Causation in a timeless world?

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to answer the question, ‘could there be causation in a timeless world?’ My conclusion: tentatively, yes. The paper and argument have three parts. Part one introduces salient issues and spells out the importance of this (initially somewhat baroque seeming) line of investigation. Section two of the paper reviews recent arguments due to Baron and Miller, who argue in favour of the possibility of causation in a timeless world, and looks to reject their arguments developed there. Section three is a response to a response. In their, Baron and Miller also argue that an argument in favour of the possibility of causation at timeless worlds, that I put forward, is an argument that fails. In section three, my response to Baron and Miller is that their argument against me succeeds, but that there is a nearby argument that we can appeal to in order to demonstrate the possibility of causation at timeless worlds.

Keywords:

• Timeless
• causation
• timeless worlds

Notes

¹ Thanks to a referee for this thought. It (helpfully) unpicked most of what I originally wanted to say.

² See Carroll (2002) inter alia for discussion.

³ Admittedly in the rod case it seems natural to think that x is idle; what does the explanatory work is that z has the property. Nonetheless, if z’s instantiating P necessitates y’s instantiating P, then it follows (albeit trivially) that x and z’s instantiating P necessitates y’s instantiating P.

⁴ The choice of directions ‘up’ and ‘down’ is irrelevant here. All that we require is that if the coin lands with heads facing D, then tails faces not-D. ‘Direction D’ and ‘direction not D’ are rather unlovely terms, though, so I persist with the more homely ‘up’ and ‘down’ in the case itself.

⁵ Some of the work on this paper was carried out during a visiting fellowship at the University of Sydney. I’m very grateful to everyone involved. I owe a particular debt to Dean Rickles, Kristie Miller, David Braddon-Mitchell and members of the graduate work in progress group. Thanks folks! I’m also very grateful to two referees for this journal for extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and to David Ingram for conversations about a very early draft of the ideas here.