Solving the Problem of Causality Based on the Duality of Time Theory

The following article is extracted from Chapter III of the Duality of Time book, and some of the details are discussed further in other chapters, as well as Volume III that is the Ultimate Symmetry.

The Problem of Causality

As we have seen in section 6.3 above, the Big Bang is a space-time singularity, which means that time started with the Big Bang, and not the opposite. The question is therefore: what is the cause for the Big Bang?

Some physicists and philosophers argue that nothing can’t exist, and non-existence have never been an option. Leibniz, however, asked the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, and he concluded that the sufficient reason is found in a substance which is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself. This philosophical question will be discussed in chapter IV, but according to the Duality of Time, causality itself is not a fundamental principle anymore, but a result of the perpetual creation in the inner levels of time, as we shall discuss at the end of chapter VII.

Actually, the Duality of Time Postulate is capable of explaining the most fundamental philosophical observations, because the basic principle of causality becomes a consequence of sequential re-creation. Therefore, without breaking the speed of light limit, this sequential re-creation can explain non-locality and various other critical quantum mechanical issues, that will be investigated further in chapter VI.

Reality of Motion

The basic issue in the philosophy of motion is whether the matter-in-motion can be itself the cause of its motion? The dialectical explanation considers that matter is the most primary source of the development of completion, and therefore it can be itself the cause and subject of motion. Metaphysical philosophy, on the other hand, insists on differentiating between that which moves and the mover. This is because motion is a gradual development and completion of a deficient thing, which can’t by itself develop and complete gradually, and therefore can’t be the cause of completion.

Ibn al-Arabi talks about motion in some details in the long chapter 198 [II.456-458], where he affirms that: “everything in the world that moves and rests doesn’t move and rest by itself, but by a mover (that is the cause that makes it move and a rest)”, but he adds that this mover either moves the object by itself or by its will to move it; so those who believe the mover moves the object by itself say that motion is created in the object, thus motion by itself, when it is in the object, causes it to move. And the same can be said regarding rest. But if the mover moves the object by its will, it will do that either by an (intermediate) means or without a means. Then if the mover is the object itself, it has to have a will, like the motion of the human being who moves under his will in the (six physical) directions.

Ibn al-Arabi then differentiates between the regular circular motion of the orb, as the celestial sphere of each planetary heaven, and the motion of objects, where motions of the orb are tidy and in a sequential manner like the motion of the millstone; each part doesn’t depart from its neighboring (part), while the motion of elements is different, because it is entwined, where some parts depart from the neighboring parts and occupy new places different from the ones they were in.

He also says that the motion of the orb is like the motion of the human being in the directions, since the orb moves by its will in order to give out what is (inspired) in its heaven by the divine Command which causes the things to occur in the earthly elements and the generators of earthly changes; so as a result of this motion, time emerges. Time, therefore, has no effect in the orbs’ appearance, but rather it affects only what is below it. Time doesn’t affect the appearance of the orb, because it is itself the appearance, or the result in the lower elemental realms, whereas the things that happen and appear in the orbs, the heavens, and the higher world have causes other than time. [II.456-458]

We have to admit that physicists habitually accept a very naive concept of motion, usually expressed by the formula “velocity equals distance per time” (v=x/t). Such a simplified concept of motion has been working nicely for many centuries, and although modern theories slightly corrected these classical Newtonian mechanics, they didn’t address the more philosophical question about the nature of motion itself. To answer this question, one has to verify whether space and time are discrete or continuous, an issue that is still persisting and unsettled even in the latest theories. However, we find some philosophers, like Zeno, who argued that, whether we consider this way or the other, we shall inevitably end up with some irresolvable paradoxes, as we discussed in chapter III, section 5.

