Maybe we can create spacetime

Suppose a substantivalist view of spacetime on which points of spacetime really exist.

Suppose I had taken a different path to my office today. Then the curvature of spacetime would have been slightly different according to General Relativity.

Question: Would spacetime have had the same points, but with different metric relations, or would spacetime have had different points with different metric relations?

If we go for the same points option, then we have to say that the distance between two points is not an essential property of the two points. Moreover it then turns out that spacetime has degrees of freedom that are completely unaccounted for in General Relativity, degrees of freedom that specify ``where’’ (with respect to the metric) our world’s points of spacetime would be in counterfactual situations. This makes for a much more complicated theory.

If we go for the different points option, then we have the cool capability of creating points of spacetime by waving our arms. While this is a little counterintuitive, it seems to me to be the best answer. Perhaps the best story here is that points of spacetime are individuated by the limiting metric properties of the patches of spacetime near them and by their causal history.

Existential inertia and spacetime

According to the principle of existential inertia:

1. If x exists at t₁ and t₂ > t₁ and there is no cause of x’s not existing at t₂, then x exists at t₂.

This sounds weird, and one way to get at the weirdness for me is to put it in terms of relativity theory. Times are spacelike hypersurfaces. So, then:

2. If x exists somewhere on a spacelike hypersurface H₁ and H₂ is a later spacelike hypersurface and there is no cause of x’s not existing on H₂, then x exists on H₂.

This seems weird to me. Why should being in one specific area of spacetime metaphysically push one to exist in another specific area of spacetime? I can see how existing in one area of spacetime could physically push one to exist in another. But metaphysically? That seems odd.

Metaphysical semiholism

For a while I’ve speculated that making ontological sense of quantum mechanics requires introducing a global entity into our ontology to ground the value of the wavefunction throughout the universe.

One alternative is to divide up the grounding task among the local entities (particles and/or Aristotelian substances). For instance, on a Bohmian story, one could divide up 3N-dimensional configuration space into N cells, one cell for each of the N particles, with each particle grounding the values of the wavefunction in its own cell. But it seems impossible to find a non-arbitrary way to divide up configuration space into such cells without massive overdetermination. (Perhaps the easiest way to think about the problem is to ask which particle gets to determine the value of the wavefunction in a small neighborhood of the current position in configuration space. They all intuitively have “equal rights” to it.)

It just seems neater to suppose a global entity to do the job.

A similar issue comes up in theories that require a global field, like an electromagnetic field or a gravitational field (even if these is to be identified with spacetime).

Here is another, rather different task for a global entity in an Aristotelian context. At many times in evolutionary history, new types of organisms have arisen, with new forms. For instance, from a dinosaur whose form did not require feathers, we got a dinosaur whose form did require feathers. Where did the new form come from? Or suppose that one day in the lab we synthesize something molecularily indistinguishable from a duck embryo. It is plausible to suppose that once it grows up, it will not only walk and quack like a duck, but it will be a duck. But where did it get its duck form from?

We could suppose that particles have a much more complex nature than the one that physics assigns to them, including the power to generate the forms of all possible organisms (or at least all possible non-personal organisms—there is at least theological reason to make that distinction). But it does not seem plausible to suppose that encoded in all the particles we have the forms of ducks, elephants, oak trees, and presumably a vast array of non-actual organisms. Also, it is somewhat difficult to see how the vast number of particles involved in the production of a duck embryo would “divide up” the task of producing a duck form. This is reminiscent of the problem of dividing up the wavefunction grounding among Bohmian particles.

I am now finding somewhat attractive the idea that a global entity carries the powers of producing a vast array of forms, so that if we synthesize something just like a duck embryo in the lab, the global entity makes it into a duck.

Of course, we could suppose the global entity to be God. But that may be too occasionalistic, and too much of a God-of-the-gaps solution. Moreover, we may want to be able to say that there is some kind of natural necessity in these productions of organisms.

We could suppose several global entities: a wavefunction, a spacetime, and a form-generator.

But we could also suppose them to be one entity that plays several roles. There are two main ways of doing this:

1. The global entity is the Universe, and all the local entities, like ducks and people and particles (if there are any), are parts of it or otherwise grounded in it. (This is Jonathan Schaffer’s holism.)

2. Local entities are ontologically independent of the global entity.

I rather like option (2). We might call this semi-holism.

But I don’t know if there is anything to be gained by supposing there to be one global entity rather than several.

