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Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
It seems you couldn't get yourself thinking outside the timestream.
Which is strange, because by all means you should find much of the Haruhi series impossible to comprehend.
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Oh, I have no problem admitting that logic used throughout the series is very screwy when it comes to this sort of thing. And yes, I do find it impossible to comprehend, in the same way that I find Escher's staircases impossible to comprehend. I can see them and understand what's being presented, but I can't come to terms with the underlying logical problems.
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Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
But here is the point; for timetraveling to the past to occur, information needs to be able to go backwards in time. It is as necessary as saying you need to eat food in order to have breakfast. And what is the definition of the "beginning" of a piece of information? The earliest point in time when the information existed. But that made no sense when with time travel allow information to go outside the flow.
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Allowing an altered flow doesn't preclude the concept of a beginning. Your flawed definition breaks down when you allow time travel (which admittedly is what you intended), but that doesn't mean that beginnings as a concept cease to exist. Instead, it would be better to consider a "beginning" to be the point at which the information originated. For example, if we look at an oval race track, the beginning is at the starting line, not at the southmost point of the track. Sure, they can be the same location, but they don't have to be. Furthermore, if two people start running around the track in different directions, they still had to have had a starting point. It doesn't matter one bit that they're not going the same way, and if they stop at the north and south ends, that doesn't mean the southmost person started earlier.
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Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
The very IDEA of a "beginning" is stuck on the very concept that everything could only flow forward in the timestream. A timemachine blows a hole in that idea immediately.
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No, beginning is based on cause and effect. The beginning of something is the cause, regardless of which way the effect flows. And before you try to tell me that causality can't truly exist if time isn't linear, consider the following.
Time travel, any sort of time travel, still has an inherent understanding that time flows forward by default. Altering the past isn't done by doing something that cascades backward; it's done by inserting yourself at an earlier point in that flow and doing something that cascades forward (ultimately affecting things that occurred before you went back in time). Cause and effect still exist.
Consider a small stream. A person standing at a particular spot in that stream will have water flowing around his feet. Now let's say that person goes 50 feet upriver and drops a big boulder in it, diverting or halting the flow of water. When he returns to his original spot, it's different from when he started, even though he's at the exact same location. It's clear that the ability to move freely in a river (or time) doesn't prove that the river (or time) has no flow.
Go ahead, try to imagine a world without cause and effect. It's chaos, isn't it?
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Originally Posted by Ithekro
Then there is the Endless Eight. A time loop...but is it stable? What is its beginning? The first day in August that Kyon gets that phone call from Haruhi? Or was it August 30 when Haruhi was unsatisfied wth her summer? Or was it sometime before that when Haruhi's subconscience decided to start over again? And was it even the first loop that they started looping? Haruhi might have been happy in the first loop, but another loop/dimension she was not and reset all dimensions so they looped. The "last" loop could have been the first were she was "happy" and thus it did not loop. Also it might have been that not all loops actually looped, just that is how Yuki preceived them in her observations.
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The loop is clearly not stable if it doesn't last indefinitely. Furthermore, the fact that Yuki gets tired is evidence for their sequential nature. If the loops occurred in parallel, where Yuki had to take in all that information at the same time, then four things couldn't have happened. First, Yuki couldn't have had a progression from normal to "bored." Similarly, there could never have been a "first" episode where everything was alright. Second, Yuki couldn't number the loops so easily (although I admit that her counts of working part time vary arbitrarily between episodes; I don't know what to make of that). Third, feelings of déjà vu couldn't have built up the way they did. And finally, there's no reason for there to be exactly 15,532 loops if they happened "at the same time." There should have been an infinite number of dimensions, and Yuki should've been able to feel that.
In short, because there was a "first" loop, the loop was unstable and began at midnight on the last day of summer. Because it had a beginning, and because that beginning was at the tail end of an iteration, it must have been looping sequentially.
EDIT: Well how about that? Today's Dinosaur Comics references time loops. And as that spurred further research on Wikipedia and the like, I've learned that this ridiculous concept is actually quite prevalent in science fiction. Does that mean I'm going to stop arguing against it? Nope.