Ibn al-Arabi, based on his theory of the oneness of being and the principle of continual re-creation, as discussed in sections 1.2 and 2.1, gives a clear and far more extensive definition of motion which is utterly different from the simple notion of just a distance in time. In the same chapter that we just quoted above, he says: ‘You have to know that the truth about motion and rest is that they are two states of the natural embodied things ... that is because the embodied thing will necessarily need a volume to occupy by itself in the time of its existence. So it may either be in the same place in the next time, or times, which is called ‘rest’; or it is in the next place in the next time and in the following place in the third time. So its appearing in and occupying these places one after another can happen only by ‘changing’ from one place to another, and this may only be due to a cause. So it would be fine to call this change ‘motion’, although we know there is nothing but the embodied thing itself, the place, and the fact that it occupied a place next to that which it occupied before. But those who claim that there is some (real) thing called ‘motion’, which got into the embodied thing and caused it to change from one place to another, they have to prove it!’ [II.457.27]

With the above definition of motion, Ibn al-Arabi has in mind his basic principle of the ever-renewed creation, which suggests that the entire world is continuously being re-created every single moment of time, as we described in section 2.1. Therefore there is no real motion like that which we habitually perceive in the human common sense or estimative faculty; in reality motion is only a ‘change of place’: i.e., the thing that is the subject of motion is being re-created in different places, and not moved between them, so we imagine motion. At the end of his short book “al-Durrat al-Bayda” (“The White Pearl”), Ibn al-Arabi wonders how (the general) people (not to mention physicists and philosophers) don’t so easily realize the delusion of motion and space. He says that “everything that moves doesn’t move in (already) occupied space, but it moves in a void.” Then he explains that the thing may not move into a new place until this new place is emptied before hand. So by simple logic, this (false) assumption that there is real motion would lead to the conclusion that the result of an action would occur before the action itself. Thus this radically different conception meticulously challenges Newton’s law of action-reaction, which, practically speaking, always holds true, but which seems to be philosophically deceiving. So the mere concept of motion apparently violates causality, the most fundamental principle of physics, and even common sense. Actually, Ibn al-Arabi, following earlier radical theories in kalam theology, even questions causality itself, where he affirms that Allah says: “I create the things next to the causes and not by them” [II.204.13]. Though this doesn’t deny causality itself, nor the appearances of regular natural causality, but it does suggest a radically new type of strictly divine causality.

Ibn al-Arabi concludes, therefore, that motion is only a new creation in different neighboring places; there is no actual path of the object between its start and the destination points when taken on the smallest scale of time, when time itself is quantized. Based on this novel definition of motion, we shall be able to resolve Zeno’s famous paradoxes that are discussed in chapter III. But this is also what happens, according to modern physics, in the atom where the electrons jump between the energy levels, that have different distance from the nucleus, without any possible existence in between. In the Quran, it is also said that this is what happened to the throne of the queen of Sheba when it refers to the unnamed man “who has knowledge from the (divine) Book” moving her throne from Sheba to Solomon’s court “in a blink of the eye”.

To further explain how such instantaneous motion may occur, seeming faster than light, let us return to the analogy of the movie screen or computer monitor, that we discussed in section 2.7. When the electric current creates them, each pixel on the screen appears in a specific form of different color and intensity that may (slightly) change from one frame to the other. This momentary form, in which the pixel appears every time it is scanned, lasts only during the very short time while the current is in its place. Once the current leaves the pixel to make the next one, the form of the previous pixel vanishes intrinsically; we only see the traces of these forms for a short time until they are scanned again to appear in a new form, that may be different or similar to the previous one.

Similarly, if the perpetual creative process by the Single Monad is conceptually stopped, and taken in isolation, it will form a kind of still picture, of things around us, including ourselves both as bodies (matter) and as spirits or states of realization (meanings). Within this conception, the dynamic manifest world, then, is the instantaneous and continuously renewed succession of these slightly changing frames. Motion, therefore, is observed because things successively appear in different places, but indeed there is no actual motion, rather: the observed objects are always at rest in the different positions that they appear in. This is the same conclusion of the Arrow argument by Zeno, which Russell described as: “in some miraculous way the change of position has to occur between the instants (without moving)” as mentioned in chapter III.

