The Conservation-of-Information Objection: Why Actionable Knowledge Eats Its Own Origin
Sending information rather than an object through a time loop avoids physical wear but raises a different puzzle. A {{bootstrap paradox}} of pure information, like Beethoven's symphony with no composer, seems to violate an intuition about where complex structure comes from. Worse, actionable information such as lottery numbers tends to destroy the very timeline that produced it.
Time-travel thought experiments often try to escape the infinite wear problem of physical objects by sending information back instead. The classic case is carrying the score of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony back to Beethoven, who then composes it, so the score circulates in a causal loop with no original author. No wear, no logical contradiction, but a strong intuition is violated: complex structured information seems like it ought to come from somewhere. This is sometimes framed as a conservation-of-novelty worry, trading a thermodynamic paradox for an epistemic one. Actionable information is worse than inert information. Imagine sending past-you the winning lottery numbers for a specific future draw. Those numbers only became winning-numbers-for-you in the timeline where you played for decades and finally hit. The instant past-you wins early, the entire shape of your life changes: you may not play that draw, may not play at all, may not even be in the same place. The information's source dissolves, because the conditions that produced it have been overwritten. This exposes a general rule: any time-travel transfer in which the receiver's action changes the conditions that produced the transfer is unstable. Wear destroys objects; consequence destroys actionable information. The only fully stable transfers are ones that change nothing. A self-consistent single-timeline model, like the Novikov self-consistency principle, accepts this by insisting the past was visited but never rewritten, which means you can know things but never use them to alter your own history. See The Infinite-Wear Argument: Why Physical Objects Can't Survive a Bootstrap Loop for the matter-based version of the same difficulty.