It's not a plot hole. It's also only a paradox/impossibility if you believe that time is created on the fly, which is really only your perception of it because you're a 3-dimensional being traversing a 4-dimensional body.
To make that idea clearer, think of it like an MRI. The scanner can only ever see a single 2D slice of the person in it at once. It can't see the whole thing, but that doesn't mean that the body isn't there, or that it is created as the picture is taken. That's only how the MRI experiences it, so to say.
Now, we're the MRI, only ever seeing a single 3D slice of the 4D body Time at once. We can't see the whole thing, which makes it seem like it only comes into existence as we experience it, and that our actions and choices create and shape the slices to come. But they don't. Just like the person being scanned by the MRI, time already exists, your choices in it already exist, and the path you'll walk in life already exists just like the veins in your body already exist.
That's why there's no beginning for the time loop and there doesn't need to be. It simply exists, and always has. It's not created by anything, no particular action causing it. It's just there.
Now if you wanna talk impossibilities, that would be time travel itself. Even if you could reposition your scanner over a previous time slice, why would that look any differently than it did before? How could you be there as anything other than the exact same person, in the exact same position and situation, with the exact same thoughts and knowledge as you were the first time? You couldn't insert an older, more knowledgeable you in a previous moment, same as your wrist wouldn't show up in your shoulder, no matter how many times you go back.
But that's a rant for another day.
reply
share
vtastek
8 years ago
It is an impossibility. We are active agents. You can't apply the Self-consistency to intelligent agents.
Let's say I buy into that, the movie logic still fails. If everything Hector did was an accident, it would be something interesting to watch but Hector deliberately tries to recreate things. Everything just falls into place because it is convenient for the script.
Like I said, you can't apply the Self-consistency to intelligent agents. It falls apart.
There is something called simulations where you can have access to the whole timeline of something, watch different time snapshots at the same time and even manipulate it. That happens just fine following some simple logical rules.
You can only access one point at a time.
You erase everything from that point on to be recreated.
So I don't like the machine being used while we still have an outside ongoing POV. We should always follow the traveler. It is a proper loop in all senses of the word. What should happen is no one enters the time machine to prevent infinite loops.
A time machine's job description is basically to break the casualization, only for its moment of travel off course. After the travel, temporal clones will have to live on while still being subjected to all casualization. They have to learn to live.
reply
share