I love time loops of that style. Maybe it's a writer thing. I guess I don't really see them as paradoxes, even though obviously you're right, they are a paradox. The thing about a loop is that it has neither beginning nor end. The rational mind says that the music must have been created somewhere, it must have a beginning, but in the time loop model it doesn't. In the infinite, unchanging line idea of time, the music began when Mozart heard a version of it. The music already existed because it was brought back from a future that had already accounted for the fact that it had been brought back and played to its creator before the first time it was written down. That probably doesn't do anything to answer the question of where it originally came from, except to say that it came from a future that had already accounted for its introduction in the past.

Rationally, even if you accept and get to that point, you then go back further in the loop and say, sure, but how did it start? The idea of a beginning, though, implies a timeline that is progressing, a timeline that had a beginning, but in such a timeline the future doesn't exist until it happens. That's the only way to truly make a paradox out of it, in my mind. If time is a line being drawn on a paper, and the present is the point where the pencil touches the paper at any given moment, with the future yet to be drawn, then it's a paradox because the time traveller can't go back and show Mozart the music until the pencil reaches the time traveller's point on the line.

But in my idea, the line isn't drawn. The entire line existed in its entirety at the moment time began, and the loops are just part of the pattern, where a bit of the line loops back and rejoins the line at an earlier point. The loops all exist at the moment the line springs into being in the instantaneous cascade of decisions throughout all of time that form everything that happens.

In such a model, there is no standard "present". The present is simply the moment you're in. In such a model there are an infinite number of me and an infinite number of you, each existing in its own "present" as we move our own lives along the line.

Ye gads, I don't even know if any of that makes sense, but I tried to give a somewhat reasonable explanation of how I view it.



I'm not quite sure if that fits what I'm saying or not, but it sounds neat. If there are infinite points of existence along the timeline, each could perhaps be considered its own universe/dimension, each moving forward at a different point on the infinite line. Thinking about it that way, you aren't really time travelling. You're moving into a reality/universe that is at a different point on the line. Except that in my idea, all of the different universes that exist along the line are connected, and all of them take into account what you do, because everything you do is already built into the line.

For example if you choose to travel into the past (or into a universe that's at an earlier point in the line), and you never come back, then all of the universes that are at a later point on the line already account for that, and you don't exist in all those universes. And at every point you're at in the past, you do exist. If there are places where you overlap, there are two of you in each of those moving universes, and always have been.

It's enough to make my head spin.




I think the main difference between our two ideas is that in yours, new realities are created by time travel, and in mine, all the realities already existed and are lined up along an infinite timeline. Yours is a perhaps infinite branching tree, while mine is a single infinite line with loops in it, which never deviates and has existed since time began. In both of our ideas, the past can't be changed.

It's possible that the ultimate ridiculous extension of my idea is the concept that at some point in the future of the line, the entire universe loops back to its beginning because some force in the future universe becomes responsible for the big bang that created the universe in the first place. In which case my pattern becomes an enormous endless circle with loops of different sizes all around its outer edges, no beginning and no end, existing in its entirity since the moment time began.