Saving a Newtonian intuition

Here is a Newtonian intuition:

1. Space and time themselves are unaffected by the activities of spatiotemporal beings.

General Relativity seems to upend (1). If I move my hand, that changes the geometry of spacetime in the vicinity of my hand, since gravity is explained by the geometry of spacetime and my hand has gravity.

It’s occurred to me this morning that a branching spacetime framework can restore the Newtonian intuition of the invariance of space. Suppose we think of ourselves as inhabiting a branching spacetime, with the laws of nature being such as to require all the substances to travel together (cf. the traveling forms interpretation of quantum mechanics). Then we can take this branching spacetime to have a fixed geometry, but when I move my hand, I bring it about that we all (i.e., all spatiotemporal substances now existing) move up to a branch with one geometry rather than up to a branch with a different geometry.

On this picture, the branching spacetime we inhabit is largely empty, but one lonely red line is filled with substances. Instead of us shaping spacetime, we travel in it.

I don’t know if (1) is worth saving, though.

From a determinable-determinate model of location to a privileged spacetime foliation

Here’s a three-level determinable-determinate model of spacetime that seems somewhat attractive to me, particularly in a multiverse context. The levels are:

1. Spatiotemporality

2. Being in a specific spacetime manifold

3. Specific location in a specific spacetime manifold.

Here, levels 2 and 3 are each a determinate of the level above it.

Thus, Alice has the property of being at spatiotemporal location x, which is a determinate of the determinable of being in manifold M, and being in manifold M is a determinate of the determinable of spatiotemporality.

This story yields a simple account of the universemate relation: objects x and y are universemates provided that they have the same Level 2 location. And spatiotemporal structure—say, lightcone and proper distance—is somehow grounded in the internal structure of the Level 2 location determinable. (The “somehow” flags that there be dragons here.)

The theory has some problematic, but very interesting, consequences. First, massive nonlocality, both in space and in time, both backwards and forwards. What spacetime manifold the past dinosaurs of Earth and the present denizens of the Andromeda Galaxy inhabit is partly up to us now. If I raise my right hand, that affects the curvature of spacetime in my vicinity, and hence affects which manifold we all have always been inhabiting.

Second, it is not possible to have a multiverse with two universes that have the same spacetime structure, say, two classical Newtonian ones, or two Minkowskian ones.

To me, the most counterintuitive of the above consequences is the backwards temporal nonlocality: that by raising my hand, I affect the level 2 locational properties, and hence the level 3 ones as well, of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs would literally have been elsewhere had I not raised my hand!

What’s worse, we get a loop in the partial causal explanation relation. The movement of my hand affects which manifold we all live in. But which manifold we all live in affects the movement of the objects in the manifold—including that of my hand.

The only way I can think of avoiding such backwards causation on something like the above model is to shift to some model that privileges a foliation into spacelike hypersurfaces, and then has something like this structure:

1. Spatiotemporality

2. Being in a specific branching spacetime

3. Being in a specific spacelike hypersurface inside one branch

4. Specific location within the specific spacelike hypersurface.

We also need some way to handle persistence over time. Perhaps we can suppose that the fundamentally located objects are slices or slice-like accidents.

I wonder if one can separate the above line of thought from the admittedly wacky determinate-determinable model and make it into a general metaphysical argument for a privileged foliation.

Spacetime and Aristotelianism

For a long time I’ve been inclining towards relationalism about space (or more generally spacetime), but lately my intuitions have been shifting. And here is an argument that seems to move me pretty far from it.

Given general relativity, the most plausible relationalism is about spacetime, not about space.

Given Aristotelianism, relations must be grounded in substances.

Here is one possibility for this grounding:

1. All spatiotemporal relations are symmetrically grounded: if x and y are spatiotemporally related, then there is an x-to-y token relation inherent in x and a y-to-x token relation inherent in y.

But this has the implausible consequence that there is routine backwards causation, because if I walk a step to the right, then that causes different tokens of Napoleon-to-me spatiotemporal relations to be found in Napoleon than would have been found in him had I walked a step to the left.

So, we need to suppose:

2. Properly timelike spatiotemporal relations are grounded only in the later substance.

But what about spacelike spatiotemporal relations? Presumably, they are symmetrically or asymmetrically grounded.

If they are symmetrically grounded, then we have routine faster-than-light causation, because if I walk a step to the right, then that causes different tokens of x-to-me spatiotemporal relations to be found in distant objects throughout the universe.

