[freehunter]

Experience is subjective. If you teleport to another location you're not the same person you were before you left, you're a similar set of molecules reconstructed in the same fashion. In all actuality, "you" died and another "you" took your place. But to you and everyone around you, it seems like nothing has changed, so you carry on with your life.

Likewise, if you travel back in time and change the future, you're not helping the people in the future you left, you're helping the people in the past avoid that future. But to you, it looks the same. It looks just like the past you're familiar with, and it develops into some semblance of the future you were expecting. So for all intents and purposes, from a subjective viewpoint you're avoiding the paradox and helping your ancestors. It doesn't matter if the people you left are still suffering, subjectively they don't exist anymore.

[hfsktr]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkBS4O3yvY - 1 minute time machine.

Sounds like what you are saying.

[thefalcon]

Incredibly relevant. Also entertaining. Thanks.

[Nadya]

This is the exact explanation used in the anime Steins;Gate. Okabe (the main character) is capable of 'moving timelines' which is treated as jumping between different parallel worlds.

He leaves his friends behind in a world where WW3 breaks out over world powers fighting over research for a working time machine. In a way, he is leaving his friends to die in a post-apocalyptic WW3...but that doesn't matter because he's saving them in his 'current' timeline. The other worlds, from his perspective, "don't exist" anymore.

>In all actuality, "you" died and another "you" took your place. But to you and everyone around you, it seems like nothing has changed, so you carry on with your life.

In the show they call this power "Reading Steiner" when he "replaces himself" in a new timeline. Since he is capable of remembering what happened in the other timelines (nobody else does - as from their perspective these other timelines never existed).

Time travel is fun to think about. :P

[clort]

In the Star Trek universe, where the matter is converted to information, transmitted and then converted to matter, then your statement may be true. But, in other universes where the matter is actually translated in a dimension then it will not be. Also, we don't actually know what "you" is and whether it would be included in the Star Trek mechanism.

My point really, is that there are varying fictional universes but in ours, we don't currently have a way to do teleportation. So, as you say, experience is subjective.

[freehunter]

Ah I forget that I'm back in the timeline that doesn't have physical teleportation... I have to start keeping notes on which universe has what.

[webmaven]

you're in that superset of worldlines that require an Ellis Drainhole held open with a counter-rotating exotic matter "collar".

[allenz]

If we accept physicalism i.e. that the world just consists of the physical, then the two methods should be identical except for a possible time delay.