defence Force are? Elga contends that Dr. Evil cannot be sure whether he is the original, who is safe in his fortress, or the duplicate, who can be tortured at any second. I agree that Dr. Evil must apply a principle of indifference to calculate the probability of being either one, but he cannot rule out the psychological duplicates that are being monitored by evil demons, or in the Matrix, or in the evil scientist's laboratory. He knows this much:

If he is in fact in the vat in the PDF's lab, failure to surrender will result in his torture.

But what of the other possibilities?

There are infinitely many possible worlds where a demon that rewards courage and punishes cowardice has got a psychological duplicate of Dr. Evil and if Dr. Evil surrenders then the demon will torture him. There are as many of these demons as there are philosophy defence forces in logical space (aren't there?), so I see no reason for why the existence of one very close psychological duplicate would have an effect on Dr. Evil's correct strategy.

How does this affect the Sleeping Beauty Paradox? It is said that Beauty doesn't know what her self-location is, that she could be awake on Monday or Tuesday, as Dr. Evil could be in either the vat or in his fortress. But we have just established that Dr. Evil's learning about the duplicate shouldn't affect his strategy. Let's use that thought and apply it to the SB paradox. Before the whole experiment SB believes that the probability of a coin landing heads is 1/2. She then learns that she is to co-habit the world with a duplicate. Or rather, her place in logical space becomes more confusing because a new possible world pops up and she has to split her credence between the two worlds as to which one she is in.

The problem here is that the SB paradox presupposes a lot. She is said to know several things about her place in the world. Does this mean that we cannot talk about brain-in-a-vat possibilities with Beauty? I think so yes.

Perhaps we should analyse both examples in terms of forgetting. Beauty forgets what "tay" it is (according to Bradley Monton). Dr. Evil forgets whether he is Dr. Evil or the duplicate (he is Dr. Evil). But how can he forget this sort of knowledge? How does anybody have this sort of knowledge in the first place? The brain-in-a-vat possibility rules us out of having this sort of knowledge as our experiences are always consistent with being the brain-in-a-vat.

I think, if anything, the PDF are trying to appeal to Dr. Evil's paranoia. The fact is that if he were a good philosopher he would already be aware of everything they are informing him about, so if he is rational, I still cannot see how his strategy is to change in light of either new information he should have already had, or the alleged forgetting of a belief he should never have rationally had.

I was thinking earlier about the problem of personal identity and particularly, the possibility and nature of essences, and thought again of the example offered to us by the writers of Red Dwarf.

We are told that everybody who works for the mining company that owns Red Dwarf is required to have their memories and personality copied onto the ship's hard drive in the event that they both die and are deemed worthy of being "resurrected" as the only hologram that the ship has the power to support. In the story, Rimmer is the one crew member chosen to have his psychological profile installed into the ship's hologram after the death of all but one of the other crew members.

There is a continuity error in the storyline because we are told that when the information is saved onto the hard drive, that that particular personality and beliefs and only that personality and beliefs will be present in the hologram, but in the story, when Rimmer is resurrected as the hologram he seems to remember everything up to his death, when actually his psychological profile was saved onto the ship's hard drive some years before his death.

Now this is relevant to personal identity because our intuition is that Rimmer is not really resurrected. The original Rimmer is dead and always will be. What has been brought to life is a being that is psychologically identical to Rimmer. Rimmer's stream of consciousness did not teleport from his first body to the hologram, and for all we know, the original Rimmer could really be in Heaven or Hell now or some other plane of existence. Of course the "new" Rimmer continues to talk about his former life and his death, as if they were really his, when in reality he has inherited these beliefs from the original Rimmer (along with his personality).

Now here's where the problem of self-location comes in. Suppose that the psyche-copying procedure goes like this: you sit down in a metal chair and a special helmet is fitted to your head. Then you feel a slight electrical current go through your whole body and that is the whole process. Your helmet is taken off and you are released.

The question then is this: At the moment when the process is done and your complete psychological state including qualia is recorded, how do you know whether you are the original you or a hologram of some formerly living person? We know that if a hologram were ever made in your image then they would be experiencing the exact same psychological state as you currently are experiencing. How then, can you tell whether you are you or them?

This is sort of a mish-mash problem between Elga's example of Dr. Evil and Wittgenstein's brain-in-a-vat (based on Descartes' evil demon). Elga gives us the following story:

Dr. Evil has a base on the Moon and is planning to destroy the Earth with nuclear missiles. So the Philosophy Defence Force send him a letter saying that they have made an exact duplicate of Dr. Evil in their laboratory and whatever Dr. Evil experiences, the duplicate experiences. If Dr. Evil does not disarm and surrender immediately, they will torture the duplicate. Elga argues that because Dr. Evil cannot be sure whether he is Dr. Evil or the duplicate, he ought to surrender.