Moreover, on the symmetric grounding, we get the odd consequence that it is only the goodness of God that guarantees that you are the same distance from me as I am from you.

If they are asymmetrically grounded, then we have arbitrariness as to which side they are grounded on, and it is a regulative ideal to avoid arbitrariness. And we still have routine faster-than-light causation. For presumably it often happens that I make a voluntary movement and someone on the other side of the earth makes a voluntary movement spacelike related to my movement (because there are so many people!), and now wherever the spatiotemporal relations is grounded, it will have to be affected by the other’s movement.

I suppose routine faster-than-light causation isn’t too terrible if it can’t be used to send signals, but it still does seem implausible. It seems to me to be another regulative ideal to avoid nonlocality in our theories.

What are the alternatives to relationalism? Substantivalism is one. We can think of spacetime as a substance with an accident corresponding to every point. And then we have relationships to these accidents. There is a lot of technical detail to work out here as to how the causal relationships between objects and spacetime points and the geometry of spacetime work out, and whether it fits with an Aristotelian view. I am mildly optimistic.

Another approach I like is a view on which spacetime position is a nonrelational position determinable accident. Determinable accidents have determinates which one can represent as values. These values may be numerical (e.g., mass or charge), but they may be more complex than that. It’s easiest in a flat spacetime: spacetime position is then a determinable whose determinates can be represented as quadruples of real numbers. In a non-flat spacetime, it’s more complicated. One option for the values of determinate positions is that they are “pointed spacetime manifold portions”, i.e., intersections of a Lorentzian manifold with a backwards lightcone (with the intended interpretation that the position of the object is at the tip of the lightcone). (What we don’t want is for the positions to be points in a single fixed manifold, because then we have backwards causation problems, since as I walk around, the shifting of my mass affects which spacetime manifold Napoleon lived in.)

Does general relativity lead to non-locality all on its own?

A five kilogram object has the determinable mass with the determinate mass of 5 kg. The determinate mass of 5 kg is a property that is one among many determinate properties that together have a mathematical structure isomorphic to a subset of real numbers from 0 to infinity (both inclusive, I expect). Something similar is true for electric charge, except now we can have negative values. Human-visible color, on the other hand, lies in a three-dimensional space.

I think one can have a Platonic version of this theory, on which all the possible determinate properties exist, and an Aristotelian one on which there are no unexemplified properties. There will be important differences, but that is not what I am interested in in this post.

I find it an attractive idea that spatial location works the same way. In a Newtonian setting the idea would be that for a point particle (for simplicity) to occupy a location is just to have a determinate position property, and the determinate position properties have the mathematical structure of a subset of three-dimensional Euclidean space.

But there is an interesting challenge when one tries to extend this to the setting of general relativity. The obvious extension of the story is that determinate instantaneous particle position properties have the mathematical structure of a subset of a four-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold. But which manifold? Here is the problem: The nature of the manifold—i.e., its metric—is affected by the movements of the particles. If I step forward rather than back, the difference in gravitational fields affects which mathematical manifold our spacetime is isomorphic to. If determinate position properties are tied to a particular manifold, it means that the position of any massive object affects which manifold all objects are in and have always been in. In other words, the account seems to yield a story that is massively non-local.

(Indeed, the story may even involve backwards causation. Since the manifold is four-dimensional, by stepping forward rather than backwards I affect which four-dimensional manifold is exemplified, and hence which manifold particles were in. )

This is interesting: it suggests that, on a certain picture of the metaphysics of location, general relativity by itself yields non-locality.

Property dualism and relativity theory

On property dualism, we are wholly made of matter but there are irreducible mental properties.

What material object fundamentally has the irreducible mental properties? There are two plausible candidates: the body and the brain. Both of them are extended objects. For concreteness, let’s say that the object is the brain (the issue I will raise will apply in either case) Because the properties are irreducible and are fundamentally had by the brain, they are are not derivative from more localized properties. Rather, the whole brain has these properties. We can think (to borrow a word from Dean Zimmerman) that the brain is suffused with these fundamental properties.

