If you had a machine that created a window through which you could see the future, and in the future you wrote down the winning lottery numbers and relayed that information to your present self before that lottery number was drawn.

However, in your present selfs excitement, you turn off the machine before your future self wrote the winning lottery numbers into it for your past self.

What would happen?

  • Zonetrooper@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox (“You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?”). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.

    Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn’t even all of them:

    • The closed loop theory: To maintain the loop, you will in the future build a time machine which will allow you to activate the machine in the past, maintaining the loop. Past you may even be unaware it was activated from the future.
    • The Parallel Universe theory: When future-you sent information into the past, they did not send it into their own past but rather into a universe in which you do not send the information back in the first place.
    • The Timelike Curve theory: Because there is no common reference frame for “time”, each quanta of “you” is experiencing a different reference frame. The historic light cone of your future self sending the information back exists, and if you could follow those photons backwards you would find him doing this. But future you, in your frame of reference, will never see the machine activate.
    • The Emergent Time theory: Time is not a linear path, but a function of entropy. By inverting entropy, you have caused a reconfiguration of the universe into a version in which the machine is inactive.
      • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Except for the fact it makes every decision, every moment of tension and every event that occurs irrelevant, because an infinite number of universe exist in which the events occurred and in which they didn’t occur.

        • davidgro@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 month ago

          Even knowing that everything happens every way in some other branch of the wave function (other universes) doesn’t really affect our own little section of it. There’s no communications or travel, so other universes if they exist have the same meaning to us as if they don’t. Except in time travel stories like this.

          Besides, the same “irrelevance” of decisions and events comes free with even one single universe given that it’s deterministic - as physics seems to be. (Yeah there’s quantum randomness, but random doesn’t help either)

          That said I still believe in free will and the importance of decisions. I just think it has to be defined so weakly that it still works in a deterministic universe. (So I have free will, but so do dice and pocket calculators.)

          • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            I’m not talking about about the possibility of real infinite dimensions. I’m talking about sci fi, and stories, which is the context of the OPs question.

            In a “real” scenario, the experience that matters is the one I’m having, not the one other versions of me might be having.

            But in a story, there is no “true” timeline, or a more “real” timeline. They’re all being retold to us indirectly, and the choice of the version of the person retelling those experiences is arbitrary by the author. It doesn’t matter what perspective the author chooses, because every other outcome also happened, the author just didn’t tell us those stories.

            • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
              0·
              1 month ago

              But in a story, there is no “true” timeline, or a more “real” timeline.

              That would be the most boring story ever.

              It becomes interesting at that point where one (or some) of the possibilities get a special meaning “above” all the others.

              • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                1·
                1 month ago

                That’s exactly my point! In an infinite timelines story, there is nothing that has special meaning over the others, making it boring, because it’s all irrelevant!

                • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
                  0·
                  1 month ago

                  I get what you mean, but I have to disagree a bit. The slice of the multiverse we’re looking at is special because we’re looking at it. It only makes it irrelevant if the slices are treated as fully replaceable.

                  Take for example Invincible. The comics & series focus on a young superhero who could have become incredibly evil, but didn’t. The multiverse is used to highlight this: it shows alternative versions of him that did become evil, and it even says that most alternative versions did so. This makes the version of him we focus on that much more special, and allows for interesting character progression through being confronted with his fears.

                  But it only works because of the restraint of the writers, never showing us another good version of Invincible, only focusing on evil alternatives.