Wittgenstein's brain-in-a-vat story is that whoever we are and whatever we are experiencing is consistent with the true proposition that we are really just a brain-in-a-vat being fed all of the relevant data by an evil scientist, and that all or most of our beliefs could be false.

In the first example Dr. Evil comes to believe that he has an actual duplicate, whereas in our second example, the subject comes to believe only that he has a possible duplicate. Nobody can work out what the probability is that that possible world is the actual world, i.e. nobody knows how likely it is that they are a brain-in-a-vat.

In the Red Dwarf example, it seems that we would have a subjective probability for it being the case that our duplicate is actual. Rimmer could work out roughly how likely it is that a duplicate of him will be made and then use a principle of indifference to calculate the probability that he is actually the duplicate.

So what are we supposed to learn from this? One thing to say is that if such a technology were ever to be developed then there would be serious ethical questions as to its use. Imagine a society where your psychological profile is saved every few months or even every morning. Perhaps the point would be that if you commit a crime or do something anti-social, you would be deleted and your last law-abiding copy would be recalled and educated in a way as to prevent you from acting the way your previous "self" had acted. (Maybe the extinction of the human race will only come when we work out how to digitalise our personalities and lose the need to breed and live like regular animals, living in computers with robot attachments immortally, eventually descending into a world of mental objects)

What if this technology already exists? after all, it possibly exists. Maybe some alien race delights in copying our personalities and memories and reproducing them in identical creatures on the other side of the universe with their own identical solar system so as not to confuse astronomers who remembered observing a different-looking solar system when they last checked? But does this possibility add anything to the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis? I can't see as it does since that is one very strong possibility and on its own allows the possibility for all or most of our beliefs to be false. Does this new example impact on the Cogito, "I think therefore I am"? It would seem that a Rimmer-clone might think "I exist" but would he be right or wrong, given that the original Rimmer no longer does exist? By saying "I", would he be referring to Original-Rimmer, or The-Person-Who-Is-Saying-This-Now? I don't think it does affect the Cogito actually, because for it to be a necessary truth the premise would have to be something like "He who is having the thought that this is, is thinking". That we can't ever be sure that we are who we were yesterday is something that is already entailed by the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, as is the possibility that we were only created from scratch yesterday, or 5 seconds ago, with all of the (false) memories and beliefs we currently have.

This isn't a concept I have really investigated much in the past, particularly as I have tried to stay away from ethics in my study of philosophy.

Let's start with a simple question. Suppose a man has murdered somebody and has been found guilty by the state, and let's also say that they confessed to the murder as well. The state has decided to execute them by hanging. Ignore the question for now about whether that's a right or wrong action. We will acknowledge the state's actions here as ethically neutral. So this man is on the gallows awaiting the executioner to pull the lever that will lead to his neck breaking. We are in the crowd some way off with a sniper rifle. Suppose that we kill the man instantly with a bullet through the head just seconds before he would die instantly of a broken neck. Also suppose that we have never met the man before and have no connection with him.

Questions:
1. Are we a murderer?
2. Are we guilty? (I am defining "guilty" here as " worthy of punishment")
3. Are we responsible for the man's death?
4. Are we morally responsible for the man's death?

(I want to clarify that in what follows, by "the murderer" I am referring to us, the shooter, and by "the man" and "the man's death" I refer to the man who was supposed to be hanged and his death.)

The answer to 1 is clearly "yes", we have murdered a man. I suppose there are possible systems of law whereby when a person is given the death penalty by a judge in a court of law, they are instantly recognised in law as no longer being a living person. Their hanging would just be a mere formality to be executed later. (More unrelated questions: does it sound condescending of me to say "no pun intended" or "pun intended" after the last sentence? If I say nothing at all there does the reader infer that I meant the pun or not?) Under that legal system I suppose a lawyer might say that I didn't murder the man because he was dead already. Maybe I would be guilty of desecration of a corpse instead? But I think we have to over-rule that lawyer, and say that the man was clearly still alive and that a court cannot proclaim a living man to be dead. The property of being alive is a biological one, and unrelated to an entity's actions.