Suppose now that I have an irreducible mental property A. Then the brain as a whole is suffused with A. Suppose that at a later time, I cease to have A. Then the brain is no longer suffused with A. Moreover, because it is the brain as a whole that is a subject of mental properties, it seems to follow that the brain must instantly move from being suffused as a whole with A to having no A in it at all. Now, consider two spatially separated neurons, n₁ and n₂. Then at one time they are both participate in the A-suffusion and at a later time neither participates in the A-suffusion. There is no time at which n₁ (say) participates in A-suffusion but n₂ does not. For if that were to happen, then A would be had by a proper part of the brain then rather than by the brain as a whole, and we’ve said that mental properties are had by the brain as a whole.

But this violates Relativity Theory. For if in one reference frame, the A-suffusion leaves n₁ and n₂ simultaneously, then in another reference frame it will leave n₁ first and only later it will leave n₂.

I think the property dualist has two moves available. First, they can say that mental properties can be had by a proper part of a brain rather than the brain as a whole. But the argument can be repeated for the proper part in place of the brain. The only stopping point here would be for the property dualist to say that mental properties can be had by a single point particle, and indeed that when mental properties leave us, at some point in time in some reference frames they are only had by very small, functionally irrelevant bits of the brain, such as a single particle. This does not seem to do justice to the brain dependence intuitions that drive dualists to property dualism over substance dualism.

The second move is to say that the brain as a whole has the irreducible mental property, but to have it as a whole is not the same as to have its parts suffused with the property. Rather, the having of the property is not something that happens to the brain qua extended, spatial or composed of physical parts. Since physical time is indivisible from space, mental time will then presumably be different from physical time, much as I think is the case on substance dualism. The result is a view on which the brain becomes a more mysterious object, an object equipped with its own timeline independent of physics. And if what led people to property dualism over substance dualism was the mysteriousness of the soul, well here the mystery has returned.

Perdurance and particles

A perdurantist who believes that particles are fundamental will typically think that the truly fundamental physical entities are instantaneous particle-slices.

But particles are not spatially localized, unless we interpret quantum mechanics in a Bohmian way. They are fuzzily spread over space. So particle-slices have the weird property that they are precisely temporally located—by definition of a slice—but spatially fuzzily spread out. Of course, it is not too surprising if fundamental reality is strange, but maybe the strangeness here should make one suspicious.

There is a second problem. According to special relativity, there are infinitely many spacelike hyperplanes through spacetime at a given point z of spacetime, corresponding to the infinitely many inertial frames of reference. If particles are spatially localized, this isn’t a problem: all of these hyperplanes slice a particle that is located at z into the same slice-at-z. But if the particles are spatially fuzzy, we have different slices corresponding to different hyperplanes. Any one family of slices seems sufficient to ground the properties of the full particle, but there are many families, so we have grounding overdetermination of a sort that seems to be evidence against the hypothesis that the slices are fundamental. (Compare Schaffer’s tiling requirement on the fundamental objects.)

A perdurantist who thinks the fundamental physical entities are fields has a similar problem.

A supersubstantialist perdurantist, who thinks that the fundamental entities are points of spacetime, doesn’t run into this problem. But that’s a really, really radical view.

An “Aristotelian” perdurantist who thinks that particles (or macroscopic entities) are ontologically prior to their slices also doesn’t have this problem.

Are there unicorns here?

Multiverse theories like David Lewis’s or Donald Turner’s populate reality with a multitude of universes containing strange things like unicorns and witches riding broomsticks. One might think that positing unicorns and witches makes a theory untenable, but the theorists try to do justice to common sense by saying that the unicorns and witches aren’t here. Each universe occupies its own spacetime, and the different spacetimes have no locations in common.

But why take the different universes to have no locations in common? Surely, just as a unicorn can have the same charge or color as I, it can have the same location as I. From the fact that a unicorn can have the same charge or color as I, we infer in a Lewisian setting that some unicorn does have the same charge or color as I (and likewise in Turner’s, with some plausible auxiliary assumptions about values). Well, by the same token, from the fact that a unicorn can have the same location as I, we should be able to infer that some unicorn does have the same location as I.

Not so, says Lewis. Counterpart theory holds for locations, but not for charges and colors. What makes it true that a unicorn can have the same charge as I now have is that some unicorn does have the same charge as I. But what makes it true that a unicorn can have the same location as I now have is that some unicorn has a counterpart of my location in a different spacetime.

But what justifies this asymmetry between the properties of charge and location? The asymmetry seems to require clauses in Lewis’s modal semantics that work differently for different properties. It seems there are properties—say, being green—whose possible possession is grounded in something’s having the property, and there are properties—say, being at this location—whose possible possession is grounded in something’s having a a counterpart of the property.

