This is true if events have an existence apart from maths. However, that is still being debated. Tegmark's "mathematical universe hypothesis" suggests that time and events are emergent from an underlying timeless mathematical structure.
To take something that is (hopefully) less contentious, the block universe of special relativity already suggests something similar to this. In relativity, all chains of events are embedded in a space-time manifold, and hence causation comes down to how world-lines are arranged within this structure. Presumably the arrangement has abstract reasons (i.e. what we call the laws of physics, whatever they turn out to be). So even in SR, causality in effect takes a back seat, becoming the result of how observers are embedded in a "timeless" structure. Of course in this case, time still exists as a dimension, as it was in Newtonian physics. But even in Newtonian physics, Laplace imagined the past and future would be "already there" as far as a sufficiently godlike intellect was concerned. So Newton and Einstein imagined that events were embedded in a physical structure, but that they were "already there" in the sense of being emergent from the laws of physics plus initial conditions. ISTM that moving causation into a purely abstract realm is just one more step in this process, and a logical one (though obviously one that needs to be tested against reality). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
