Well— we’re deep in the meta philosophy of a fictional world, so I’m not sure that any great insight will come from the discussion.
I’m unsure of how to resolve the apparent safety of time tuners with the idea that there is an optimization process selecting a permissible outcome unless I wave my arms and say that the optimization process is moral, perhaps borrowing the objectives of the operator (like the sorting hat). One way to do this is to note that bad things happening increase the probability of more time tuner usage, which a human-interest blind metric could still be minimizing.
Seems very handwavy, though: Saying the optimizer picked tie breaking that— say— minimized the sum probability change displaced in times would just tend to select time tuners out of existence.
As far as information itself, I’m not so sure if it’s quite that sticky: Imagine our universe as we normally would think of it but with quantized time (tics). We would normally imagine a each tick having a state and then there is some (large but) finite number of successor states possible, each with its own probability which is simply the product of the probabilities of all the component transitions for all the particles. The universe evaluates this function a step at a time moving to a particular new state with probabilities proportional to product the component particle transition probabilities according to natural law.
In HPMOR verse, instead the evaluation gets performed by some hyper-computer that evaluates the states using a six hour look-ahead. You could imagine taking the every possible combination of 6 hour successor states and picking according to their joint probability, then stepping forward one tick towards the selected group and then redoing the evaluation. At least in classical mechanics you don’t need the look ahead evaluation but MORverse has time tuners.
As seconds fall out of the tail of the window they become fixed. Prior to that happening time tuner usage upwhen can influence the selected states in the downwhen subject to the constraints that no inconsistency is created. If Minerva noticing harry seemed different would have created some contradiction (due to it influencing into time travel that went into the fixed downwhen) then she simply wouldn’t. The picking of the “most likely” way to constrain her from (e.g. having her drop dead) is precluded by having to be consistent with the past history which is already fixed and doesn’t include any dangerous interactions.
Stated differently: danger would arise only because of time travel into a past that was fixed before the cause of the danger was available to the evaluator. Unsafe resolutions would tend to not be consistent with the fixed past. So the normalcy of constrained time travel might simply be a result of the forward lookahead and the backwards modification depth being exactly the same.
Well— we’re deep in the meta philosophy of a fictional world, so I’m not sure that any great insight will come from the discussion.
I’m unsure of how to resolve the apparent safety of time tuners with the idea that there is an optimization process selecting a permissible outcome unless I wave my arms and say that the optimization process is moral, perhaps borrowing the objectives of the operator (like the sorting hat). One way to do this is to note that bad things happening increase the probability of more time tuner usage, which a human-interest blind metric could still be minimizing.
Seems very handwavy, though: Saying the optimizer picked tie breaking that— say— minimized the sum probability change displaced in times would just tend to select time tuners out of existence.
As far as information itself, I’m not so sure if it’s quite that sticky: Imagine our universe as we normally would think of it but with quantized time (tics). We would normally imagine a each tick having a state and then there is some (large but) finite number of successor states possible, each with its own probability which is simply the product of the probabilities of all the component transitions for all the particles. The universe evaluates this function a step at a time moving to a particular new state with probabilities proportional to product the component particle transition probabilities according to natural law.
In HPMOR verse, instead the evaluation gets performed by some hyper-computer that evaluates the states using a six hour look-ahead. You could imagine taking the every possible combination of 6 hour successor states and picking according to their joint probability, then stepping forward one tick towards the selected group and then redoing the evaluation. At least in classical mechanics you don’t need the look ahead evaluation but MORverse has time tuners.
As seconds fall out of the tail of the window they become fixed. Prior to that happening time tuner usage upwhen can influence the selected states in the downwhen subject to the constraints that no inconsistency is created. If Minerva noticing harry seemed different would have created some contradiction (due to it influencing into time travel that went into the fixed downwhen) then she simply wouldn’t. The picking of the “most likely” way to constrain her from (e.g. having her drop dead) is precluded by having to be consistent with the past history which is already fixed and doesn’t include any dangerous interactions.
Stated differently: danger would arise only because of time travel into a past that was fixed before the cause of the danger was available to the evaluator. Unsafe resolutions would tend to not be consistent with the fixed past. So the normalcy of constrained time travel might simply be a result of the forward lookahead and the backwards modification depth being exactly the same.