Our existence is limited to four dimensions, so we perceive things through the scope of time, including cause -> effect.
On the level of higher dimensions, it's difficult for us to perceive how cause -> effect would play out, but it's similar to how you would influence a drawing of a 2D stick figure. You could draw a house next to the stick figure, and that would cause the house to exist, but to the stick figure it would only perceive a single line with a start and finish on 1 dimension.
To that stick figure, cause and effect would be perceived as the two points on the line, though your four dimensional pencil caused it to exist on a different dimensional level.
Causality is just human perception and there's nothing special about time. Let me try to explain this in three ways, going from intuitive/trivial to non-intuitive/mind-blowing:
• You can have causality in space rather than time: e.g. a convolutional image filter at pixel 13 might consider pixels 12, 13, 14 (of which the first two are causal and the last is non-causal, if we consider higher numbers as going "forward")
• You can have non-causal filters in time: e.g. audio compression at time 0:30 might consider not only the portion of audio from 0:00 to 0:30, but also the audio from 0:30 to 2:33. (This doesn't seem that remarkable, because the track has already been recorded, so it's not in "real time".)
• Finally, what we usually think of as intuitive causality in "real time" is simply a question of entropy. We think of a person dying because she was shot by a bullet, but we could also replay the movie backwards and think of all the tissues of a human body coming together in such a way as to propel the bullet backwards at a high velocity - in other words the wound causes the bullet to fly! The only reason we don't think of it this way is because the latter explanation decreases rather than increases entropy. As it turns out, physicists can show that entropy is also the exact reason why we remember the past and not the future. (And if we did remember the future and not the past, we would simply think of the future as the past and vice versa, so things wouldn't feel any different.)
If I turn on a very simple computer, then the clock starts at zero. From the computers perspective that's all there is, it doesn't know the cause. From my point of view there absolutely is a case, me pushing a button.
This is not a god argument, there might be natural processes that can trigger such events.
We really don't. We don't have any physical evidence of anything from before the big bang (presuming that's what we call the "beginning"). Zero. All we have is people having views on the current situation, trying to apply those views backwards to "before", where they may or may not fit, and saying "I think it's like this".
I don't think this is an accurate analogy. The computer's space-time and your space-time are the same in this analogy. The space-time that our universe exists in would not be the same as the space-time that some extra-universe process would be inside if the big bang theory is accurate. This isn't an analogy for causality without time, this is causality for the creation of our universe if the big bang theory is wrong and space-time didn't expand out of a point some billions of years ago, ie. that our space-time existed "before" the big bang and there were processes outside of our universe that were still inside of the same space-time as ours.
If the computer is simulating a spacetime, they're not the same.
You could - hypothetically - pause the computer, check its state, change a few variables, and the simulation would experience instant modifications.
A slow simulator could take many "real" time units to calculate each in-simulation time frame - and this would be invisible in-simulation.
And so on.
You have a fully causal system, but the simulation is ruled by its own independent emulation of causality.
Of course a computer implies a conscious user. But let's attempt some wild speculation and suggest that a "simulation" could also be a completely natural process - something that happens in a much bigger causal substrate: a kind of causal symmetry breaking, where a subset of possible relationships crystallises out of a bigger set of possibilities and then continues independently, losing some degrees of freedom.
A simple two level topology is the simplest possible model. But "causality physics" could allow all kinds of topologies - nested, circular, fractal, etc.
Good point which brings us to a simple explanation. Time zero isn't when the h/w is booted, it's when the software is started. As unpopular as the simulation theory is, many difficult issues can easily be thought about. Except for the rest of the turtles.
Although it raises an interesting question, because physics has a lot of issues with time. Just as in the computer example, why could we not imagine that our universe exists inside the space and time of larger superuniverse, and perhaps the phenomena that explain times arrow is easily observable in that universe, but not in ours.
Logically, cause and effect precede time. The concept of time integrates your perceptions of cause and effect. We observe various causes and effects require variable amounts of time, we omit the specific amounts of time, thus inductively identifying the abstract concept of time.
Both causality and the "flow" of time are ultimately artifacts due to the fact that a "universe", by definition, is something thay starts out in a highly-ordered state and evolves away from it. The basic laws of physics are time-symmetrical, at least in a practical sense - they do not involve any distinction between "cause" and "effect".
