Yeah. I'm in the middle of writing a book about this, but in a sense it was also discussed by the Pythagoreans. And they (correctly, I think,) went a step fur

Yeah. I'm in the middle of writing a book about this, but in a sense it was also discussed by the Pythagoreans. And they (correctly, I think,) went a step further: "The Pythagoreans too used to say that numerically the same things occur again and again. It is worth setting down a passage from the third book of Eudemus' Physics in which he paraphrases their views: ‘One might wonder-whether or not the same time recurs as some say it does. Now we call things 'the same' in different ways: things the same in kind plainly recur - e.g. summer and winter and the other seasons and periods; again, motions recur the same in kind - for the sun completes the solstices and the equinoxes and the other movements; But if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur - that you will be sitting here and I shall talk to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else - then it is plausible that the same time too recurs.’" - Simplicius, Commentary on the Physics 732.23-33. Branching paths, "all possible mathematics," etc. In a universe which appears to be discrete, which can support finitist arguments, and where the potential number of paths is starkly finite -- this eventually leads to the conclusion that all paths eventually recur.