I think the mathematical sense of quining is meant here, not the standard programing one. The quine does not take up the entire program, you can run it on dedicated hardware containing nothing else so it's fully predictable and also include a mapping from those bits to physical states. At the very least, this lets you have your full past state (just simulate yourself up to that point), and you future state (store the size of your ram, treat as number of zeroes in maping to physical state, delete self).