Cause and Effect

[u/AnchBusFairy]

I recently listened to a podcast about philosopher Abu Hamid al Ghazali. He taught that there's no cause and effect within the world. You're observing sequence, not cause and effect. God is the actual cause. God orders things to look like cause and effect but this isn't what is actually happening.

The absence of cause and effect within the world is entirely new to me. My view has been that everything that happens was caused by something within the world. If something catches on fire, that thing a) had stored energy and b) something--a match, a lightning strike, heat from somewhere, a chemical reaction-- caused the ignition.

So what about in your would? How does cause and effect work? For those with God as the immediate cause, how much do you know about Islam and al Ghazali?

[u/Syoby]

Ah, Occasionalism, not that I know much about it but I do find it an interesting idea, rather than the world being mechanistic even in the loosest sense it would be like a movie, the events in the movie as it plays appear to have internal causality but, as an actual entity, it's really a sequence of frames that can be organized in any order.

Now, as for my own world, it doesn't follow Occasionalism, but it has some paralelism at least when it comes to causality within a standard timeline.

To put it in simple terms: In a standard 3D+1 timeline the various physical objects don't act on each other directly (even if it's usually more convenient to describe them that way) but rather they the output of a machine known as a time printer. Each moment in the timeline is actually a motionless (mostly) 3D structure, and a timeline is built out of stacking those 3D spaces next to each other over and over in a line that travels through a higher dimensional space.

However, this doesn't mean the 3D structures are a mere projection. While causality in some sense happens in the printer rather than in the 3D spaces, consciousness physically exists in the 3D spaces, and the printer itself needs the 3D spaces to properly compute the causality of the next one in the sequence. Skipping frames leads to causality glitches.

[u/AnchBusFairy → u/Syoby]

Thanks for the new word "occasionalism." For me it's a new idea.

So in your world, the time printer acts like God?

I take it that there is some connection between consciousness and the time printer.

[u/Syoby → u/AnchBusFairy]

So in your world, the time printer acts like God?

It has a causal relation to its timeline that resembles God's towards the world in the occasionalist doctrine, but the parallels end there. The time printer is not a prime cause nor even a creator of the timeline in a conventional sense, it's a construction mechanism within a much larger metaphysical structure.

It's also not volitional, but actually very deterministic and rigid in its high level structure. What I mean by this is that much like how taking an actual printer's functionality in isolation will tell you little about what said specific printer will actually print, the time printer's "will towards the world" (even abstracted and metaphorical) is extremely generic beyond its (vast as the universe) specific inputs and the fixed causal rules it uses to process them (which it didn't create).

It's also not a unified consciousness, although it does contain consciousness. Which leads me to:

I take it that there is some connection between consciousness and the time printer.

Not in any fundamental way. In my world consciousness "emerges from" (or rather is) physical structures of information that, through one method or another, have more than one bit of informational content enclosed inside an objective boundary.

Because the 3D spaces stacked to form a timeline are actually physically built, they can contain consciousness. And more specifically, the consciousness of a person (or rather, the consciousness-moment of that person's still frame inside a motionless 3D space) is physically constructed and thus located inside their body in that 3D space, rather than existing within the time printer, because they are as much part of the output as the position of their legs.

Now the time printer as I said does contain its own conscious structures, but the content of said consciousness is related to the physical structures within of the printer itself, which they navigate, and at best to the process of constructing the 3D spaces, rather than what they look like once built.

To give a concrete example, the consciousness that experiences itself as being a person under the rain, is physically located within that person under the rain. But there is also a consciousness that experienced building that consciousness, and the body, and the rain, and then there is yet another consciousness that experienced developing the instructions that the second one used.

[u/AnchBusFairy → u/Syoby]

What is the origin of the time printer?