Quantum Causality

Since the whole universe in space is a closed system, all changes in it are necessarily internal changes only. Therefore, any change in any part of the universe will inevitably cause instantaneous synchronizing change(s) in other parts. In normal cases the effect of the ongoing process of cosmic re-creation is not noticeable because of the many possible changes that could happen in any part of the complex system and the corresponding distraction of our limited means of attention and perception. So, being part of this closed system, the observer can have a considerable role in determining its state. In normal circumstances, however, the effect of the observer on the surrounding world is limited only through physical forces, because his or her mind or monad constitutes only a very insignificant part of this whole world. On much smaller scales, and after isolating other stronger causes, the effect of consciousness will be more detectable.

This distinctive mental capacity might be significantly different from one person to another, and from time to time, because it is subject to quantum uncertainty, which may explain some people’s inherent capability to perform certain telekinetic and telepathic actions, which have been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability.

Therefore, this new conception of space construction can provide a hypothetical explanation for diverse para-psychological phenomena, that are yet beyond the scope of the current laws of physics. This is of course a diverse subject that is far beyond the scope of this article, but we can clearly see how the principle of ongoing re-creation is capable of explaining many diverse natural and supernatural phenomena.

The re-creation does not deliver any new monads; rather, it only may change some of the different states of existing monads. This means that the universe is like a global manifold standing wave, or a closed system of quantized field excitations, where any perturbation at a particular location will cause subsequent coherent synchronization in other locations. This is usually expressed through the laws of conservation, for example, of energy and momentum, that are normally applied only in local or connected space-time. With this novel view of re-creation, the conservation laws can be applied in any isolated system, but the isolation is not necessarily spatial.

Additionally, this application of the Re-creation Principle on the whole world as a closed system of field excitations can actually provide the first natural explanation of causality itself, that is not directly related to space or even time; i.e. it allows non-local and even non-temporal interactions.

In regular macroscopic situations, the perturbation causes gradual or smooth, but still discrete, motion or change; because of the vast number of neighboring individual monads, the effect of any perturbation will be limited to adjacent monads and will decease very quickly after short distance, when energy is consumed. This kind of apparent motion is limited by the speed of light, because the change can appear infinitesimally continuous in space.

In the special case when a small closed system is isolated as a small part of the universe, and this isolation is not necessarily spatial isolation, as it is the case of the two entangled particles in the EPR, then the effect of any perturbation will appear instantaneous because it will be transferred only through a small number of monads, irrespective of their positions in space. Furthermore, when the observer or gauge is part of such a small closed system, it will have a significant effect on determining the state into which the wave-function of this system will collapse. In normal macroscopic situations, the effect of the observer is not noticeable for the very same reason that enforces the speed of light limit, i.e. it is dissipated over a large number of monads that are normally spatially isolated. So in the macroscopic situations the effect of the observer or measurement will be limited only through physical forces, but in small isolated or entangled systems consciousness may have a considerable effect on the collapse of wave function.

List of Some Major Problems Solved by the Duality of Time Theory

In the following articles, we will list some of the major unsolved problems in theoretical physics and describe them in brief, stating their potential solutions according to the Duality of Time Postulate. Although many of these problems will be simply eliminated according to the new genuinely-complex time-time geometry, a detailed theoretical and mathematical analysis is required in order to explain how these problems are settled. Therefore, some of the following brief suggested solutions may be speculative.

These articles are extracted from Chapter III of the Duality of Time book, and some of the details are discussed further in other chapters, as well as Volume III that is the Ultimate Symmetry. A more concise description is also published in Time Chest.

The Arrow of Time Problem	Logical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics	Problem of Physical Information
The Problem of Causality	The Planck Scale Problem	Problem of Magnetic Monopoles
EPR and the Problem of Non-Locality	Problem of Quantum Gravity	Mass Generation Mechanism
Homogeneity and the Horizon Problem	Problem of Neutrino Masses	Problem of Color Confinement
The Hierarchy Problem	Problem of Cosmic Inflation	Problem of Yang-Mills Theory
Problem of Unification of Fundamental Interactions	Problem of Super-Symmetry	Problem of Baryon Asymmetry
Problem of Dark Matter	Problem of Dark Energy	Cosmological Constant Problems

The Duality of Time Postulate

To understand how all these major problems could be solved so easily, please study first the Duality of Time Postulate, that has been extracted from Chapter V of the Duality of Time book.