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Which will you choose: the future or the past?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Everyone here is trying to make a quick buck, without thinking about whether it will work.
If they change the past, they will cease to exist, unless time is looped, which means nothing would have changed.
So the past is a dead end, and the future you should know this too, answering you will either make them vanish from existence, or answering you will not change anything.
If they vanish, there's no guarantee you'll be better off, even if you do become rich.
This seems like a completely pointless comment. If moneymaking efforts won't work because of the paradox of changing the future, then nothing else will work, since anything will change the future. In that situation, if given the opportunity, why not try?
Also, this can be resolved if your relative future self is smart enough to remember what they heard in the past, and say the same thing they heard when the time comes (unless it doesn't work, in which case arguably they'd say something else, which leads to an unstable configuration where the theoretical future will change until you reach a stable configuration where future you does repeat what you heard)
ACKTHUALLY
My other post gave an answer which made sense.
I would want to know what moment in the future causes me the most stress, which I don't need to worry about at all.
No paradoxes, just convenience.
Also, I wasn't saying money making wouldn't work, only that your future you would cease to exist because you would have changed things.
If you're okay with suicide to offer your past self financial advice, then the same should be true of your future self.
Personally, erasing that timeline seems unacceptable.
Well, it's not me who will stop existing, that's 5 seconds from now me's problem. But like, she already doesn't exist. So really all I'm doing is changing which 5 seconds from now me has to deal with the burden of existence.
But any knowledge you gain will change your behavior in the future, it's unavoidable, and those changes will compound causing the divergence to grow over time.
The only way to avoid "erasing" the timeline is to propose a time travel mechanism through which the timeline never changes despite passing information to the past, and that'd be basically what I suggested, taken to a bit more extreme of a conclusion - that because any other possibility would cause a paradox, your future self must have already made the optimal choice and will be satisfied telling your past self what they already heard in the past themselves.
Well, either that, or you just continue existing in a different timeline, with no benefit from helping your past self.
Good point, I'm definitely changing the past then.
Oof.