Closed time loop

Imagine two scenarios:

1. An infinitely long life of repetition of a session meaningful pleasure followed by a memory wipe.

2. A closed time loop involving one session of the meaningful pleasure followed by a memory wipe.

Scenario (1) involves infinitely many sessions of the meaningful pleasure. This seems better than having only one session as in (2). But subjectively, I have a hard time feeling any preference for (1). In both cases, you have your pleasure, and it’s true that you will have it again.

I suppose this is some evidence that we’re not meant to live in a closed time loop. :-)

Infinite causal histories and causal loops

As I was thinking about causal finitism, the view that nothing can have an infinite causal past, I realized that there were structural similarities between the arguments for it on the basis of paradoxes like the Grim Reaper and Grandfather-like arguments against causal loops. And that led me to thinking whether there wasn't some way to generalize causal finitism so as to rule out both infinite causal pasts and causal loops.

There is. Here is one way. Say that a causal nexus is a network of nodes with partial-causation arrows between them, such that there is an arrow A→B if and only if A is a partial cause of B (or causally prior to? I think that's the same thing, but I'm not sure; or, if there is such a thing, directly causally prior to). Say that a monotonic sequence in a causal nexus is a finite sequence A₁,A₂,...,A_n of nodes such that each node is joined with an arrow to the next: A₁→A₂→...→A_n. The sequence culminates in A_n. Note that if there are causal loops, then a monotonic sequence can contain the same node multiple times.

The generalization of causal finitism now says:

• No metaphysically possible causal nexus contains a node that is the culmination of infinitely many monotonic sequences.

This rules out three kinds of causal nexuses:

1. Infinite regresses: longer and longer monotonic sequences of distinct nodes culminating in a given node.
2. Infinite cooperation: infinitely many arrows pointing to a single node (and hence infinitely many monotonic sequences of length two culminating in it).
3. Causal loops: longer and longer repeating monotonic sequences culminate in a given node (e.g., A→B, B→A→B, A→B→A→B, ...).

The possibility of handling infinite causal histories and causal loops--which I've long thought absurd--in the same framework makes me even more confident in causal finitism.