Specifying in a non-ad hoc way which properties are which rather complicates the system. Moreover, it leads to this oddity. Lewis thinks abstract objects exist in all worlds. So, he has to say that being at this location exists in all worlds. And yet the counterpart of being at this location in another world is a different property, even though this exact property does exist at that world.

There is a solution for Lewis. Lewis is committed to counterpart theory holding for objects. It is reasonable for him thus to take counterpart theory also to hold for properties defined de re in terms of particular non-abstract objects. Thus, what makes it true that a unicorn could have had the property of being a mount of Socrates is not that some unicorn in some universe has this property—for no unicorn in our universe has that property, and Socrates according to Lewis only exists in our world—but that some unicorn has a counterpart to this property, which counterpart property is the property of being a mount of S where S is a counterpart of Socrates.

If Lewis can maintain that location properties are defined de re by relation to non-abstract objects, then he has a way out of the objection. Two kinds of theories allow a Lewisian to do this. First, the Lewisian can be a substantivalist who thinks that points or regions of space are non-abstract. Then being here will consist in being locationally related to some point or region L, and Lewis can take counterpart theory to apply to points or regions L. Second, the Lewisian can be a relationalist and say that location is defined by relations to other physical objects, in such a way that if all the objects were numerically different from what they are, nothing could be in the same place it is, and counterpart theory is applied to physical objects by Lewis.

What Lewis cannot do, however, is take a view of location that either takes location to be a relation to abstract objects—say, sets of points in a mathematical manifold—or that takes location to simply be a non-relational determinable like charge or rest mass.

In particular, multiverse theorists like Lewis and Turner are committed to treating location as different from other properties. Anecdotally, most philosophers do treat location like that. But for those of us who are attracted to the idea that location is just another determinable, this is a real cost.

Substantivalism about space is a kind of relationalism

It’s just occurred to me that substantivalist views of space or spacetime are actually relationalist: they define location by relations between objects. It’s just that they introduce one or more additional objects—say, points or space or spacetime—to fill out the theory. An entity’s being located is then a matter of the entity standing in a certain relation to one or more of these additional objects.

Moreover, a substantivalist theory couched in terms of points may have to be even closer to relationalism, in that it may need to say that what makes the points be points of the kind of space or spacetime they are points of are their mutual spatial or spatiotemporal relations.

What has a hope of being a more radical alternative to relationalist theories are property theories, on which being in a location is a property very much like having a certain electric charge—the only difference being that the location properties have a three- or four-dimensional structure while the charge properties have a one-dimensional structure. Of course, having properties will be a matter of relation on heavy-weight Platonism and on trope theories, but these relations are not special spatial or spatiotemporal relations, but just general-purpose relations like instantiation or inherence.

Of course, maybe we don’t want an alternative to relationalism because we like relationalism.

Doing things fast

I was thinking about deadlines--papers and exams to grade--and realized that doing things fast is a similar kind of challenge to making things small. Companies try to fit phone electronics into as spatially thin a region of spacetime as possible, while runners try to fit a run of a particular distance into as temporally thin a region of spacetime as possible. (And while sometimes small spatial and temporal size has "utilitarian value", as in the case of getting my grades in, in the phone and running cases, the reasons are mainly of the aesthetic variety.)

Of balloons and transubstantiation

Our three-dimensional space is curved, say, like the surface of a balloon--except that the surface of a balloon is two-dimensional while space is three-dimensional.

Now imagine you have an inflated balloon. Draw two circles, an inch in diameter, on opposite sides, one red and one blue. Put your left thumb in the middle of the red circle and your right thumb in the middle of the blue circle. Press the thumbs towards each other, until they meet, with two layers of rubber between them. The balloon now looks kind of like a donut, but with no hole all the way through. Imagine now that you press so hard that the two layers of rubber between your thumbs coalesce into a single layer of rubber.

Now the single layer of rubber between your thumbs is at the center of the red circle and at the center of the blue circle. We can think of each circle as defining a place, and the coalesced rubber inside it is found in both of these places.

Replace the red circle with a drawing of a church and the blue circle with a drawing of heaven. The same coalesced layer of rubber is both inside (a drawing of) a church and inside (a drawing of) heaven. Suppose now that the rubber is infinitely thin, and that there is a space that coincides with this rubber, and little two-dimensional people, animals, plants and other objects inhabiting this space, much as in Abbott’s novel Flatland . Suppose that the pictures of the church and heaven are replaced with two-dimensional realities. Then the space of the church and the space of heaven literally overlap, so that there is a place that is located in both. An object found in that place will be literally and physically located both in the church and in heaven. In one sense, that object is physically located in two places at once. In another sense, it is located in a single place, but that single place is simultaneously located both in heaven and in the church.

