"Time Travel"

[devonin]

that means that some sort of intelligence must be blocking it from happening before it can even occur.

Why? You're leaping to a "necessary" conclusion that I don't feel is necessary at all. I didn't say something -blocks- a paradox from happening, I said that the fact of the state of reality just happens to show that you didn't succeed.

Team A winning the championship shows that team B failed to win the championship without some outside force necessary having -stopped- Team B from winning. You can still observe the lack of championship trophy in the possession of Team B and conclude "They failed to win the championship"

you can even exhaust a huge number of individual reasons why in any given case of the above, team B failed to win. Maybe a player got injured, maybe the referee got bribed, maybe the team simply played poorly, and on and on and on. By the same token, you seem insistant that there has to be ONLY ONE reason why time paradoxes don't happen. You're simply going from "I could resolve to engage in some paradoxical act involving time travel" and then leaping directly to "It succeeded with no problems, what are the consequences" without considering the myriad reasons that could each individually be why each individual attempt has apparantly failed.

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:

You're missing my point once again. I know what happened one minute ago, and it wasn't "A duplicate me appeared and shot me in the head" My point is thus: THE REASON WHY THAT IS THE CASE IS COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY IRELLEVANT TO ANYTHING.

The simple, observable fact of the matter is "One minute ago, I was not shot in the head" This is just the state of things. My chosen method to explain why "I did not shoot myself in the head one minute ago" is true is "Because I did not shoot myself in the head one minute ago."

You can try to call that tautological of you like, but it really isn't. As I mentioned before: For the same reason why the factual state of whether free will or determinism is true is irellevant (because we have either free will or a perfect illusion of free will) so too the case-by-case individual reason why time paradoxes haven't ever occured is irellevant.

It seems like you're assuming it goes "If someone were to go back from what is currently our future, to our objective past, and change something, effects would cascade forward, changing reality and potentially leading to paradox" And you choose to resolve those potential paradoxes by supposing that there must be alternate timelines causally seperated from this one which are the true destination for time travellers (Which to me, would make me say that they aren't actually time travellers)

Instead I'm saying "Any and all time travel that will ever occur in what is currently our future, to our objective past, has ALREADY HAPPENED AND LED TO OUR CURRENT REALITY"

Functionally, you left off #5: Reality as we percieve it is already the result of all time travel that will ever occur to a time before ours