Temporal Based RPGs

[RandomCasualty2]

Which, incidentally, also requires meta-time. Speed is a way of describing position as a function of time. Describing something's position in time as a function of time is...rather uninteresting, unless "time" refers to different things in each instance.

Well the speed of time is sort of metatime, but not exactly. Basically the idea is that changes take some manner of time to update, similar to how it takes the light from distant stars a certain amount of time to reach you.

Temporal changes under this theory also take a certain amount of time to update. This is likely going to be directly dependent on the temporal "distance" between the change and the current time. Change something 10 minutes ago, and the change may well seem instantaneous. Change something in the Year 1000 BC and it could take a few months before the changes actually "catch up." to your current time. And in the meantime you've got ample opportunity to fix them before they reach you.

It's basically a temporal explosion of sorts that begins the moment someone goes back in time. The explosion originates from the point in history that was changed and moves forward, changing reality as it goes. So if the speed of time was 1 day/ second, it'd mean that if you changed something 3 days ago, it'd take 3 seconds before the changes actually happened from the point you went back in time.

And that's a pretty good storytelling mechanic, because it allows stuff like Terminator where they can hear about sending a killing machine back in time, and they get an opportunity to send their own human agent back in time before they get erased.

Now, I actually go a step further and put in a restriction that prevents paradoxes. And once you do that, you don't really have any metatime, since there is no point where things outside the timeline are influencing the timeline. There are points where two timelines can exist, but because of the consequences of a paradox, there is never any metatime.

[Manxome]

It's basically a temporal explosion of sorts that begins the moment someone goes back in time. The explosion originates from the point in history that was changed and moves forward, changing reality as it goes. So if the speed of time was 1 day/ second, it'd mean that if you changed something 3 days ago, it'd take 3 seconds before the changes actually happened from the point you went back in time.

Three seconds from when? Your definition is incomplete.

Things happen when they happen. If a star blows up and you ask how long it takes for me to see it, you're asking at what time the light from the star's explosion enters a specific point in space (my eye)--you're measuring one physical variable (the light's position) in relation to another (the hands on your clock).

If someone messes with temporal mechanics and you ask what time the effects reach a specific point in time, the answer can only be "at that point in time." That's like asking at what point in space the light from the star is located when it reaches a particular point in space.


I assume what you actually want is some system where if the bad guy goes back in time and prevents your birth, the original you can jump through the time portal and "follow" him back to stop him, and you can create mechanics that support that, with or without metatime. For example:

Window of "Simultaneous" Travel: When someone travels backwards in time, their timeline ceases to exist. However, all additional travelers that attempt to leave within a time limit T from the point of first departure are also successful in traveling backwards in time and arrive in the new timeline as it is being written. You can even make T a function based on how far back the first person travels, if you want.

Countably Infinite Timelines: See my explanation earlier in this thread.

Quintessential Metatime BS: There is something else that behaves like time, but continues to flow forward when someone travels back in time. If someone goes back to change history, your unchanged self has an amount of subjective time to follow them (before you retroactively cease to exist) that is equal to the amount of subjective time it takes the villain to perform some symbolic history-changing act after arriving in the past. (Or, in a lot of sci-fi, equal to a totally arbitrary length of time that the author pulls out of his ass that has nothing to do with anything.)


But if you specifically want to talk about the speed at which effects move through time, that is utterly incoherent garbage unless you've got metatime, because you are measuring time as a function of itself.

[IGTN]

He described it as time from the instant of time travel.

If the time travel constant is C (dimensionless and arbitrarily set by the DM), and I go back in time from my lab at time t=0 to a point t=-T and change history, then my lab assistant notices the effects of my changing history at time t=TC.

It's essentially what you called the "Window of Simultaneous Travel"

[Elennsar]

So there would presumably be a minimum time that you could go back and adjust. For instance, you couldn't go back to the past five minutes like reloading a saved game.

Am I following, or babbling inanely?

[Manxome]

He described it as time from the instant of time travel.

Well, sort of. He said it "...begins the moment someone goes back in time." In the very next sentence, he said "the explosion originates from the point in history that was changed and moves forward, changing reality as it goes." (emphasis added)

So I am forced to conclude that the first sentence either means that it begins at the moment in meta-time that the time travel took place, or that he is hopelessly confused and contradicting himself.

