"Time Travel"

[Afrobean]

Originally Posted by devonin

Nowhere in anything I said, did I even imply that the universe is in any way self-correcting, that the universe "knows" anything.

If backwards time travel is possible (and traveling back in time can affect the "present" form of the person traveling through time, i.e., the time line refreshes itself when changed in the past) and it is still impossible to create a time paradox, that means that some sort of intelligence must be blocking it from happening before it can even occur. A time police system appears to be somewhat reasonable, but the refreshing nature and the paradox would still show through and by the time a time police force would be aware of an emerged time paradox, it would have already become apparent, turning causality on its head.

What I said was "The fact that you exist shows that you did not kill your grandfather"

And what I said was that your grandfather could simultaneously both live out his life or die in his youth by his potential grandson's hands. Schroedinger ****, I'll admit, but that is the view that I have on reality and the nature of higher dimensions. Do you not buy into the idea of multiple iterations of reality existing simultaneously in higher dimensions?

Such as? You're intending to just describe some set of circumstances where if you were hell-bent on creating a paradox you could simply arrange your attempt in such a way as to make it "impossible" to fail?

Uh, yeah. Like, go back in time one minute and shoot yourself in the head. The only way something simple as that could fail is:

#1: time travel skews into an alternate time line that exists simultaneously in another dimension
#2: backward time travel is not possible
#3: random chance
#4: some sort of intelligent and all-knowing/all-powerful being taking care to ensure that the attempt fails

The first example is what I think is right. The second is also a reasonable explanation. The third is essentially impossible, because even if the first attempt fails, given a potentially infinite number of attempts to create a paradox, there is no way, for example, that your gun would jam every time you try to kill your past self. The fourth jumps into the same area as intelligent design and there is no evidence to suggest that backward time travel has ever occurred in this iteration of reality, and if there were such evidence, an intelligent presence acting, even indirectly, would leave something to suggest that things we're playing out entirely on their own (for example, a person's gun jamming EVERY time they try to shoot their past self in the head would indicate something fishy).