Some say “no” because the ring wasn’t a cause of Sawyer’s time travel. According to the naysayers, predestination paradoxes must be causality loops, where A causes B, which causes C, which causes A. But I say “yes” because the ring was already under the floorboards in Season 1, well before the survivors of Oceanic 815 traveled back in time. Sawyer was thus predestined to time travel and bury the ring even if he had no idea of its existence.

Here’s another hypo that I posted on Wikipedia. A man lives in a town with a broken clock. One day, he falls randomly through a natural wormhole into the past. While there, he somehow breaks the clock inadvertently. Technically, this isn’t a causality loop because the broken clock didn’t cause him to travel back in time. But I still say it’s a predestination paradox because his act was already a part of history, predestining him to travel back in time.

What say you?

Deja Vu, as to the context of free will and what happens depending on the position one currently adopts.

If it’s built, any correlation to a future time “is” already in play?

If left to the mind then to convolve as if thought to exist by choice to change, how would we know it’s outcome? The scenarios are then easily dramatized to know the basic language of is quite capable in any persons choice now. Hmmm….just wonder.

Sean says you -can’t- go back and brake a brick (which is right), but I think the better way to say this is that you -didn’t- go (or will not go) back in time to brake the brick. We know this because you weren’t there to brake the brick; after all, all 100 bricks were there. If you did go brake the brick, then there never could’ve been 100 bricks to build the tower with.

Our language is not really designed to talk about time traveling and the possible paradoxes related to it, which adds enormously to the confusion that surrounds discussions about time traveling.

Amos– Yes, I’m using “happen” in the most general sense, to include simply the configuration of every particle in that region of space and time. I think I agree with “the universe must replay exactly as it did the first time,” although I don’t like that formulation — there aren’t separate “times,” there is only a set of positions in space and time. Each spacetime position occurs once and only once, and whatever is there is there, no multiple versions.

The point of time travel (if it were possible, which is unlikely) is not that you literally “travel backward” in time, but that you go on a journey that takes you back to a region that you had considered “the past.” But from your own perspective, you are always moving into the future. It’s all in Chapter Six!