Representing and Reasoning About Time Travel Narratives: Foundational Concepts

ABSTRACT. The paper develops a branching-time ontology that maintains the classical restriction of forward movement through a temporal tree structure, but permits the representation of paths in which one can perform inferences about time-travel scenarios. Central to the ontology is the notion of an agent embodiment whose beliefs are equivalent to those of an agent who has time-traveled from the future. We discuss the formalization of several example scenarios, define what it means for such scenarios to be motivated with respect to an agent embodiment, and relate the underlying structure to a more general theory of (non-time-travel) narrative.