There is no serious additional conceptual difficulty in three-dimensional space curving in on itself similarly.

(This is largely taken from a forthcoming piece by Beckwith and Pruss.)

General Relativity and the dimension of reality

When people first hear of General Relativity and the idea that spacetime is curved, they naturally imagine a higher-dimensional uncurved space in which our four-dimensional spacetime curvily sits. They may even be shown pictures of a two-dimensional sheet warping into three dimensions. But it's usually then explained to them that that's a misleading way to look at things: reality is just four-dimensional, but has a metric that makes it behave like it's curving in a higher-dimensional space.

What if the natural way of thinking about this is right? What if, say, reality is an 89-dimensional Euclidean space with signature (2,87), but physical objects are constrained to live on a 4-dimensional subset of it? The constraint could be effected, for instance, by a global discontinuous scalar field on the 89-dimensional space that takes two values: 1=allowed and 0=forbidden.

I suppose the main reason not to go for an ontology like this for General Relativity is that it's messier.

Spacetime: Beyond substantivalism and relationalism

According to substantivalism, spacetime or its points or regions is a substance, and location is a relation between material things and spacetime or its points or regions. According to relationalism, location is constituted by relations between material things. Often, the two views are treated as an exhaustive division of the territory.

But they're not. Lately, I've found myself attracted to a tertium quid which I know is not original (it's a story other people, too, have come to by thinking about the analogy between location and physical qualities like charge or mass). On a simplified version of this view, being located is a determinable unary property. Locations are simply determinates of being located. This picture is natural for other physical qualities like charge. Having charge of 7 coulombs is not a matter of being related to some other substances--whether other charged substances or some kind of substantial "chargespace" or its points or regions. It's just a determinate of the determinable having charge.

This determinate-property view is more like the absolutism of substantivalism, but differs from substantivalism by not positing any "spacetime substance", or by making the locations into substances. Locations are determinates of a property, and hence are properties rather than substances. If nominalism is tenable for things like charge or mass, the theory won't even require realism about locations.

Is spacetime countable?

Plausibly there is such a thing as a true physics, an ideal physics that we are striving towards, a physics that includes both particular statements as well as laws. That true physics is true, and hence consistent. It is also the sort of theory we can produce, so it has countably many statements (maybe finitely, but perhaps we could continually add to it). Finally, it is very likely to be a first-order theory, since it looks like all of science involves first-order theories.

Suppose there is a spacetime. Then the true physics posits it. Imagine we now have the true physics. By downward Löwenheim-Skolem, the true physics is consistent with spacetime being countable. So, by Ockham's Razor, wouldn't we have good reason to think that spacetime is countable, since that's more parsimonious than its being uncountable? And, now returning to the early 21st century of the actual world, doesn't the fact that if we had the true physics we would have good reason to think spacetime is countable, give us good reason to accept the counterintuitive conclusion that spacetime is actually countable?

I am not sure. For even if a countable spacetime is ontologically simpler, its description in our mathematical language is more complex than that of an uncountable spacetime manifold. Does that matter? Yes, but only if our mathematical language actually cuts mathematical reality at the joints or if we are created to get science right. (I suspect a naturalistic physicist could have a hard time resisting the argument for a countable spacetime. But this is all very, very speculative, and my mind fogs up when I think about the relativity of uncountability, intended models and the like.)

Causation and collapse

If determinism were true, then since each state could be project from the initial state, we could simply suppose that the whole four-dimensional shebang came into existence causally "all at once", so that there would be no causal relations within the four-dimensional universe. The only relevant causation could that of God's causing the universe as a whole--and an atheist might just think the four-dimensional universe to be uncaused.

I think that this acausal picture could be adapted to give an attractive picture of the role of causation in a collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics (whether the collapse is of the GRW-type or of the consciousness-caused type). On a collapse picture, we have an alternation between a deterministic evolution governed by the Schroedinger equation and an indeterministic collapse. Why not suppose, then, that there is no causation within the deterministic evolution? We could instead suppose that the state of the universe at collapse causes the whole of the four-dimensional block between that collapse and the next. As long as collapse isn't too frequent, this could allow occasions of causation to be discrete, with only a finite number of such occasions within any interval of time. And this would let us reconcile quantum physics with causal finitism even with a continuous time. (Relativity would require more work.)