I think question 2 is a tough one, and really we need to answer the other questions first.

question 3 is a question that Lewis attempts to answer in one of his papers. What do we mean by "the man's death"? That term can describe 3 different events here. One is the rigid designator, the death of that man. The second is the event whereby that man died of hanging and the third is the event whereby that man died of a bullet wound, more specifically, a wound inflicted by a bullet that we fired. We are responsible for the man's death by bullet, and we are also responsible for preventing the man's death by hanging. In some sick logical sense I suppose we might even claim to have saved a man's life here. But we are not responsible for the death of that man because had we not done anything then the man would have died anyway. In this example we could say that we are responsible for that man experiencing a few seconds less of life, but the example could be changed so that the man was shot just as there was one inch of rope remaining until his neck broke. The amount of life we took from this man that he would have lived had we not been present can be reduced to being insignificant to the question.

Of course we are still responsible for the man's death in the same way that every other human is responsible for it. Every human in that society tacitly accepts the death penalty by not doing all they can to stop the man from being executed. I am very very slightly responsible for the murders of teenagers killed by knives in London (even though I don't live there), simply because I didn't use my powers to the fullest to prevent those deaths. It's so small an amount of moral responsibility that I don't think I ought to feel guilty for the combined number of murders that have occurred in my lifetime. Most of us will one day encounter a scenario where somebody was murdered in a fight on a street that we were walking on, and we'll feel slightly guilty later on for not doing enough to prevent it. Our closeness to the event will emphasise to us the degree of influence we had on the event, and even though we did nothing wrong, we did not necessarily do everything right either, and sometimes a person is to be condemned for not doing what is right even when not doing what is wrong. (We would condemn a person who can swim for not doing anything when presented with a drowning person who needs their help, even though they committed no crimes or sins by not acting).

So my answer to question 3 is that our actions are a necessary cause of the event whereby the man died in almost exactly the same way (instantly, and at the same time, and knowing he would die at that moment) as he would have had we not been present. Our actions changed very little in the great scheme of things: about as much as one of the by-standers. So I think I have to conclude that we were not morally responsible for the death of the man, or at least only as morally responsible as one of the by-standers.

Which leads me back to Q2. My intuition is that we are deserving of punishment. But let's look at the reasons why and try to remove them from the example. I think we deserve punishment for two reasons. Firstly, we desecrated a corpse. Nobody agreed beforehand that this person deserved to have their body dead and with a hole through the head. Secondly, if I were the ruling body I would want to lock the shooter up because even if they are not morally responsible for the death, they have a disposition to murder people. In this one instance the murder was fine, but probabilistically speaking, the shooter has a greater chance of committing an immoral murder in the future than a by-stander does.

So let's try to remove those factors from the example and re-evaluate. We need a way for the murderer to be the cause of the death without inflicting any damage to the corpse. Suppose that the murderer is actually a heart surgeon who operated on the person to be executed
and installed a device that operated the man's heart. He also kept a remote control that can de-activate the device and instantly kill the man. And it is this remote control he uses right at the second where the man would have had his neck broken. I don't think that action would really count as desecrating a corpse even after the man's death because the heart-device is not part of the man. But it would still count as murder before the death of the man.

The second factor: how do we remove any increased probability in the murderer murdering other people as a result of his murdering this person? I can't really think of a way that doesn't reduce the amount of responsibility the murderer had in the event. If we made them an executioner or a soldier obeying a command then they are less responsible for the murder in the first place, and our lawyers would tell us that in those circumstances the death does not even count as murder.

Perhaps we make the murderer take an extensive psychological test to determine how likely it is that they will murder again, and we discover that their likelihood is less than or equal to the average person's. The problem with this is that we then cannot explain why the murderer acted in the way they did at all. Surely the test cannot be correct because normal people don't do these sorts of "amoral murders" and yet this person did. Perhaps their act can be explained by them having a desire to end somebody's life but ONLY on the condition that it not be immoral. Anybody with this desire should not be a danger to society.

I suppose the reason we would punish this person is because of some psychological theory. In reality there is no such person who has a desire to kill amorally and no desire to kill immorally. All people who have a desire to kill amorally will have a heightened desire to kill immorally. This should be explained in some law of psychology. But our question never really addressed psychology. Surely a person with a desire to kill amorally and no desire to kill immorally is a logically possible entity. Suppose that it was a computer that had been programmed to act that way, and in a society where computers and people are treated equally, with free will and moral responsibility, as Dennett would have us believe.

Of course now this issue gets clouded with the contention that perhaps no murderer deserves to be punished, because if their desires are programmed into them, they are not responsible for any of their actions. We do not want to take that position.