[Ice9]

The "speed of time" concept is used in a SF series - Time Patrol, IIRC. Basically, time "updates" at a given rate - 1 year per second, for instance.


So at 12:00pm, in the year 2000, Alex and Bob are standing in a cave, next to a time machine. Alex decides to go back 100 years and write his name on the cliff.

100 years ago, the time wave with Alex's writing in it starts moving forward, at a rate of one year per second.

At 12:01 and 40 seconds, the time wave hits Bob - now he's in a timeline where Alex's name is written on the wall. Of course, since he's altered along with the rest of time, he remembers it always being that way.


Now to have much happen in the way of time travelling adventures, the PCs need to either have immunity to time changes (they remember the "old" timeline), or else have some kind of advance warning, from a device or from time scouts in the past.

Of course, even in this setup, a lot of time-travel plots don't really make sense. "You have to leave immediately to stop Dr. Destructo from stomping on a bunch of butterflies back in the Paleozoic.", for instance - even if there is a time wave coming, jumping to the future will give you as much time to prepare as you need. And why didn't your future self give you advance warning about this, anyway?

[Ice9]

Thinking about it, the first step would be deciding what kind of time travel you want. Several kinds, off the top of my head:

The Past is Another Country
As seen in many movies - Back to the Future, for instance. While the past influences the future in a general way, changes don't multiply butterfly-effect style, and in general you could almost be visiting merely a different place. There might be a splash of paradox, but nothing like gemini-armies, revision wars, or effective prescience.

Paradox Central
The paradoxes and possibilities of time travel are the central focus. The Man Who Folded Himself is an example of this.

Time Fight!
Short range time travel can give you some pretty kickass fight scenes. As seen in the video I posted above, as well as Prince of Persia-style rewinding.

[Elennsar]

So to use option #1, if I screw up and cause the Nazis to win WWII, we have only the immediate ripples of that.

Not the ripples of the ripples of the ripples of the ripples until we wind up with a world that resembles Warcraft (or whatever) more than Earth?

You presumably have the United States be more or less like it is in our timeline, for instance. Obviously there are some unpleasant consequences, but we go to a path similar to our own, in the end, nonetheless.

[Manxome]

The "speed of time" concept is used in a SF series - Time Patrol, IIRC. Basically, time "updates" at a given rate - 1 year per second, for instance.


So at 12:00pm, in the year 2000, Alex and Bob are standing in a cave, next to a time machine. Alex decides to go back 100 years and write his name on the cliff.

100 years ago, the time wave with Alex's writing in it starts moving forward, at a rate of one year per second.

At 12:01 and 40 seconds, the time wave hits Bob - now he's in a timeline where Alex's name is written on the wall. Of course, since he's altered along with the rest of time, he remembers it always being that way.

Sure, lots of stories have rules something like that. In single-author fiction, your mechanics don't need to be explicit, consistent or even coherent to tell an interesting story. But "time waves" of that sort do not qualify as any sort of actual coherent mechanic unless you have meta-time. "1 year per second" is not a meaningful description of anything unless the time you're measuring in the numerator and denominator are different.

Because, as you wrote, at 12:01 and 40 seconds, the time wave reaches Bob. IF the narrator happens to start the story at 12:00. If the camera starts focused on Bob in the cave at 11:00, then the time wave hits him at 11:01 and 39.9-something seconds. Which directly contradicts the fact that it hasn't reached him yet at 12:00, unless there's some other relevant variable.

I don't know how many different ways I can say this: speed is an expression of one variable as a function of another. Measuring a variable as a function of itself always gives you the identity function, and anyone who says otherwise is talking nonsense. If you want to measure speed through time, you must measure temporal position as a function of something other than time, or you are not actually measuring anything. That's just fundamental mathematics, and you cannot get around it no matter how fanciful a story you tell.

[RandomCasualty2]

Of course, even in this setup, a lot of time-travel plots don't really make sense. "You have to leave immediately to stop Dr. Destructo from stomping on a bunch of butterflies back in the Paleozoic.", for instance - even if there is a time wave coming, jumping to the future will give you as much time to prepare as you need. And why didn't your future self give you advance warning about this, anyway?

