I've been diving deep into time travel logic recently, and the "Bootstrap Paradox" (Ontological Paradox) is the one that breaks my brain the most.
The classic example of a time traveler giving Beethoven his own music before he writes it implies that the information has no origin. It creates a closed loop where the object exists without being created by anyone.
It makes me wonder about Free Will. If the past creates the future, but the future also ensures the past happens (like in Dark or Tenet), are we just following a script?
I tried to visualize this concept, along with the "Grandfather Paradox" and the "Novikov Self-Consistency Principle," in a short documentary style.
If you enjoy deep dives into causal loops and physics, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this logic:
https://youtu.be/2FprWq34PxQ?si=nwY54RTu5-2XLaGy
Question for the sub: Do you think the universe allows these paradoxes (Multiverse theory), or does it "correct" itself like Novikov suggested?
I mean, they are called paradoxes because they logically can’t happen.
Yeah but sometimes what first appears to be a paradox turns out to have a solution when reframed in a new paradigm.
In Groundhog Day, the main character speaks the words the npc is destined to say several times in the cafe
This doesn’t mean those words have no origin
In OPs example, the music still came from Beethoven mind, but were also delivered to him before hand
Delivered before hand in an alternate timeline. B created the music and it was shipped somewhere that it didn’t exist.
No, in the Beethoven example, they didn’t come from Beethoven’s mind because there was no Beethoven, and the time traveller who takes the place of Beethoven is just using music that has no origin.
Yeah but the time traveller heard the music from Beethoven so the music did come from Beethoven originally. If you unravel the time traveler's timeline you see a straight line that goes -> Beethoven writes music ->time traveller is born -> time traveller hears Beethoven's music -> time traveller goes back in time to inspire Beethoven with his own music...
That depends on whether the paradox is that Beethoven hasn’t written the music, or Beethoven didn’t exist.
But that’s the paradox: the Time Traveller thought Beethoven wrote it, but finds out Beethoven didn’t, and in the process either gives him music he didn’t write that he passes off as his own, or becomes Beethoven in the past.
In both cases, the music wasn’t written by Beethoven. It had no author.
It depends on the mechanics of time travel but I would say there is no timeline that could possibly exist without Beethoven writing the music before the time traveller goes back to change things. From the time travellers perspective at least.
If history is reset such that events caused Beethoven to not exist then the time traveller would not have any memory oh him existing and as such could not go back with the information that Beethoven created.
If the time traveller's memory of Beethoven is preserved because his timeline is preserved then there was a time when Beethoven existed even if according to the timeline of the rest of the world he never did.
Yes, it's silly, but that's the paradox.
(Yes until the last paragraph; the *point* of the paradox is how you could get to uncaused creation)
Word is a word. Salad is a word. Word salad is two words.
But what does it taste like?
Salad but some say chicken.
But everything tastes like chicken. 🐔 🪓 🍗 🍽️
True , but what came first. Chicken or Beethovens music? ....or his egg?
I'm drunk , Merry Christmas.
You are on r/timetravel, yet you do not ponder the possibility of a New Paradigm that could resolve the above paradox?
Time travel doesn’t exist until it happens.
At which point it will have always existed and then you are going to have looked pretty stupid right about now!
Any actual examples? Again we're talking about a literally impossible situation here. Trying to say "what's the answer to this unsolvable question" doesn't have an answer no matter what mental gymnastics you try to apply.
It's like the "can god make a rock so big he can't lift it" question. It's not actually deep or intelligent. The answer is no because the situation presupposes an omnipotent deity that can do whatever they want and also has no physical form in our universe. You might as well ask "how much weight can Hercules the mythical greek hero bench press?" There's no answer because Hercules didn't exist. Bootstrap paradoxes are interesting in stories but cannot happen in real life because it's impossible to create a series of events that ends up making itself happen.
Branches Solution
Before anyone time travels anywhere in the universe:
When someone time travels to the past:
Important: Branches are NOT infinite
Current state:
Bootstrap Paradox Resolution
Now that you understand branches:
Resolution:
No paradox because branches exist and information transfers between them.
