Can causality exist without time?

[arthwollipot]

A question for those who know a lot more about physics, cosmology and philosophy than I do.

I'm engaged in a discussion on another forum, and the topic has drifted to the idea of causality. My erstwhile opponent (who is a religious moderate with fundamental leanings, if that makes any sense - he is also not stupid and a very good debating partner, so please don't underestimate him) is suggesting that causality can exist without time. Otherwise, how could the universe have begun? Since time began at the instant of the universe's creation, then the creation's cause must have existed outside of time. Of course, this "cause" is God.

My contention is that causality cannot exist without time, because any sequence of events requires the existence of time. Otherwise, how can any one event even be said to occur "after" another, let alone be caused by it. My contention is also that there can be uncaused events (qv. the Kalam Cosmological Argument).

Is he right? Can one event cause another in the absence of time?

 

[Jeff Corey]

I'm not a philosopher, but a behavioral scientist who tries to discover what variables influence behavior. A determinist. It seems to me that cause and effect relationships need to have a time frame, whereby the causal agent has to come before the effect. Or in more complex cases, a response is made and a positive reinforcer follows, resulting in an increase in the probability of the response.
All these involve attending to what comes first. And a timer would be handy.

 

[dasmiller]

. . . is suggesting that causality can exist without time. Otherwise, how could the universe have begun? Since time began at the instant of the universe's creation, then the creation's cause must have existed outside of time. Of course, this "cause" is God.

My contention is that causality cannot exist without time, because any sequence of events requires the existence of time. Otherwise, how can any one event even be said to occur "after" another, let alone be caused by it. My contention is also that there can be uncaused events (qv. the Kalam Cosmological Argument).

Is he right? Can one event cause another in the absence of time?

Well, let's take it into a domain that I understand better than reality. I sometimes program, so let's imagine that I write and run a program that creates a little virtual world, with little virtual creatures speculating about philosophy. In their universe, time started when I ran the program, so I'm outside of their time and I caused them to come into existence. They measure time in "blarnons" and sometimes the program runs fast, sometimes I pause it, etc - their time really isn't our time, and it's pretty meaningless for them to ask what was happening 10 blarnons before the program started.

So I'd consider this to be an existence proof that your friend's view isn't ruled out.

I have no reason to believe that he's right, just that we can't rule it out.

My personal theory is that God didn't create the universe, but He was around at the beginning and decided to name all the protons individually. Unfortunately, He ran out of names after a while, so fully 83% of all protons are named "Sally."

AFAIK, my theory is exactly as testable as your friend's.

 

[athon]

I think there are a couple of issues here.

First of all (now, keep in mind I'm not a physicist and am happy to be corrected), the whole Big Bang thing is often easily misrepresented. Essentially, from how I understand it, the laws we use to describe our universe currently cannot explain events at the moment of the Big Bang. In other words, we simply lack the means to say anything about causality on that level. We can't say 'time didn't exist', we can only say 'time as we describe it on our macro level can't be used to explain how things operate within a singularity'. The rules change on that level, and we're only slowly working out what this really means. I hear quite often how people think this means there is no 'cause' to the expansion of space and time, which I find makes no sense on any level, especially on a religious one.

The way I see it, time might simply be our observation of other relationships. It doesn't exist as a thing itself, but rather it is the observation of some deeper phenomenon that describes how events are related. We observe entropy as being linked with time as we're part of that same system, making it look as if it has a direction. Greg Egan's sci-fi novel 'Permutation City' does a good job of exploring the notion of the subjectivity of time.

Athon

 

[sol invictus]

I'm not sure this answers the question, but in physics the term "casuality" has a specific meaning¹ - one which makes no sense without time.

ETA: Athon's point is worth emphasizing. We have no good reason to think that time began at the big bang - we simply don't know what happened then.


¹If you're curious: to determine the state at a point in spacetime it is necessary and sufficient to specify the state at every point in the past lightcone of that point, which in turn implies that one need only specify the state along a spacelike volume slicing the past lightcone.

 

[MrQhuest]

Can the cause be at time = -x ?
In the concept of a "big bounce" where the previous universe collapsed to a singularity only to spawn a new universe.

But then you get the same first cause argument. What/when/how was the previous universe caused.

It's late...
I need to study more cosmology, and less mixology.

MrQ

 

[Tricky]

The concept of "without time" is meaningless in our universe. "Cause" is a time-based concept. To "happen" requires a before and after. Even "exist" suggests that there is a "now".

And just try conjugating verbs without a reference to time.

 

[dasmiller]

It's late...
I need to study more cosmology, and less mixology.

MrQ

All in all, I think my time spent dabbling in mixology has been more productive than my time spent dabbling in cosmology.

The jury is still out on which has led to more embarrassment.

