Other than the assumption that all universes are inherently loopy, what mechanism would actually prevent such a universe (structured as a loop with multiple timelines) from itself being the original cause for a linear timeline (one that dissolves into a maximally entropic state and stops evolving)? Seems like these offshoots could be extremely numerous compared with timelines that successfully renew an earlier state.
A timeline cannot loop and then offshoot into an open timeline. Each event in a causal loop is like a single point. It goes against our intuition, but they don’t “repeat” as if they happen over and over again—there is just one instance of each event, and they all exist at once. So if any one point on this loop were to somehow change to being open, then it no longer causes the very events which lead to its own existence, so the entire causal chain would not have existed in the first place.
Its subtle, but such a “break” is different than the notion of extensive splitting in the many worlds interpretation, where those splits might be better understood as “overlays” of valid/possible timelines which all maintain their respective loops, and they just happen to share the same informational state at the point of decoherence/splitting.
Other than the assumption that all universes are inherently loopy, what mechanism would actually prevent such a universe (structured as a loop with multiple timelines) from itself being the original cause for a linear timeline (one that dissolves into a maximally entropic state and stops evolving)? Seems like these offshoots could be extremely numerous compared with timelines that successfully renew an earlier state.
A timeline cannot loop and then offshoot into an open timeline. Each event in a causal loop is like a single point. It goes against our intuition, but they don’t “repeat” as if they happen over and over again—there is just one instance of each event, and they all exist at once. So if any one point on this loop were to somehow change to being open, then it no longer causes the very events which lead to its own existence, so the entire causal chain would not have existed in the first place.
Its subtle, but such a “break” is different than the notion of extensive splitting in the many worlds interpretation, where those splits might be better understood as “overlays” of valid/possible timelines which all maintain their respective loops, and they just happen to share the same informational state at the point of decoherence/splitting.