[simonh]

Everything in the universe is connected to, and influences everything else. Suppose I hit the cue ball on a very low friction billiard table really hard and cause a cascade of collisions, such that some of the balls undergo 20 impacts. That's a lot, but not inconceivable.

Even extremely tiny variations in the initial movement of the cue ball or configuration of the balls can cause the final configuration on the table to be completely different. How tiny? Well, even the removal of a single electron from an atom over ten billion lightyears away could cause a measurable change in the position of some of the balls when they come to rest. That's how interconnected everything is, and how small changes are vastly magnified by cascades of events.

Breaking causality is basically time travel. It would in theory allow future events to change the conditions that lead to our present. Timelines are extremely unstable. Even the most minuscule change could make our present utterly impossible or unrecognisable. A stable consistent universe isn't possible in the presence of causality violations.

[wruza]

So it just makes it very unlikely, right? If I think about the universe as a spreadsheet, there is a large number of formulas, but they are never cyclic, and only look “up” and to the sides, through some lorentz addressing so to say. And dependencies in it are massive, every cell looks at everything up-around it.

We could definitely make a spreadsheet that is circular in parts, e.g. make it find low, middle and high solutions to some cyclic equality group that only resolves to e.g. 1, 2 and 3. But then we have to include all other parameters from up-around and it is ~~ unlikely to solve, makes sense. But I’m curious if that’s correct or provable. The universe seems to have no trouble solving things which we struggle with even at the basic level. Maybe there are coincidences in this spreadsheet that lead to possible dependencies on the future, and then they become a true dependency? We just have no idea how to catch these events.