Yeah, ultimately there's a lot of problematic plot holes that can arise from any kind of time travel scenario that goes beyond one set of time travelers. Once you have multiple time travelers doing multiple things, it pretty much is going to have logical holes in it. The best explanation I could think of is that maybe it's only possible to detect the use of a time travel machine within a certain period of time, and stepping into a time machine automatically transports you into the new altered future or past (unless you go back to before the wave originated, which is the thing you want people to do).

So for instance, you may only be able to detect Dr. Destructo's time jump from say 5 minutes after he made it, and if you go in a time machine to the future to try to buy more time, you arrive in the altered future, not the future that you know, as traveling through time would allow the wave to catch up, since you're stepping outside of time to time travel.

You yourself might be unaffected by the wave, since you were in a time machine, but it assumes the future is at all hospitable enough for you to prepare. It may be some post apocalyptic hell for all you know.

But really even then you've still got the problem of tons of time travelers running around changing things, and I don't really think there's a great solution for that. Widespread time travel basically fucks everything up if you think about it too hard.

[virgil]

And then to top it all off, paradoxes truly exist in forms less than killing your grandfather and such like that. Repeating what you saw your future self do is itself an ontological paradox, because there's no actual origin/cause for a particular event; and I've never seen a time travel story avoid this.

That's my biggest concern at the moment. Trying to wrap my mind around the ontological paradox, where ideas/actions bootstrap themselves into existance and break even a metatime-perspective causality.

[Ice9]

Because, as you wrote, at 12:01 and 40 seconds, the time wave reaches Bob. IF the narrator happens to start the story at 12:00. If the camera starts focused on Bob in the cave at 11:00, then the time wave hits him at 11:01 and 39.9-something seconds. Which directly contradicts the fact that it hasn't reached him yet at 12:00, unless there's some other relevant variable.

Ok, accurately, I should have said it hits "12:00 Bob" at that time. It hit "11:00 Bob" at a different time, and it hit "10 years ago Bob" at yet another point. If you go with the time wave concept, those instances of Bob are basically separate, and while they might all "exist", the PCs are only playing as one of them.

[Manxome]

That's my biggest concern at the moment. Trying to wrap my mind around the ontological paradox, where ideas/actions bootstrap themselves into existance and break even a metatime-perspective causality.

The "Countably Infinite Timeline" model really does totally eliminate paradoxes, because it actually puts an inviolable total ordering on all events. I could see how you might feel that that defeats the purpose, though.

Frank's "Self-Regulating Time" also sort of does the same thing; there are hard rules for generating the outcomes and all of them require you to fix your lunch at some point in the narrative before you get to eat it. The end result can still look like a paradox, though...and technically, there's no guarantee that any number of iterations will bring you to a stable state, so every time-traveling attempt actually risks "crashing" the universe.

But I suspect that's what this comes down to: the thing that makes paradoxes arise is closed loops. As soon as you've got a recursive loop with human choice somewhere in it, there's a million ways to force a paradox, and there's certainly a ton of ways to game the system and give yourself ridiculous advantages. There may exist some incredibly subtle, insightful set of rules that prevents them, but the only solution that us mere mortals can offer is: don't let people loop in the first place.

Heck, even simplistic video game time-manipulation powers (Prince of Persia, Braid, etc.) can avoid paradoxes if you describe them correctly--you are, after all, running all of the mechanics on a computer, which is capable of neither time travel nor magical paradox resolution, so clearly there's some manner of expressing the outcomes that follows well-defined and self-consistent rules. And there's a lot of stuff you can do with those powers. But none of them are actually time travel in the traditional sense (except the ones that are part of the plot instead of part of the game mechanics).

Ok, accurately, I should have said it hits "12:00 Bob" at that time. It hit "11:00 Bob" at a different time, and it hit "10 years ago Bob" at yet another point. If you go with the time wave concept, those instances of Bob are basically separate, and while they might all "exist", the PCs are only playing as one of them.

So it hits 12:00 Bob at 12:01:40. And this is supposedly OK, because 12:00 Bob is a different person from 11:00 Bob or, say, 12:01:40 Bob, who gets hit around 12:03:20.

But that means either that 12:00 Bob exists at 12:01:40 (while still being a separate person from 12:01:40 Bob, implying there are at least two separate Bobs in existence at that one specific point in time), or else 12:00 Bob never actually gets hit by the time wave at all, because he doesn't exist at the point in time at which he would get hit.