 

[ElMondoHummus]

I'm not sure this answers the question, but in physics the term "casuality" has a specific meaning¹ - one which makes no sense without time.


¹If you're curious: to determine the state at a point in spacetime it is necessary and sufficient to specify the state at every point in the past lightcone of that point, which in turn implies that one need only specify the state along a spacelike volume slicing the past lightcone.

Well, even outside of any strict physics treatment, I think the whole concept of causality implies time, since its definition is that one event follows another. I don't see how that can hold true outside of time.

I guess if you wanted to speak strictly philisophically, if you accept an agent involved in the creation of the universe, then the starting point may have been outside of time up until the point the universe came to be, but the moment the universe was created, it automatically brings that "point" into a timeframe. This is sort of a "it takes two points to define a line" argument, with the "line" being time, the first dot being outside of "time", and the second creating a situation where the first gets dragged in. But I'm bending over backwards to make this argument, and personally I don't like it. It feels more like a silly rationalization than a serious treatment of the concept of causality.

Anyway, I think the bottom line is that it's plain illogical to discuss causality and explicity exclude time, since time is implicit in the definition of causality.

ETA: Blaaah! I see that others have beat me to it, and put things more economically than I. Drat...

 

[KingMerv00]

In the concept of a "big bounce" where the previous universe collapsed to a singularity only to spawn a new universe.

Considering the evidence for an accelerating rate of universal expansion, isn't the Big Bounce unlikely?.

 

[Perpetual Student]

It has been pointed out several times on other threads that our current models cannot account for t = 0 and t < 0. As s. i. points out, in the real physical world (as explored by physicists) causality has no meaning without time. Consequently, I don't know how we get around the contradiction that if there was no t < 0, it would violate causality. Conclusion: The deficiency of our models notwithstanding, time always existed and so did causality.
By the way, regarding the OP, if one includes a creator in one's world view, then causality is obviously violated by the existence of a creator, since no one or thing created the creator. However, one might argue if the universe always existed in one form or another (bubble universes or whatever), that fact also violates causality – at least, in that one respect

 

[JFrankA]

I'm not a physicist either. (I don't think I even spelled it correctly ), but isn't there a theory about the 11th dimension (called M-Theory) where our universe was created by a collision between branes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

If this theory is true, and..if I understand it corretly, then there time and a causality even at the beginning of our universe.

Uhm...someone who actually is a physicist please correct me if I got it wrong....?

 

[Vorpal]

It has been pointed out several times on other threads that our current models cannot account for t = 0 and t < 0. As s. i. points out, in the real physical world (as explored by physicists) causality has no meaning without time. Consequently, I don't know how we get around the contradiction that if there was no t < 0, it would violate causality.

You seem to be making a lot of unstated assumptions about causality. If your notion of causality requires that every event has a prior cause, then it is certainly logically possible for a finite time interval to contain an infinite chain of causes. If your notion of causality doesn't require that, then there's plainly no contradiction either. As such, I'm at a loss of what you mean--what notion of causality are you using and how does the nonexistence of t<=0 present problems for it?

 

[GreedyAlgorithm]

Depends on what you mean by "causality". As stated above, the physics usage assumes time. But at least one representation of causality, explored among other places in Judea Pearl's Causality, does not require causes and effects to obey relativity. This may be because it's a purely mathematical generalization of a physical concept, or because our physics only happens to implement a certain subset of possible causal relationships.

 

[The Man]

As one of the most proficient physicist of our time John Archibald Wheeler
said.

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.

So, yes, as far as the physics of casualty go, without time there is no causality.

I think there are a couple of issues here.

First of all (now, keep in mind I'm not a physicist and am happy to be corrected), the whole Big Bang thing is often easily misrepresented. Essentially, from how I understand it, the laws we use to describe our universe currently cannot explain events at the moment of the Big Bang. In other words, we simply lack the means to say anything about causality on that level. We can't say 'time didn't exist', we can only say 'time as we describe it on our macro level can't be used to explain how things operate within a singularity'. The rules change on that level, and we're only slowly working out what this really means. I hear quite often how people think this means there is no 'cause' to the expansion of space and time, which I find makes no sense on any level, especially on a religious one.

The way I see it, time might simply be our observation of other relationships. It doesn't exist as a thing itself, but rather it is the observation of some deeper phenomenon that describes how events are related. We observe entropy as being linked with time as we're part of that same system, making it look as if it has a direction. Greg Egan's sci-fi novel 'Permutation City' does a good job of exploring the notion of the subjectivity of time.