Could be exactly the same thing for Bitcoin.
Time is two-dimensional, probabilities don't add up to one, we're immersed, not embedded, meandering trapped time loops create a perception illusion of reflections of the future from the past, when causality reconnects with linear temporal field regions.
Basically, trying to imagine the fabric of reality may require a mind with more degrees of freedom than ours
You don’t have to make it sound that complicated.
Just get some lsd, think about the problem again and you will find out that time is just a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey winey stuff
LSD?! It's from some ideas in physics, it's not complicated, physicists experience strong attraction to charmed particles, which have color charge, that's all...
OK, maybe it's LSD.
i once took ketamin and made a travel through universes with an increasing number of spatial dimensions. can't really describe what 9 spatial dimensions feel like. also it got more and more complex.
that was an interesting tripp.
...yeah and then i woke up sitting on the floor in my living room and I had peed myself probably sometime betwenn the 5 and 7 dimensional reality.
Psychedelics anneal, inthe hot phase some unusual connections may take place
My brother did ketamine and became right wing. 🙃
Why?
What did he see?
That might have been cuntamine
Time is two-dimensional! How? probabilities don't add up to one?? from when?? we're immersed, not embedded??? yeah in your mother! perception illusion of reflections of the future from the past??? what the fuck in 7 hells is this??? linear temporal field....you discovered this? Einstein's left scrotum............... asshole go read your school books, touch some grass, and don't talk shit like that ever again.
maybe its 3 dimensional and we can only feel one dimension of time.
just read on flatworld and imagine the same effects of time.
Just because consciousness appears to experience time forwards does not mean that its not a synergistic construct.
Moving forward in time, you must realize, if someone comes back and give Beethoven the 9th, in a forward moving system, that is not a guy coming back. Its the apparition of a guy as well as the birth of his supposed loop. Most theories start the going back from the future that is false. The first time, it happens spontaneously.
The thing you need to understand a paradox like this is - to look for evidence of it in the real world. But that's hard. Or is it?
In Back to the Future, Marty McFly goes back in time to 1955, and presents this 'oldie but goody' at the school dance where we then see a phone call being made to Chuck Berry, who in OUR timeline is the original creator of the song "Johnny B Goode" which was subsequently released in 1958.
Now this represents the essence of your thought bootstrap paradox, right? If Marty McFly provided Chuck Berry the inspiration, then how does this loop resolve?
Back to the Future is brilliant with this - because we're NEVER told, expressly - in the reality Marty originated from - that Chuck Berry is actually where HE heard this song from originally. All Marty says - in these exact words is "This is an oldie but goodie... Where I'm from".
So how do you break this causal loop?
Simple. You look for the holes. You create a new story for it.
WE HAVE to presume Marty doesn't live in our world, right? That's silly to think about anyways, Marty's played by Michael J Fox as an actor and Christopher Lloyd plays Doc Brown.
So with this. We have empirical evidence, in film - that the locations used for the film are not owned by the same people they are in the film, or named the same "Twin Pines Mall", etc.
Which provides direct evidence that Marty's world exists in an alternate reality.
A reality that we CANNOT presume that Chuck Berry is where Marty originally heard that song from. We know, empirically - in the film - that Marty CHANGED the future by what he did in the past (1955) - a part of those changes NOT documented is quite likely who originated the song "Johnny B Goode". Was it Elvis in the previous reality?
That idea breaks the bootstrap paradox. You simply alter the origin story.
So let's cross apply this lesson to your lesson. The time traveler giving Beethoven his music. If Beethoven received his music from a time traveler "IN THIS ITERATION" - if you could keep on time traveling back in a loop following the time traveler - you'd see - like Marty - that the world changed in subtly different ways for every iteration.
But let's say - like Marty's retreat back in time, that this was his 1000th time traveling back in time. That is, 1955 happens, A NEW VERSION OF Marty is born in 1968, who travels back in time in 1985, who goes back to 1955, which creates a new timeline resulting in a new version of Marty being born in 1968, who goes back in time in 1985.....
