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That is an ontological paradox orsimilarly a predestination paradox.Originally Posted by Nako XL
i thought of it sort of as the terminator paradox. i.e. the terminator exists because it failed at trying to kill john connor, but had it killed john connor, there would have been no reason for it to exist in the future to be sent back, in fact it wouldnt have left any chips in the past for skynet to be developed from to begin with, therefore it never would have existed and john connor would survive, leading to its eventual existence.Originally Posted by EB4President
Ok I am really confused. Why do people keep saying you can't change the past? I thought Hurley's example was put to rest when they handed ben over to richard. Hurley said "why didnt Ben remember Sayid when he grew up as the man who shot him" miles was like "ummmm" but at the end Richard said Ben wouldnt remember anything. So i thought if Kate never took him to others maybe the past would change.
Also did anybody think about where the heck sayid could have gone, is he with the others now explaining the future joint, or just chillin on the island.
Lastly, get of Jack's back, apparently Ben already knew about the others and they knew about him. Richard asked if that was Benjamin Linas as though he knew who he was or who he was suppose to be. Jack didnt change Ben's future that part was going to happen regardless.
The whole Kate, Sawyer, Juliet, Jack thing is annoying.
confusing, but you see what i mean?
jack chose not to save ben, forcing kate to take him to the others to "heal" him, wiping his memory and making him evil. But had Jack saved Ben, he never would have gone to the others, never would have been evil in the future, and jack and ultimately sayid would never have come back in time to shoot and then save ben. so the series of events that lead to that very situation would have never happened. jacks very presence in the past at that moment means that his decision had already been made for him. time is a continuum. of course he didnt save ben because if he had he wouldn't have been there to not save ben at all.
we knew what jack was going to do before he did it because it had already been decided for him.
that's what myles meant.
An ontological paradox is a paradox of time travel that questions the existence and creation of information and objects that travel in time. It is very closely related to the predestination paradox and usually occurs at the same time.
Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating history, not changing it. The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can.
However, a scenario can occur where items or information are passed from the future to the past, which then become the same items or information that are subsequently passed back. This not only creates a loop, but a situation where these items have no discernible origin. Physical items are even more problematic than pieces of information, since they should ordinarily age and increase in entropy according to the Second law of thermodynamics. But if they age by any nonzero amount at each cycle, they cannot be the same item to be sent back in time, creating a contradiction unless it is a reproduced item such as a seed, spore, etc.