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the wheel was malfunctioning at that time, so I'm not sure if this is conclusive proof that there is no such rule.

Such a rule, though, would be a fundamental law of nature that cannot be broken under any circumstances. It's not the kind of rule that means "if you break it there will be consequences", it's the kind of rule that means "there's nothing you can do to break it". There is no "if you do, then...", it's simply not something possible to do in this universe. Like traveling faster than light.

But at any rate, there is no rule that says you can't meet yourself. You're free to meet yourself, as long as you already have a memory of it. If it didn't already happen to you, then you can't meet yourself, and again, not "you can't or else", but "something will occur that prevents you from doing it". And that "something" won't be "time throwing something in your way", it will be something whose causes have already been set up and will simply happen and you didn't see it coming.

I think that paradox talk usually focuses on the idea of meeting yourself because it doesn't bode well for free will. Let's say that back in season one Locke was crying into the hatch and suddenly his older self walks out of the bushes and says "Yo wassup dawg?" Locke now knows that at some point he will travel back in time and fulfill those events. Not only will he, but he absolutely must. He cannot choose not to. He cannot emerge from another direction, or say something different. If he tries to alter the events he remembers*, he will fail. If he tries to put a bullet in his head before he goes back, he will fail (or he will die and it turns out that he didn't really go back, he was just hallucinating). While this doesn't necessarily negate free will, it makes the philosophy troubling.

While Lost's rules seem to nullify the threat of paradoxes, technically they're still occurring, because events are unfolding that are caused by themselves. Loops of causality are simply conjuring themselves up. It's like the old joke about how to invent a time machine: simply imagine yourself someday inventing one and using it go back to this moment and give yourself the blueprints. Instant time machine...but who invented it?


*I have been arguing that a loophole exists whereby a person cannot alter what they know as the past, but a person in the past can still alter the future depending on the nature of the information they receive about it. If Sawyer jumped out of the bushes and said hello to younger Locke, then Sawyer wouldn't necessarily be obligated to fulfill those events, depending on what Locke tells him about it. The past being unalterable may depend largely on our perception and memory of the past. For all Sawyer knows, Locke could be crazy, or lying, or remembering wrong.

I'm a little suprised that people are having as much trouble understanding Lost's time travel rules

I'm not really surprised. It may just be that some of us are able to wrap our heads around the concepts while others struggle. I have a high IQ and while I don't have trouble with time travel ideas there are areas of real physics that I may never understand like space-time and gravity and hypercubes and much of relativity. I've tried. Meanwhile a person with a higher IQ might be able to grasp those ideas and still get confused about time travel.