You can measure position in time as a function of meta-time if you want. Measuring position in time as a function of time is just a question of how long you can distract the reader from the fact that you directly contradicted yourself back in the first sentence and nothing you can possibly say after that will fix it.

Is this really confusing you? I would have thought this was about as simple as it gets. The Denizens have mercilessly mocked people in the laugh or cry threads for less than this.

[Username17]

That's a pretty analogy, but as far as I can tell all you're doing is sneaking in a concept of metatime (represented in your analogy by: time). The rock that you moved upstream comes from a point that, at the end of your narrative, is not part of the space-time continuum, and therefore does not exist unless you allow that something outside that continuum exists. So you need something outside of normal space-time (like metatime, or alternate timelines) or you have an ontological paradox, just as I've been saying for several posts.

Are you being deliberately thick?

In this model, things don't vanish from the present just because their history forward in time no longer will have happened. There is only one stream of time and everything in it exists for as long as it is in it. If you move backwards in time you change the time forward of your new point and then likely eliminate your history from the time stream. But you don't eliminate it from your own memory because you are still in the time stream (at the point backwards in time from your original location) and your memory is a bunch of physical chemicals and electrical impulses. So you remember a history that won't ever have happened.

So to use really small words because you keep getting all weird about this:

Subjective Time: The events that happen to a single individual in the order that they experience them.
Objective Time: The time stream in the order that it takes place from the standpoint of a stationary observer.
History: The events that caused an item or person to be how they currently are. These events are only necessarily past events in subjective time. As long as that person or object is in the time stream, History Cannot Be Changed.
Future: Like History, Future is a subjective time reference point. It's things that will happen relative to the observer. It, like forward time is unset.
Backward Time: Time in the opposite direction of its normal travel for objective time. Without time travel you cannot change it, and if it does get changed, the present will change also (destroying any present and replacing it with another).
Forward Time: Time that objective time will eventually reach from the present. It changes based on every single thing you say or do (or don't do). Only people from the current forward time can use Backward Time to get to the present, and by doing so they would by definition change the contents and the people of the current Forward Time.

To avoid really massive headaches caused by small changes to Forward Time, I suggest that for a game you only allow relatively large time jumps. So honestly, no killing Hitler because it's not long enough ago and makes for confusing alterations in futures. But you could totally go back and kill Jeff Davis or Mohammad Ali Shah. A cutoff of 100 years seems to be enough to keep things from getting too crazy (for time travel).

Example: Let's say you have two time travelers: Bob and Susan. Bob comes from the current forward time direction. He comes backward in time and is now in what is subjectively the present. He does some stuff, creating a new forward time where he was never born (this will always be the case even for old people because enough butterfly effects will ensure that your parents either failed to conceive on that day or at least used a different sperm to make a child). Even though Bob's world does not now exist in Objective Time, the imprints it made on his memory are still there for him, so his personal History is unchanged by this experience. But in the new Forward Time, there is Susan. And she sees something she doesn't like, and goes backward in time, to a place farther back than Bob went. And of course, she changes all time from that point.

So where does that leave Bob? That leaves Bob in one of three places depending upon how you want to run that:

• Bob is destroyed. The time frame he went to has been eliminated as was his own history. Bob is no longer in any point in Objective Time and cannot come out.
• Bob won't see Susan's work unless and until he jumps again. Time propagates at the speed of time. So if he jumps forward or back, he'll see a timeline that is shaped by Susan's actions, not his. But until he jumps, Susan's alterations won't have caught up with him yet. Note that in this model, everyone who wants to from Bob's original time can go back and fight him.
• Bob's adventures in Backward Time have become Forward Time and are now retconned based on the changes Susan made. So now Bob appears in a point that was originally backward time to him that is nonetheless a history he doesn't remember. It has been permanently altered by the actions of someone from a future he would have created had he been allowed to tamper with the backward time that created the history he was taught in school from his own history.

For this reason, you may well want to make history jumping happen in discrete units, to avoid exactly this question. Or you can just take option 2 or 3, and say that people from whatever the current time line is are monkeying with the time line all the time such that whenever you go back in time the timeline is radically different all the way through, so you get a new whacky sliders type adventure every time you jump.