Non-spatiotemporal things

Imagine someone who said: "It's really mysterious how there could be an entity that isn't subject to moral duties." That would be a silly thing to say. Moral duties are themselves deeply mysterious, and it is very difficult to get a good philosophical account of them. If anything it should be less mysterious to have an entity that isn't subject to morality.

But now imagine someone who says: "It's really mysterious how there could be an entity that isn't spatiotemporal." People do say such things about God or Platonic beings. But why isn't the same answer appropriate? Spatiotemporality is itself deeply mysterious, and it is very difficult to get a good philosophical account of it. If anything it should be less mysterious to have an entity that lacks spatiotemporality.

The essential properties of our spacetime

Suppose that spacetime really exists. Name our world's spacetime "Spacey". Now, we have some very interesting question of which properties of Spacey are essential to it. Consider a possible but non-actual world whose spacetime is curved differently, say because some star (or just some cat) is in a different place. If that world were actual instead of ours, would Spacey still exist, but just be curved differently, or would a numerically different spacetime, say Smiley, exist in Spacey's place?

There are three different views one could have about some kind K of potential properties of a spacetime:

1. All the properties in K that Spacey has are essential to Spacey.
2. None of the properties in K are essential to Spacey.
3. Some but not all the properties in K that Spacey has are essential to Spacey.

Suppose K is the geometric properties. It's plausible that at least the dimensionality is essential to Spacey: if Spacey is four-dimensional, it is essentially four-dimensional. Any world with a different number of dimensions doesn't have our friend Spacey as its spacetime. If so, we need only to decide between (1) and (3).

Here is an argument for (3). Spacey's properties can be divided into earlier and later ones, since one of the four (or more) dimensions of Spacey is time. Further, according to General Relativity, some of Spacey's later geometric properties are causally explained at least in part by Spacey's own earlier causal influences. But if (1) were true, then Spacey would not have existed had the later geometric properties been different from how they are, and a part of the explanation of why it is Spacey that exists lies in the exercise of Spacey's own causal influences. But nothing can even partly causally explain its own existence. (Interesting consequence: If Newtonian physics were right, we might think that view (1) was true with respect to geometric properties. But this is implausible given General Relativity.)

Similar arguments go for the wavefunction of the universe, if it's a fundamental entity.

Space, time, spacetime and difficulty of causally affecting

I have previously speculated that the concept of spatial distance might be closely to connected to the difficulty of causally affecting. Roughly speaking, the further apart two things are, the harder it is for one to affect the other. This morning I was thinking about what happens if you bring time into this. Consider events a and b in spacetime, with a earlier than b. Then, keeping spatial distance constant, the greater the temporal distance, intuitively the easier it is for a to affect b. The greater the temporal distance, the greater the number of slow-moving influences from x to y that are available.

So we can think of the difficulty of causally affecting (DCA) as increasing with spatial distance and decreasing with temporal distance. And it turns out that this is pretty much what the Minkowskian relativistic metric describes: ds²=dx²+dy²+dz²−dt² (in c=1 units).

So if we think of distance as closely connected to dca, then it is very natural to think of distance as not just a spatial but a spatiotemporal phenomenon. And without any deep considerations of physics, just using everyday observations about dca, a relativistic metric looks roughly right.

We might now have a rough functional characterization of distance: distance is the sufficiently natural relational quantity which roughly corresponds to dca. In our world it seems there is such a very natural quantity: geodesic distance in a four-dimensional spacetime. In other worlds there may not be such a quantity. Those worlds which have a distance have space or spacetime or time—which it is will depend on the mathematical structure of distance in those worlds and/or on the structure of dca.

This is, of course, vague (I said: "sufficiently natural ... which roughly corresponds"). And so it should be. Compare: Mammals have hair. That's clear. But we should not expect there to be a precise characterization of what kinds of flexible filaments in other species—especially species completely different from ours (think of aliens!)—count as hair. We can give a rough functional characterization of which biological characteristic is hair, but it's going to be very rough, and it may be vague whether some species swimming seas of liquid ammonia is hairy, and that's how it should be. Likewise, if I am right, whether there is time in a world may be quite vague and not a substantive question in Sider's sense.