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hairyfigment comments on Timeless Physics - Less Wrong
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An omnipotent magicker decides to flip a coin, and the coin lands heads. Afterwards, the magicker changes every particle in the universe to what it would be had the coin landed tails -- including those in his own brain. Is it true that in the past, the coin landed heads, even though this event is epiphenomenal?
I realize that the magicker is violating the laws of entropy, and that in the real world there are no magickers. I also realize that for the purposes of anyone in the universe, the first coin flip doesn't and couldn't possibly matter, because it was epiphenomenal. But I'm still curious what the answer to my question is.
It may help to start with regular quantum mechanics/ Many Worlds. Because there, your scenario sounds like a world receiving amplitude from two different histories - actually many more, but let's start with them - there's the actually possible history in which the coin landed tails, and the magical one where it landed heads. Both contribute to the underlying result.
Timeless physics sounds like it takes this one step further. In this view, both pasts exist as disconnected points in a timeless space. Eliezer's version (I think) has an implicit causal connection between the 'present' and the 'tails' past if we analyze them according to real physics, and another connection to 'heads' if we analyze them by magical physics.