Athon

Technically under the current mathematical considerations (that I am aware) of the big bang singularity it is consider as being a causal singularity. In that no time like or light like (and as far as I know space like) separations extend past that singularity. Some work on Loop quantum gravity has some variance on this, not so much in a causal relationship but that in a possible big bounce, that can be asserted form those calculations, some aspects of a pervious universe may be similar to aspects in our current universe. If my thinking is correct those calculations might entail a space like separation between those two universes, but I’m probably wrong. As I am only an armature theoretical physicist, I will of course defer to any one with more experience or the referenced information one could gather on their own. So please take what I say in that consideration.

 

[martu]

The time we experience is a property of our universe bound to the shape, size and energy it has.

At t=0 picture the universe as a lump of solid matter all in one place. How can all matter be in one place? Well without any movement and no ‘gaps’ in the matter there isn’t any distance so to speak of and if nothing is moving there isn’t any time. All matter is therefore in the same ‘place’ (x, y, z) = (0, 0, 0).

This universe has no causality because nothing can happen. This universe has no time because nothing is happening.

Then Bang! it explodes and we have matter flying off in all directions and as a consequence time is ‘created’ or, to put it another way, time is the expansion of the universe and without this expansion time doesn’t exist.

The cause of this event defines t=0 and time keeps ticking as long as the universe keeps expanding. But there is no reason to assume anything about what caused this explosion. Maybe it is an endless series of contractions and expansions. Maybe there are lots of these lumps of matter floating around somewhere and two hit each other causing them to explode. Maybe there is powerful being who kicked it all off by hitting this clump of matter with a large hammer. Who knows? I doubt we ever will. What we do know is that causality in this universe starts at t=0 and anything before that is meaningless to us as we can’t ‘get out’ of our universe to take a look (there is a speed limit stopping us doing that).

If Theists want to retreat to unobservable events as proof of their God then let them though maybe one could question their faith. They have no evidence for this however, no evidence at all, and while we can postulate other causes as plausible as a Super Being no reason to resort to a God.

 

[sol invictus]

It has been pointed out several times on other threads that our current models cannot account for t = 0 and t < 0. As s. i. points out, in the real physical world (as explored by physicists) causality has no meaning without time. Consequently, I don't know how we get around the contradiction that if there was no t < 0, it would violate causality. Conclusion: The deficiency of our models notwithstanding, time always existed and so did causality.

I agree with Vorpal - this doesn't follow. There is no causality without time, granted, but how does that imply that a finite time interval violates causality?

An example: it doesn't make sense to speak of an ordering on numbers (as in 5>3.2) if you don't have any numbers to order. Does that mean one can't define an ordering on the set of strictly positive real numbers? Does the non-existence of negatives in that set cause a contradiction and "violate ordering"?

 

[Perpetual Student]

You seem to be making a lot of unstated assumptions about causality. If your notion of causality requires that every event has a prior cause, then it is certainly logically possible for a finite time interval to contain an infinite chain of causes. If your notion of causality doesn't require that, then there's plainly no contradiction either. As such, I'm at a loss of what you mean--what notion of causality are you using and how does the nonexistence of t<=0 present problems for it?

Yes, the universe consists within the context of an endless chain of causes. If there was no t < 0, then something happened without any prior event, i.e., without cause, which is not possible. Hence there was a t < 0.

 

[Vorpal]

Yes, the universe consists within the context of an endless chain of causes. If there was no t < 0, then something happened without any prior event, i.e., without cause, which is not possible. Hence there was a t < 0.

However, if there is no t = 0 either, then nothing happened without any prior event. The nonexistence of t = 0, as you said in this thread, is predicted by our current best models. (Whether they're correct is, of course, a different matter.)

Although in general, I'm not sure that if a cosmological model was otherwise successfully predictive and had cosmological time behaving more like a half-closed interval [0,inf) rather than (0,inf), the apparent contradiction with certain theories of causality should be counted against the cosmological model or the theory of causality. I can't think of any a priori reason why every event should have a cause before it in time; the only relevant reason seems to me something along the lines of "thinking in that way gives good models about the world", which makes particular notions of causality scientific (or meta-scientific?) theories in themselves, and hence potentially open to falsification and revision.

 

[Perpetual Student]

I agree with Vorpal - this doesn't follow. There is no causality without time, granted, but how does that imply that a finite time interval violates causality?

If there were no t < 0, then there can be no cause for events at t = 0 and later.

An example: it doesn't make sense to speak of an ordering on numbers (as in 5>3.2) if you don't have any numbers to order. Does that mean one can't define an ordering on the set of strictly positive real numbers? Does the non-existence of negatives in that set cause a contradiction and "violate ordering"?

The difference is that the negatives do not "cause" the positives. Events in the real world are always linked through causality.

Vorpal -- However, if there is no t = 0 either, then nothing happened without any prior event. The nonexistence of t = 0, as you said in this thread, is predicted by our current best models.

My understanding is that current models say nothing about t = 0; they do not claim there was no t = 0.