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.
Not sure why I never responded to that comment, but I do remember and appreciate it.
The biological holism post certainly seems to echo many of the themes one would expect from a quantum annealing viewpoint (although it’s presented there merely as a perspective, whereas I think there’s an underlying mechanism to be accounted for). Interesting to see those similarities pop up in different disciplines and approaches.