If you could follow these threads BACKWARDS, understanding EVERY NEW iteration creates a separate and distinct OBSERVABLE timeline (1985 wimp dad versus 1985 confident dad) from an external (audience) perspective.
You could eventually land on a reality where Beethoven crafted his own music without a time traveler.
OR.
You might find out the music was originally written by Rachmaninoff and that's where the Time traveler got the music from who WAS the original writer of Beethoven's material.
In order to break your loop. You have to break the fourth wall. Imagine an external perspective and seeing the loop, seeing the subtle changes of time that occur due to the interference of the time traveler, and tracing it back to the originator that DIDNT use time travel to get their source material.
I always thought it would be cool to have a story where these objects with no origin were rare and powerful and someone was searching the universe looking for them.
Check out the lost room
Are you referring to the movie / miniseries, "The Lost Room"?
Great movie, imo. And it perfectly fits that request! Lol
Yup, I wish there was more of it. Might have to do a rewatch
Watch "Predestination", skip the synopsis and reviews, go in blind and just press play. Then report back. One of Ethan Hawks best movies.
The thing is, they’re fun to think about, but they’re also the very reason time travel is impossible. So in reality, this is something that will never be a problem. But that doesn’t mean u don’t love watching content about it. So thanks for sharing!
I don't think I'm convinced that "If X happens then a paradox will result" means that X can't happen. For all we know the universe won't care that nobody wrote the symphony.
The universe does care though. The law of conservation of energy tells us it does. Something can’t come from nothing.
Conservation laws aren't enforced. Nothing cares and nothing is counting and making sure things add up then changing things to make sure they do. Conservation laws are simply descriptions of what happens because all the things that do +X also do -X at the same time. If a loophole could be found, it wouldn't piss off the universe. In fact we might only exist because of such a flaw creating unequal amounts of matter and antimatter at the beginning of the universe.
What is nothing?
The absence of anything
If something can’t come from nothing then why does anything exist in the first place?
That’s a good question. You have two choices: either the physical universe is uncreated and eternal (which isn’t possible unless you eliminate time from the equation) or a power exists beyond the physical universe that has creative power.
Something can't currently come from nothing. It's entirely reasonable to think that very limit is a by product of the universe being created from nothing.
Our current physics just says it cant happen now. But our current understanding of physics only works going so far back in time.
It could have happened once, and as a result, can't happen again, until such a time where conditions allow it.
The laws of physics dont create universes. Universes create laws of physics.
If you knew anything about the universe, you'd know that something comes from nothing all the time.
What and where?
I think he is referring to quantum fluctuations. Virtual particles. Particle /anti-particle pairs.
If you take a particle of energy 1 and combine it with particle of energy -1, then the result is zero, it's gone. annihilated.
So the reverse it also true. from 0(nothing), matter can come from nothing. a particle and anti-particle.
I thought that’s what they might be saying. But that’s not actually coming from nothing.
Right! And even if time travel was possible, it would not create a paradox either, the moment time travel happens - a parallel timelime starts, so there is no closed-loop and no paradox caused in the end. You took the music back in time, new timeline starts.
That’s another possibility. But I prefer fixed time. It makes for better stories.
David Bowie
I think you are worrying too much about something that isn’t possible. This is why we use the word paradox.
Cool premise for YouTube channel content. What do you plan on doing with it?
The bootstrap paradox seems complex at first but it actually resolves very neatly. If you follow it in linear time the music appears to be a noncausal object existing before it's creation. But from the music's perspective it's existence began when it was created. From it's perspective it's existence is an unbroken thread of linear time wherein it's created in the future >> Travels to the past >> Is eventually destroyed >> and needs to be recreated the hard way in the future again.
there's a solution to this now
That was actually a very easy read, and made perfect sense.