But your argument about moving only part of an item through time doesn't even matter unless you are presupposing that destroying other parts of an item in other time periods somehow destroys the entire item, which I specifically am not.

-Username17

[Elennsar]

So...

I jump back in time to prevent Lincoln's assassination.

I succeed. Or at least alter events.

The "present" that I jumped from no longer exists.

However, I still exist and I exist how I am now (though I might be hurt or otherwise impacted, that's another story).

However, I could jump forward to December 3rd, 2008.

If I did jump to December 3rd, 2008, I would appear (to anyone observing) to have come into existance from "nothing". And for all intents and purposes other than conservation of energy and mass, I did.

So in a way, time travel (into the past) is a one way trip. There is no point for you to return to once you alter the past. Maybe even "enter the past", depending.

So you could not go back in time, do something, and then go back to the time/place you left to stop yourself from going back in time.

Once you go back and change things , you could change things from that change to something like how things would be if you hadn't changed them to begin with, but you've created an entirely new world in place of the old one.

And while it is theoretically possible that you could wind up with the same outcome in the "present" (in my case, 12/3/2008), it is highly unlikely.

Is that correct?

[Manxome]

Are you being deliberately thick?

No, and I apologize if we're talking past each other. Maybe there's some unstated assumption I'm making about how time has to work to be "sensible" and you're breaking it without me figuring it out or something. If it helps at all to clarify, I am not arguing that destroying part of an item automatically destroys the entire item.

I think I understand your descriptions of all the options you enumerated well enough that I could identify them being used in a narrative or write my own stories using those rules and have them come out understandable. I don't even see any notable obstacles to using them as the rules for a time-travel RPG, and I can imagine a group of players applying one of them and all agreeing on the "correct" outcome (possibly after arguing out some nuances). I think your claim about them being a plausible guess at how reality would/does work is incredible, at least without further analysis, but that wouldn't stop me from mechanically applying them and probably getting the same answer that you would.

What I don't see is how you think any of them prevents an ontological paradox. To borrow your terminology, objects and information can exist in objective time that have no origin in objective time. (I'm tempted to say "current" objective time, but I'm trying not to ascribe a meta-time dimension to you when you say you're not using one.)

Maybe I'm totally missing something, but my impression was that the following are sufficient to have an ontological paradox:

1. An object or piece of information exists in the timestream.
2. That object or piece of information has no cause/origin in the timestream.

You don't seem to be disputing that your rules permit both of those conditions to be met. So are we having a problem with agreeing what the goals are or something?

[RandomCasualty2]

So it hits 12:00 Bob at 12:01:40. And this is supposedly OK, because 12:00 Bob is a different person from 11:00 Bob or, say, 12:01:40 Bob, who gets hit around 12:03:20.

But that means either that 12:00 Bob exists at 12:01:40 (while still being a separate person from 12:01:40 Bob, implying there are at least two separate Bobs in existence at that one specific point in time), or else 12:00 Bob never actually gets hit by the time wave at all, because he doesn't exist at the point in time at which he would get hit.

The idea is that causality happens at the speed of time. For normal purposes this doesn't matter because the speed of time is faster than the speed of reality. So any changes you make are instantly realized to the next second, and the one after it.

However when you change something that occurred at a different time, it takes causality a while to catch up, as history effectively rewrites itself. During the process of a time wave, there are actually two distinct realities that exist and it takes time for one reality to wipe out the other.

Because basically the whole principle is that causality isn't instantaneous. So even if Bob 10:00 doesn't exist, until the time wave hits and rewrite reality accounting for that, Bob 10:12 can still exist, because time has yet to catch up to him yet.

You can measure position in time as a function of meta-time if you want. Measuring position in time as a function of time is just a question of how long you can distract the reader from the fact that you directly contradicted yourself back in the first sentence and nothing you can possibly say after that will fix it.

The units may seem funky, because the speed of time seems to be expresses as time over time, but it's actually two different times we're talking about. It's really, amount of time overwritten over time elapsed after the time machine was activated. And those really are two different things.

[Elennsar]

As I understand it...

I come from Timeline A to the past (relative to where I am now).

I alter things. Timeline A is destroyed.

I (and anything else that "escaped") still exist. Like refuges of downfallen Atlantis or something.

