A timeline cannot loop and then offshoot into an open timeline. Each event in a causal loop is like a single point. It goes against our intuition, but they don't "repeat" as if they happen over and over again -- there is just one instance of each event, and they all exist at once. So if any one point on this loop were to somehow change to being open, then it no longer causes the very events which lead to its own existence, so the entire causal chain would not have existed in the first place.
Its subtle, but such a "break" is different than the notion of ext...
If you are embedded in a CTC, there is no changing that.
I'm not saying you're changing a timeline, simply that it's not the only looped timeline that decoheres from a single point in a many-worlds formulation. If you arrived back at a previous point in your timeline via reverse causation, then several timelines/worlds still decohere from that point -- including the timeline you were "previously" in. They all exist. In any case, this isn't the core of the essay's argument. I noted that the MWI is used to illustrate possibilities; we simply require a determi...
Not sure why I never responded to that comment, but I do remember and appreciate it.
The biological holism post certainly seems to echo many of the themes one would expect from a quantum annealing viewpoint (although it’s presented there merely as a perspective, whereas I think there’s an underlying mechanism to be accounted for). Interesting to see those similarities pop up in different disciplines and approaches.