I've agreed with that theory for a few decades now myself. Not because I actually thought of it myself, but because of an episode of The Twilight Zone I watched. Lol
(Spoiler! Old episode, but don't want to spoil it for anyone wanting to watch it first! Lol )
The Twilight Zone -- Cradle of Darkness -- S1/E5 -- October 2, 2002
Andrea Collins (Katherine Heigl) travels from an unmentioned time to April 28, 1889, to Braunau am Inn, Austria, and becomes a housemaid to the Hitler family. Her plan is to kill the infant Adolf Hitler.
Her first attempts fail due to disruptions and her own inability to kill a baby. After being unable to kill the baby, Collins goes into a church to confess. She tells the father that someone in the city would cause the death of 60 million people and that she will kill him, to which the father replies that nobody knows the future but even if it is true, only God has the right to kill that person. During her pursuit to kill the infant Adolf Hitler, Collins also learns that his father Alois Hitler not only holds bigoted views towards Jews and Gypsies, but also has a desire for Austria to reunite with Germany (views which Adolf Hitler was known for holding in his adulthood), which makes Collins briefly consider getting the infant away from his father rather than killing him.
Collins finally manages to fulfill her plan by stealing the child and jumping into a river with it. However, Kristina, another housemaid, having followed Andrea and witnessed her jump, buys a homeless woman's baby – the homeless woman ironically a Gypsy – and passes it off as Adolf, presumably the one known to history in the first place. Effectively Collins murdered an innocent child while creating Adolf Hitler.
The key is to realize that time becomes a recurring spiral, an infinite series of parallel timelines. When you travel back in time, you're actually traveling sideways and backwards to a parallel timeline, and influencing that one, not the one you came from. This is in principle how cinema often works with this question.
The other option is that the timeline must immediately become self consistent, and so the second you influence the past in a way that influences the future, the future updates correspondingly, usually with future-you ceasing to exist. I don't know of anything that actually does it this way but it makes more sense, even if it doesn't work well for movies.
It came from a Beethoven from a separate parallel timeline, where the information is transmitted from one universe to the other.
Nothing is impossible.
Even if you give Beethoven´s work to Bob, the creator is still Beethoven, the origin doesn't disappear, it just gets rewritten, and as long as ur alive u know he is the creator, and when u die no one else will know, yet Beethoven still created it.
Dont get confused by semantics just cause paradoxes get complex.
The Beethoven Paradox involves the time traveller finding that there never was a Beethoven, not changing what Beethoven actually did.
Beethoven could cease to exist, but he did, doesn't matter
just cause we dont know the truth doesn't make it a non thing
The thing about boostrap paradoxes is they have both a start and an ending, even if it seemingly doesnt look like it.
I think perhaps you don’t understand this hypothetical.
ohhhhh the irony, its the opposite, you all confused and lost, when its simple.
Just cause it involves time travel and non linear events, doesnt mean it gets mystical and strange.
You guys should learn how to think with the reductionism method:
"Methodological reductionism is the scientific approach of explaining complex systems or phenomena by analyzing their simpler, constituent parts. This method involves breaking down a complex problem into smaller, more manageable components to understand their interactions and behaviors, which can then be used to explain the whole system. It is often associated with the scientific method, where variables are isolated to identify causal relationships, such as in experiments that examine how individual independent variables affect dependent variables"
I’m a programmer, my entire job is methodological reductionism.
I already showed several ways to reach the solution, to the other people here on this post, go check them.
Your lack of understanding here doesn’t give me confidence you’re understanding it elsewhere in this thread.
OPs position is that it may have never been written because they always delivered it hence the paradox. They only think Beethoven created it so they delivered it to him under that assumption. It could have been possible that the original origin was someone else entirely.
"the original origin was someone else entirely"
see, it doesnt matter, its sematics, there is always a real origin, even you fell into the right logic after counter-arguing it.
Sure, you're just abstracting which is the only way we really can comprehend the subject. In my opinion it's fun to let yourself run these loops because it's astonishing that as intelligent as people are there are just so many things beyond the limits of our biology. OP is most likely engaging in a similar exercise, so the over reductionist perspective, "it doesn't matter" kind of fails to contribute much.