[Username17]

What I don't see is how you think any of them prevents an ontological paradox.

A ha! Got it. Your problem is with the definition of "Paradox."

A Paradox is a seemingly acceptable set of premises which follow a seemingly acceptable argument to form a seemingly unacceptable conclusion. There are three ways to resolve a paradox: you can reject the premises, you can reject the reasoning, or you can accept the conclusion. Once you meet one of those criteria, it is no longer a paradox.

So if you have a system by which "uncaused" things can exist sensibly within the framework of your time model, then things appearing in an "uncaused" or "self caused" manner is no longer a paradox. You have rationalized and explained the uncaused or self caused events and they are no longer unacceptable. So there's no paradox.

For example: in self regulating time the events self cause themselves by running infinite iterations of themselves until they self cause. The question of how they could have started if they required their future actions to start is actually resolved because a potentially infinite number of slightly to massively different time lines altered themselves over and over again until a stable state occurred. So the fact that the only reason you have the time machine is because you told yourself how to build one is not a paradox, because it is clearly obvious how this might have come to pass - with younger and younger versions of you going back with more and more complete time machines for the young temporal engineer you to work on until it reached a steady state.

-Username17

[Manxome]

So if you have a system by which "uncaused" things can exist sensibly within the framework of your time model, then things appearing in an "uncaused" or "self caused" manner is no longer a paradox. You have rationalized and explained the uncaused or self caused events and they are no longer unacceptable. So there's no paradox.

Ah. OK, so I think this is the crux of the matter:

You have assumed that the circumstances of the paradox are unacceptable because we cannot explain how they could arise, or cannot articulate a set of rules that is consistent with those circumstances. Thus, by supplying an explanation, you have rendered them acceptable.

I assumed that the circumstances of the paradox are unacceptable because they violate certain basic assumptions we have about the properties of the universe as a whole that we are unwilling to give up. For example, we might want traits like the following:

Closed System: All effects that exist within the universe originate within the universe.

Stability: We can expect to reach a "final" resolution of events, rather than always having some step left "in the queue" that will change the outcome if we think about it too hard.

Unless narrative time (or something similar) is made a formal part of the universe, your description of spatial time produces a universe that lacks these traits.

If you happen to care about the "emergent" trait but don't care about the above traits, then sure, your rules work admirably. If you don't care about any of these traits at all, then the paradox isn't a paradox in the first place and doesn't require any resolution at all.

The units may seem funky, because the speed of time seems to be expresses as time over time, but it's actually two different times we're talking about. It's really, amount of time overwritten over time elapsed after the time machine was activated. And those really are two different things.

Those are different things, but you're just burying the problem under another layer of abstraction.

You are telling me that if you were to draw me a timeline, and mark out what part of it has been "overwritten," that you would need to add the caveat "this drawing is only accurate for a specific time, t." Your time line, whose purpose is to represent the entirety of time, is actually a representation of a specific moment of time. That means that if I want to see all of time as it exists at all points in time--that is, if I want an actual complete representation of all of time under your rules--you can't draw me a time line, you have to draw me a time plane, with two dimensions.

That means you have two dimensions of time.

Every explanation you try to offer makes up new terms and doesn't bother to define them. "Speed of time?"

[Username17]

OK first I think I'm going to have to bust out the small words as regards the concept of time change propagation, because it's a pretty common conceit and you seem to be flipping out about it. It goes like this: when a change is made at some point t in the time stream that will change every point >t in the time stream (assuming that you are in a time model where time can be changed). But there is no guaranty that it will do so instantaneously.

That is, we are all fine and dandy that if you go back and change the past and then sit around on the porch in that past and wait and watch as it progresses to the future that the world thus experienced will be changed. Sure. But in many models the change to the future will only happen when enough seconds have ticked by to actually get there. In short, that the time stream will move forward at the normal rate of causality such that if you hop in your time machine you can actually out run that wave of time shift and return to your own original time period.

In some versions the propagation is "faster" than the normal ticking of a clock, and thus any point in the future will eventually be overtaken by the changed history - giving you a window to loot things from your original forward time before it is overwritten.

This system of time alteration propagation is reasonable and consistent, and there is no reason to reject it other than simple preference.

---

Anyway...

