Talk:Temporality

Time symmetry: because quantum mechanical as well as relativistic equations are time symmetric, and the very idea of causality requires time asymmetry (as in the causes preceding the effects), then causality “plays no role” at that level. Wrong...

It is true that the most basic equations in physics are time symmetric, so that causality doesn’t enter into them. But it is also unquestionably true that we have to somehow explain the arrow of time and the fact that things do very much appear to happen one after the other. While we move freely back and forth the three spatial dimensions, we definitely don’t do that along the fourth, temporal, dimension. Three possible solutions to this conundrum are: I) to say that causality is an “illusion,” part and parcel of the manifest image, but not really a scientifically viable concept; or II) to claim that causality somehow emerges from basic physics (whatever “emergence,” a philosophically controversial concept, means); or III) to argue that causality is fundamental and that there is something incomplete about quantum mechanics and general relativity, and that’s why it needs to be “added by hand,” so to speak, in order to describe how the world actually works.

Causality is absolutely fundamental, but it evolves as everything else in the Reality.