We aint even talking about time travel, its just bullshit philosophy about the real origin of the real real origin, a circle that leads no where.
See it this way, imagine you are a all powerful god, no matter how many times puny humans change history, you a god will always know the real origin, meanwhile some idiots on reddit are debating "nah this is the real origin" and "no this is the real origin" all pointless.
original timeline -> origin = real origin
alt timeline -> origin = seemingly "real" origin
One thing doesn't deny the other, its a simple linear process that you are overthinking, and its sad you thing this is a intelligent conversation.
There is no free will.
The answer is that the act of going back in time involves jumping to another universe in the multiverse where you existed at that time. So giving Beethoven's music to Beethoven just means you transferred information from one universe to another universe.
You can decide a new universe pinches off when the time traveler first arrives in Beethoven's time, or that no paradox ensues; Beethoven publishes the work, the time traveler obtains it in the future, they loop back to give it to Beethoven.
Or really, anything that tickles your fancy, since there is no time travel you can make up the rules!
Consider the three types of time travel.
Static universe: Assumption can't happen. Even if you can go back in time, you can't change anything, as it has already happened. Thinking otherwise just shows confusion about what free will is.
Multi Universe: You think you have gone back into the past and changed stuff, but really you have travelled to an identical parallel universe. So no paradox just two different universes.
Dynamic single universe (12 Monkeys TT). Weird stuff happens, don't bother trying to understand. Exciting for TV shows, but otherwise nonsensical.
Uh, wasn’t 12 Monkeys an example of a static universe? At least in the story the movie was based on, and the movie, the main character witnesses his own death as an adult when he was a child. He doesn’t change history, but fulfills it.
No, not static. In the first episode, Cole did the trick with Railly's watch from her grave. Showing that scratching the newer version in the present changed the watch from her grave.
So the 12M-universe changes dynamically as time travellers do stuff.
In a static universe, nothing changes; whatever time travellers do, it's what they always do/did.
So you’re specifically talking about the tv show, not the movie or original story?
Yes. I thought the watch thing was a good demonstration of this time-travel idea.
I really like the bootstrap paradox. Something about the gnawing question of where information comes from in even a passive sense.
That said, part of the aversion we have to self contained events is that we see linear causality as being this line that goes from the past into the future. But If we look to the past, the line either continues infinitely or it starts with all other lines arbitrarily during a cosmic crestion event with no internal origin.
In the other direction, the same, either the information continues on infinitely or it arbitrarily ceases to exist in some cosmic end.
In either case, is an infinite line really more logical than a finite circle? Is a line with no clear origin or end any more logical than a circle with no origin?
It's neat to think about.
Time travel is not possible. That state of being has already happened. The best you can do is replicate an identical state of being that IS NOT the original. Super Mario World 1-1 can be replay to infinity. It is the same game, same level…however it is NOT the same game state.
You cannot change what’s already been done. Even if you revert every atom to the state it was previously, the progress has already concluded and you’re just replaying the level.
Strictly speaking we don’t know if time travel is impossible.
that AI slop youtube video is like nails on a chalkboard
It just be how it do.
It’s not really a paradox if branching time lines exist. Basically in timeline A the symphony is created, and then at some future point time travel is invented. Some time traveler in that timeline goes back to hand the creator the symphony but their mere presence there splits the timeline, so they’re handing the symphony off to timeline B composer.
In that scenario, if you’re going back to give the music to a Beethoven who hasn’t written them, that would imply that it’s our timeline until you arrive in the past and cause a branch, which still leaves the paradoxical question of where that music came from, since in your example the branching event involves one reality in which you appear and give the Beethoven music, and another in which you don’t, but the music still comes into existence after that branch moment.
You need to listen to this episode of the Telepathy Tapes.