You have assumed that the circumstances of the paradox are unacceptable because we cannot explain how they could arise, or cannot articulate a set of rules that is consistent with those circumstances. Thus, by supplying an explanation, you have rendered them acceptable.

Right. That is how one resolves a paradox.

I assumed that the circumstances of the paradox are unacceptable because they violate certain basic assumptions we have about the properties of the universe as a whole that we are unwilling to give up.

And that is an unreasonable assumption. For starters, the resolutions I proposed do give up the assumptions you are making as valid. Meaning that if you refuse to let go of them, you are refusing to accept my proposed solutions - you aren't actually arguing against those solutions. You're just jumping up and down and saying DO NOT WANT! rather than engaging with the actual discussion.

Closed System: All effects that exist within the universe originate within the universe.

Considering that over four billion people on Earth formally believe that this statement is false, I think that claiming that it is an unshakable axiom that cannot be done without is rather over stating the case. The number of people who actually think that every effect in the universe must ultimately and necessarily begin within it is vanishingly small. A much larger number of people believe that every effect must be caused by something in "the past" - which is obviously going right out the window as soon as you even contemplate Time Travel in any form.

Stability: We can expect to reach a "final" resolution of events, rather than always having some step left "in the queue" that will change the outcome if we think about it too hard.

Considering how many people believe that the universe is eternal (formally approximately 5 billion), I find that one rather hard to accept as an axiom that must be untested by a game with fucking time travel in it as well. I mean, the very concept of Time Travel is that you are going to event that "have happened" and changing them. Why you expect that events must necessarily be unchangeable after making that leap is beyond mortal understanding.

So you took as the two things that both "must" be true as things which are rejected by the first and third largest religions on the planet. Obviously you're in the profound minority of people who think that they both must be true together. Hell, you're hard pressed to find people who believe that either must be true. You might seriously be a minority of one on those points.

---

But yeah, if you still refuse to accept the conclusion and you still accept the premises and reasoning, then you still have a paradox on your hands. That has nothing whatever to do with whether any of the suggested models resolve the paradox, because as previously stated you not accepting the model has no bearing on whether the model is internally consistent or not.

-Username17

[Manxome]

I have already admitted that all of the proposals under discussion work perfectly fine if you'd just admit that you have an implicit "narrative time" mechanic that is separate from actual time. But apparently I am totally unable to communicate my thoughts or you all have the concept of story-time so ingrained in your thinking that you can use it constantly while still honestly believing you've totally eliminated it.

I give up.

For the record, Frank doesn't seem to have understood what I intended by either of the conditions I listed, but I'm too sick of this discussion to bother trying to identify the point of miscommunication.

[Ice9]

that is, if I want an actual complete representation of all of time under your rules--you can't draw me a time line, you have to draw me a time plane, with two dimensions.

Well that's part of it right there. If you're going by the "speed of time" model, there is no absolute timeline, just as in relativity there is no perfect observer or absolute frame of reference. The "timeline" question can only be answered in relation to a given observer.

[Username17]

There seriously isn't a narrative time or meta time or anything in most of the models that people have proposed. I really really don't understand why you keep bringing it up.

When you move forward in time via time machine you are by definition outrunning the normal progression of time. However fast time normally moves, you are moving faster than it. Or cutting corners, or whatever your justification is. The idea that if you do that that the time in the future may not have received the information that it should change yet makes as much sense as the idea of moving forward in time does to begin with.

You are literally moving forward in time faster than cause and effect. Why would you necessarily require a secondary absolute time counter to keep track of how much you've outrun cause and effect?

Smash a glass at point t. Now all future times will be adjusted to be a world where the glass is smashed. But if you can outrun cause and effect, which a time machine is apparently capable of doing, then you should be able to jump to a future time t where the glass hasn't gotten the message that it has been destroyed.

Now since we all move through time at the speed of time, we have no real reference for how fast cause and effect modifies the future, right? So you are free as a designer of a temporal model to give any adjustment speed you want. Jumping ahead 50 years may give you limitless time to play around in an unchanged future because the time wave adjustment will stay 50 years behind you for as long as you live. Or it might give you 50 seconds or no time at all. That's seriously a slider that you have to set for your own temporal model.

But it is internally consistent and does not require metatime of any sort or in any way. It's really just a question of what moving forward in time means.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Fuck I hate time travel.