I'm not sure what conclusion to make here. In societies where execution occurs, there always has to be somebody who is the most responsible agent for the death of the executed person. These are jobs that most people can apply for and that are really some people's jobs in the USA today. (In prisons and abortion clinics) Therefore I suppose that we do allow and encourage these people who have desires to kill amorally to satisfy their desires by applying for these jobs and carrying out these "murders" without punishment. The problem I have is that those people are not really morally responsible for the deaths. If they didn't do it then somebody else would, and I can't really imagine a society in which they jointly condone the death penalty but no single agent will step up to carry out the actions supported by the whole group. So I really haven't solved the problem of how we should treat the shooter in this example, and will think about it further.

I put this off for a bit. I've been working very rarely on this for about 18 months, but today I came to look at what work I had previously done and realised it had mostly been in my head and in documents I have since deleted. So today I have been working out what I originally intended to do and what is now the best strategy. What I have so far ascertained is that I am going to need to provide long, indepth and justified analyses of the following concepts:

Free Will
Moral Responsibility
Causation
Right/Wrong
Decision theory

For four of those I believe I am proposing an analysis that has not previously been argued for, or rather at least not to my knowledge (which means it blatantly has been). I think I'll be using a form of Kantian Utilitarianism in my analysis of Right and Wrong, which I think is the most standard and commonsensical attitude to ethics.

I'm going to be defining Free Will as a parameter of decision theory which will involve adding another dimension to that, which I might start calling Free Decision Theory. I'll be using a semi-Lewisean analysis of causation, something that Lewis never mentioned but I don't think he would have a problem with. he probably would've given the same analysis as me under the circumstances. (Had he written much about Free Will)

Moral responsibility is going to be the most problematic concept I will need to demogrify. (I just googled that word to see if it was correct and it only returned 4 results. I'm sure it is a word though, even if spelt incorrectly but Google suggested to me "demagnify"?!) It's going to be a mish-mash of the concepts of free will, causation and utility, so will need to work up to it.

Free Will has probably the most radical analysis I am giving in the paper, hopefully with its very own faintly absurd logical formulas with lots of juicy factors.

I will be referring quite a lot to psychological papers on the value of choice, and it's quite important I investigate the relationship between choice and Free Will.

Consider this. Tomorrow at 3pm. a 100 foot tall man walks onto the M5 motorway and begins kicking around cards and being a massive bastard to everybody. All of this is caught on CCTV and very quickly the police are informed and the giant is killed by armed forces. To describe the giant closer I'd say that he is proportional in shape to a regular human, is bald but has a groomed beard, and is wearing chain-mail like armour and leatherish boots. In the weeks after the incident experts determine that the giant is genetically a human, perhaps he only shows the same sort of variations to any human genome that two humans of different races would show to each other. Detectives scour the local countryside and there is no evidence of anywhere the giant came from or could have been living.

Now here's the question: how will this event be remembered in 100 years time, if at all? Maybe nobody died, or just a couple, so politically speaking it's a relatively minor event. In 100 years time we will definitely still be talking about events like 9/11, particular World Cups and Olympic Games, acts made by Parliament, the race between Obama and Clinton, and so on. (Will they remember Madeleine McCann I wonder, probably the most dominating news item of the last 2 years in the UK? I doubt they will).

Let's suppose that in the 100 years between the event and the future state we are contemplating, nobody has got any closer to explaining the event than the detectives who looked at all the evidence at the time.

I think the only explanation is that the giant is an alien or somehow walked through a wormhole somewhere in the universe and came out in the England countryside. The former explanation isn't that good really, as a coherent explanation. Why would an alien race that is sophisticated enough to transport a giant to Earth undetected be so easily dealt with, and why would they wear leather and chain mail? Why would they attack in the first place? Maybe some alien race invaded a world of primitive giants and for a laugh dumped one on Earth. Maybe they are watching from space somewhere as we wonder what the hell just happened? Maybe they had the technology to just teleport the giant here?

I suppose that the experts would test the materials found on the giant to see where they originated. Would the leather belong to a kind of animal that had never lived on Earth, for instance? And the same for the metal. Would this event only be significantly remembered in scientific journals and not in common knowledge of world history? Maybe this event would be so significant to count as proof for scientific theories. Any cosmologist who came forward and said that he had scrutinized the matter of space and determined that everywhere in the universe except for the Earth is made of some kind of natural kind that prohibits life in any form, would just be met with scepticism. It would become a scientific fact that life existed elsewhere in the universe. Maybe theories about wormholes would gain strength directly because of this isolated incident.

Maybe this event would be remembered most as a religious event? Perhaps it would gain backing as some kind of divine act, because it couldn't be explained any other way? Maybe a new religion would be formed as a result, and 100 years later that religion dominates the whole world.