"The Consciousness of Creativity. Are ideas alive and do they choose us?"
youtube.com/watch?v=BCNL3lKOCac&pp=ygUYdGVsZXBhdGh5IHRhcGVzIHNlYXNvbiAy
According that that, these ideas seem to just be out there looking for someone to give them life. And if you can't satisfy them, they'll move onto someone else.
Try breaking the assumption that each loop is static. A dynamic loop has the potential for variations loop to loop.
Therefore, it is conceivable that the musician wrote the music, but the music emigrated into timelines where they did not write it.
Perhaps it is the act of time travel that allows a second (or n+1 if you prefer) visit to all random outcomes within the loops timeframe. So, even if the traveler changed nothing, the heads/tails outcomes of millions of events could be revisited and the future that the time traveler left would be impossible to return to.
Loop this enough and you could end up with music that has no causal origin in this iteration of events.
Time travel to the past isn't consistent in the context of existing physics models. But travel to the future is fine (i.e., relativistic effects). So the time travel paradoxes you mention aren't physically possible. There are some weird causal things in QM (e.g., quantum erasure), but the interpretation is debated so thats inconclusive.
If time exists, and history exists, then why would time travel to the future be less problematic? In both casss you’re altering the flow of time and it’s only now from our perspective, just as when you go to the past, a person in the past could say “who cares if you’re making a change? The future hasn’t happened yet.”
On the other hand....
If the difficulty is moving matter and/or energy through time, information is massless. It should be less impossible.
Use his paper and ink, write stuff and hand it to him.
No evidence of time travel.
Yes. No composer but no matter has been created either.
That should satisfy E=mc2.
This is solved by multiple time dimensions or iterations. The music is organically created in the first iteration and in the subsequent iterations given to Beethoven. It doesn't matter so much who created it first.
Free will. If you are 100% a result (im taking about your actions and decisions ) a result of what has happen to you (environment) and how you are hard wired (both genetics and past experience again shaping this) to respond to any sort of stimuli where does free will Enter into the equation?
Just adding to the problem, not helping at all :)
The origin of the music was GTA 6
In a closed time like curve each iteration shrinks it slightly. So there was a beginning, most likely it was the original intended author. But the act of time travel created a closed time like curve and eventually it shrunk enough that the original causal chain was lost and only the retro causal chain remains.
Hope that helps!
What is will in free will? How humans make decisions? I do believe that we do have free will,… but free will is not what we think it is. Our agency is not proven in decision making. Since day we are born every decision we make is somehow connected with previous one, and while we did make those decisions we truly don’t know is there any other decision we could have made. For sure we can imagine it. But imagine and do is not a same thing. If we could made different decision why we didn’t. My favourite argument on this topic is that if past is not possible to change than future is not possible to change as well. Because future will be past in some point.
The information has no origin, perhaps self-originating, perhaps originating from the mind of someone... perhaps god. A time traveler can't exist. "You" are a time-based process. So you're the wave in the water wondering if it can transcend the state of being water, but failing to realize that the wave is integral to your existence. The misunderstanding is that "you" could meaningfully traverse time in any opposite direction without a basic destruction of what it would mean to be "you" at all. All signs point to the answer being no.
If you have a parallel universe then the information can come from Beethoven in a different universe
You mean.... the chuck berry song in back to the future?
Neil Degrass Tyson spoke of this on Startalk but using Back to the Future.
Marty plays Johnny B Goode at the dance, Marvin Berry has his cousin Chuck hear it over the phone for the new sound he’s been looking for. So who wrote it?
Didn't you learn anything in Physics at school? Time travel paradoxes doesn't make any sense. Entropy can't be reversed, if it could, think about what this means. You going back in time, yet you getting older.
This is totally possible if you accept the fact that the universe created with the paradox already in tact.
If you believe that every event is the result of a previous event, that there are no events that are causeless, then free will cannot exist.
It’s more than a law of physics though. It’s logic. Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing, nothing comes. In fact, you can’t get something from nothing without invoking the supernatural.
