Hey, I just figured out how you could build a time machine if what the WHHers say is correct. You could just search through the history books about weird occurances or about mysterious people who have come from no-where or seem to have abnormal information about 'future' events, then uncover that one of these people is actually you! Then just sit back and chill out, the machine will come. It's kinda like an opposite version of "if you build it, they will come".

You're curious about my take on WHH? As I've said a number of times, I think the statement '"Whatever happened, happened" is a logically self-consistant proposition that is not falsified by considering that 'what happened' from the point of view of any now might have happened some otherway 'before' that now and might be some other way in some 'future' now.

I think "what happened, happened" will begin to mean something different to how it currently seems to be interpreted by almost everybody (i.e. that the second "happend" seems to suggest some kind of unchangeability of the first "happened"); I think it will start to mean that 'what happened, (once, still) happened' (once, even though it is no longer 'what happened' now).

LOL Just teasing ya Lis. I haven't exactly been keeping my opinions on that subject to myself. Even within these discussion groups. I think the link I posted, in your 'what's the point' topic, to an earlier thread I started, explains my position on WHH most clearly - with the aid of a thought experiment that clearly shows free-will and a fixed past are mutually exclusive propositions given time-travel.

How wrong you are about what I can argue.

Novikov self-consistency principle - in short, it states that you can travel back in time, you just can't change anything or create a paradox. Like the old grandfather paradox, if you go back in time and try to shoot your grandfather, something will step in place to prevent it from happening. Everyone still has the ability to exercise free will even though some form of time travel has occurred in a fixed timeline. Free will put into action may be hindered by some unknown force, but you still have it.

With Novikov's self-consistancy principle all of history, past, present, and future, must have to be already written, like a book. And we would have no more free-will than a character in a book (and I do realise the irony that the people we are really talking about are really just that). Time-travellers would just come to realise that they are in fact just characters in a book (those with information about the events they participate in the past in anyway); it would have already been written that way.

In fact, we would have even less free-will than a character in a book, since, many writers argue (eg King), the characters of books often write themselves. In Novikov's universe, the book has always been written, there was never any chance for any of the characters within it, to do anything of their own accord.