Despite all the phenomenal stories, it turns out you can’t prevent yourself from being born…
I recently wrote a short story involving a shared electronic universe, something akin to a world of warcraft that people would upload themselves into. In my story, individual member’s minds were functionally virtualized into the world.
In this sort of existence, the potential for apparent paradox exists. If memory becomes digitized than the record could be altered beyond the knowledge of the memory itself and no temporal continuity needs to be maintained. Paradox cannot truly happen, but the definition of a paradox can be stretched broader than necessarily apparent. For example, it would be entirely possible for a person to go back in time, kill themselves, and yet till exist. The solution to the paradox is, of course, that the real world has changed the functional rules of the world in ways fully consistent with a larger existence.
That’s my general take of the article. We don’t know what the larger rules are, but through an appraisal of how things appear to be, we can derive what our more localized rules must be. Unfortunately, we don’t have any obvious capacity to confirm them. If some greater body of rules is set to disallow the appearance of paradox, than we would have no ability to comprehend that; the rules would change to adapt any new information. It’s sort of the ultimate Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Yep…fun stuff.
