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Pewpipoopoo t1_j5nxuw4 wrote

Imagine the universe we're in as a timeline, and that timeline splits at the point of every potentiality, and from each of those points in the timeline a new actuality takes its own course.

If you were to try to travel backwards in time, along your current timeline, you would necessarily be introducing a new timeline altogether. By going backwards, you've made an alteration, causing a retroactively separate timeline. The past has already happened and can never be re-experienced in exactly the same way, because to experience it would necessarily change it into a new timeline, you see?

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AterCygnus t1_j5o38ca wrote

This the speculative hypertemporal hypothesis, that posits an alternative temporal direction, that would somehow be angular to past-present-future of the entropic block universe. Nothing of the sort has ever been observed or experimentally suggested or demonstrated. It's a purely philosophical contention at this point in time.

Everett's argument was simply that the wave function is a real feature of the natural world, and that alternative states of a given amplitude ought also exist somewhere. There are, in turn, multiple interpretations of this interpretation.

It might also be that alternative amplitudes exist in other worlds of some inflatory multiverse beyond the cosmic horizon - in which case, the evolution of the wavefunction remains purely deterministic within our own block universe. Thus, free will and human decision-making need not apply. Everett himself was determinist in his thinking, and the beauty of his interpretation is that it's entirely consistent with observation.

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