Poll: Time Paradox

[massau]

we just cant know for example if someone go back in time to kill his mother and he just pull the trigger than will his gun jam will he succeed or will he just be cough by the police and it is impossible trough the law of energy and E=mc² because you cant make any energy and if you go beck you will have more energy than before

 

[massau]

The paradigm I like to use is this:

If you go back in time, the point you back to is now the present, and everything is essentially 'rerolled', and effectively you just 'appear' out of nowhere. If you go back into the future, there's no spot waiting for you.

So, if Marty from Back to the Future goes back to 1955 in the time machine, there he is with a time machine. If his parents get together or not, he doesn't fade. He's just there. If they have a son and name him Marty, this second Marty will exist separately of the first, and will not be a clone. If the first Marty goes back to the future, there will be another Marty there, one who is a different person with his own life story.

I like this paradigm because it ditches paradoxes (which I loathe). Causality is cut the moment the jump through time backwards is made.

The only problem with this is the whole conservation of energy, by going back in time you'll suddenly introduce all the energy in your body (thermal, chemical) to this new time zone. And since the amount of energy in the universe remains constant and you can't create it (that's my understanding anyway) so going back in time shouldn't work.

Truth. I don't accept time travel as possible. If I did, this is the system I would use, because it involves the fewest additional changes.

maybe you can only do it trough going to a parallel universe where time is going back and than come back to this on i think that this is one of the only ways to get to another time

 

[headshotcatcher]

If time travel DOES exist it will probably just create a new reality, instead of changing the one there is now.

 

[huntedannoyed]

I doubt that the past could ever be changed. I believe that the past could be observed but not interacted with. Kind of like Al in Quantum Leap. If it was possible to alter the past, sombody in the future would have already gone back and changed it.

 

[Abedeus]

Or it will happen like in Harry Potter: PoA.

You go back to the past, but this has already happened in YOUR past. So it's a chain - you go back to the past, where you see yourself, he goes back to the past, then he sees himself and so on.

In theory, going back to the past is stupid and useless. But if you knew about it and decided not to, THEN you would change the future. Or the present time.


Or Discworld time travel.

The second something like this happens and there is a risk of "pants of the Time ripping apart", the Monks of Time step in and make sure everything will turn out okay. But it's usually hard and requires some work.

 

[TikiShades]

I believe in split timeline theory, so a "paradox" is simply the time where the timeline would split.

 

[TikiShades]

I doubt that the past could ever be changed. I believe that the past could be observed but not interacted with. Kind of like Al in Quantum Leap. If it was possible to alter the past, sombody in the future would have already gone back and changed it.

And maybe it would have, but we don't know about it, because it is out reality. Maybe Hitler originally won, but someone changed the past so he lost.

 

[huntedannoyed]

I doubt that the past could ever be changed. I believe that the past could be observed but not interacted with. Kind of like Al in Quantum Leap. If it was possible to alter the past, sombody in the future would have already gone back and changed it.

And maybe it would have, but we don't know about it, because it is out reality. Maybe Hitler originally won, but someone changed the past so he lost.

Right, I get the argument. But if it was possible to go back in time and change stuff, there would still be dinosaurs, we would know where Christs bones were burried, and the same few people would keep winning the lottery every week. No two people could ever agree on how to alter the past. So there would be chaos from all of their changes. And, don't you think they would have killed Adolf as a child?

 

[nerdsamwich]

I choose not to believe in time travel of any sort(including prophecy) because it invalidates free will. If it is possible to travel from future to past, or even just to view the future, then the future has already happened, and is even more inevitable than paper burning in fire. Of course, I may believe in free will precisely because the course of history is already set in stone, but if that's the case it doesn't matter what I think because it's all predetermined anyway.

Pre-determination does not invalidate free will. The future may well be set in stone, but if so, it is because of the choices we will make freely.

Speaking of paradoxes...how do you figure we have a choice if the choices are already made? That's like the Ford advertisement that the Model T comes in any color you want, as long as it's black.

Not quite. The Model T example proposes that other options don't exist.

Tomorrow I may have any number of things for breakfast. I will probably have frosted flakes. Let's say I will. If someone went into the future, saw my breakfast, wrote it down on a piece of paper and left it for me to find the paper and my choice will always agree. It will still be my choice. The truth of the statement "you had frosted flakes" on the paper is made so by what I did.

Think about it: How many "choices" do you make where you would have done the same thing presented with the same options every time? Blackjack is a great example. Against a dealer's 6 I will always split double 8s. It's my choice, but I'll do it every time. How many more choices in your life are like this? For most people, almost all of them.

The exercise of free will is a complex process. Often we have made our choices long before they are actualized. We choose what kind of person we want to be, and then our day to day 'choices' are pre-programmed responses to our original choice.

Which means I now have a problem. In my first post I said that causality is not what it seems. In this post I invoke causality of choice to show how 'free will' is often pre-determined and to help explain how free-will and a knowable future are unrelated.

For a big f'ing cookie, just what is my philosophical stance?

What I'm saying is that the definition of choice is the ability to change an outcome. If I choose to go left, I will end up at a strip bar. If I choose to go right, I end up at home alone. Now I can predict with a reasonable degree of certainty what choice I'm going to make, but there's still the option to decide differently. Now if someone from the future reads in a history book that I went to the strip bar, I can no longer affect the outcome because it has already happened. my present is just someone else's history, rolling along with the inevitability of a chemical reaction. The only way my choices can matter, the only way I can have a choice, is if the future doesn't exist yet, and as such, cannot be traveled to. And your philosophical stance seems to be a lot of Pavlov with a bit of Hitchhikers guide thrown in for spice.