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Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
Only true if you can't time travel. The order of events only have relevance when everything can flow only in one way. Thus the rule is broken as soon as a time machine come into being.
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The rule is not broken; it's reversed. There's a huge difference, which I'll get into in the next paragraph.
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Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
What determines which is the cause and which is the effect? The one that happened first in the timeline. But with time travel, when something happened no longer mattered.
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Consider this. I throw a baseball through a window. The window shatters, the baseball is slowed slightly, and the baseball and glass all fall to the ground. That's all cause and effect. Now let's say the same thing happens as we go back in time. The baseball launches itself into the air, pulls all the glass together, and lands in your hand, forcing a reverse windup of your arm. Energy is transferred the opposite way and entropy is decreased. I suppose that's legitimate if you don't think too deeply about how the ball started moving. However, the baseball
still follows all the rules that were in effect before, only in the wrong order. Instead of cause and effect, you have effect and cause, but the relationship still exists.
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Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
Your rules only apply without a time machine. Trying to force time travel into the same rules simply don't work. It would be like saying it is impossible to sail around the world in one week, then use that as proof that you can't FLY around the world in one week.
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Except time travel DOES follow those rules by default. You either go forward or backward, and all the relationships between events and objects remain the same. Time is one-dimensional, and as such, the rules governing it are absurdly simple. But you're trying to have your cake and eat it too; you're trying in one breath to convince me that closed loops follow the rules and in the next to say that the rules are irrelevant. Rules either exist or they don't; there's either rigidity or absurdity.
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Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
The universe is what it is. That's all. Rules are just what we humans made up to explain and predict things, but in the end the priority is the observed data. If we see something that breaks the rules, then the rules are wrong and had to be changed. We don't change the universe to suit the rules, that would be unscientific.
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Uh, except that's exactly what you're doing. You're saying, "Yes, I know that we have all the rules, but to heck with them! In this made-up case, they don't apply!" You say the rules don't fit time travel; I say time travel doesn't fit the rules. And when we have no reason to believe that the rules should be changed other than "some guy wrote about it this way and boy wouldn't it be cool if it worked," that's not a legitimate reason to say the rules don't apply. If a description of ANY situation doesn't fit the understood rules, then the correct response is to assume the description is false.
Yes, it's fiction, and yes, fiction can have its own rules. If I were to argue against the magic in Harry Potter on rational terms, you'd tell me to give it a rest because it's all made up, and you'd be right. But here, the argument is not, "it's a story so don't worry about it;" it's "yes it's a story but it could actually happen that way!" That's where I draw the line.