In this case, there isn’t nothing. There is a something in the “song”, the traveler, the act of traveling, and the predecessor who gets the information. That’s all then passed forward. There’s always something in this paradox — which is why it can break the brain!
I like the idea, it’s poetic. But you’re still saying the song came from the song.
Virtual particles pop into and out of existence in the quantum foam of the universe. Because the universe is weirder than we think, it’s not a stretch (for me) to think the song comes from the song. :-)
Have you seen the 12 Monkeys TV show (different than the movie, but based on the same book)? This is absolutely the best time travel media I've ever witnessed and it relies on the bootstrap method.
The big bang math show that at what should be 1000th of a second after the bang Space, matter and time came into existence. That means what came before existed without time as we understand it sometime called eternality
All of paradoxes related to time travel(if it exists) assumes time always existed but physics believes it had a beginning.
Free will exists but to someone who lives in eternality could view everything that has or will happened. The best way I have seen it explained in flatland book for layman it takes several chapters to set this then explains it one chapter,
PKDs story A Prominent Author has a similar theme albeit around the origins of the Old Testament.
If we couldn't think of these paradoxes, they wouldn't exist.
Can’t wait until y’all grasp 5th dimensional physics and realize that it’s all possible, it’s all happening and whatever you conceive can become a new pocket universe “reality”. No worries…I’ll wait.
Bruce Banner's line about time travel
In "Avengers: Endgame," Bruce Banner, also known as the Hulk, explains the mechanics of time travel in the MCU. He states that if you travel to the past, that past becomes your future, and the original timeline remains unaffected. This line is a departure from the traditional "Back to the Future" style of time travel, where altering the past directly affects the present. Instead, in the MCU, time travel creates a new timeline, and the original timeline remains unchanged. This approach allows for the possibility of creating alternate futures without altering the present
There's no answer because it's a paradox. It's an impossible question to answer because it's an impossible scenario that cannot happen.
This very paradox happens in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Link first learns the Song of Storms from Guru-Guru in the windmill, who’s pissed that some kid played the song in the past and broke the windmill.
Later (from Link’s perspective), he goes back in time, retaining his memory, and plays the song, breaking the windmill and ensuring that Guru-Guru was able to give Link the song.
Thus, the paradox is that Link and Guru-Guru mutually require each other to learn the song, so where did the Song of Storms originate?
I believe the paradox is resolved because of many worlds.
There is one branch of time in which someone, anyone, writes the symphonies.
There is then another branch of the timeline where a time traveler gives the sheets to Beethoven.
So, the music does not come from nowhere. It has to originally be written by someone.
New branches only get created when someone time travels.
So, if the music was written in the base original timeline by someone other than Beethoven. A time traveler from that branch travels back and gives it to Beethoven, thus creating a different branch of time.
Same could be true of Bitcoin and the original white paper.
Not an issue if there are infinite universes.
Shouldn't assume time is linear, either. Just because we perceive it that way doesn't mean much.
bootstrapped information does have an origin, but it's a bit weird. while the information seems to come from nothing, it creating itself means it is still derived from the context and environment.
for example: you code up a program that asks for a random password and says "your winner" if you input the correct one. then you meet yourself and they tell you "it's this one, 1356532" so you input it to verify, then hop back two minutes and become the one to give the code.
so, the code derived itself from what it had to be, because you wouldn't give yourself the wrong code(in the strict parameters of this experiment) and then go "...oR uhhh i mEaN wHoOpS IdK CoDe lmao herpaderp"
so in the case of giving a composer his own work, what it needs to be becomes a bit more nebulous, but it would at least be something the composer would accept from a ghostwriter to pass off as their own. in some form.
I’m confused, where’s the paradox?
Isn’t this stuff simply explained by the Multi - Worlds theory?
Somebody travels back in time and gives Beethoven his symphonies before he writes them. In that timeline he doesn’t write them and goes on to write new ones.
Where did the symphonies come from? From Beethoven in a timeline where he wasn’t visited.
It’s quite a physics challenge but hardly a paradox.
Am I missing something?