Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

That's interesting. However, it seems to me that any retro-causative time loop that actually introduced new complex specified information into the past (that must have had a sentient creative origin or at least some creative origin process), would invoke paradox. And the grandfather paradox would happen if any change is introduced that changes or deletes the origin process of a human being, and that would seem to be inevitable for any significant evolutionary innovation introduced far enough in the past by retro-causation. I would like to know how Wargo's ideas somehow get around this. 

How does a "self-consistent" retro-causative time loop differ from my suggested thought experiment, or to pose it in another way, does a "self-consistent" time loop permit introduction of truly new complex specified information (such as a new design in the area of human invention) into the past? It would seem to me that the only type of retro-causative time loop of interest here would be one that can introduce new information that required a designer or a design process of some kind, and that type would inevitably be "inconsistent".

Yeah, I feel like Feser essentially disproves time loops in this blog post:

Edward Feser: Causal loops, infinite regresses, and information

I haven't finished Wargo's book yet, but I think he is allowing for the kind of situation you've described, in which information is reaching the past from the future through retro-causation, and getting from the past to the future in the conventional way.

With regard to paradoxes, I think the idea is essentially that they just don't happen because the universe has to remain consistent. So circumstances that involve inconsistency occur with zero probability. If people really could go back in time to try to kill their grandfathers, something would always happen to prevent their doing so.

But even if you don't go back and kill your grandfather, it seems to me there are enough changes to chaotic systems that these perturbations always lead to large shifts in history?

Even particles continually going back would have this issue, but beyond that we'd need to understand why only small bits of relevant information is being sent back. It'd seem more likely that, if we allow for something akin to time travel, that natural selection exploited the hypothesized quantum realm of the Possibles. Basically scanning future timelines for the better case scenarios.


It seems like if there temporal entanglement, and this can be a first step to showing potential FTL communication, that would be a good starting point for quantum biology to investigate. But everything in that last sentence is speculative so we'll have to wait & see...