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[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

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What you think of as the past doesn't cause what you think of as the future anymore than what you think of as the future causes what you think of as the past. Temporal one-way causality doesn't exist. Typically, whenever we say "X happens because of Y", it's provably incorrect, provably illusory, and provably part of an bigger, more fundamental, and more pervasive illusion.

For clarity, I want you to assume I'm an adamant confident atheist who absolutely does not actually believe in God when you read the rest of the this post.

The reason for that is then you can more clearly understand what I am saying, since my point has nothing to do with whether or not there is a god and my point remains truth whether or not there is a god.

For one who does believe in God (or if we imagine there is a god just for the sake of argument), my views on time, causality, guilt, and responsibility can be summed up as follows:

Imagine the story of the whole universe (including what you see as the distant past and the distant future) is a book, a single unchanging already written eternal timeless book. Imagine that book is all that physically exists. It's all there is, that book and God, nothing else at all. Then, it's just as true to say that God wrote the ending first and the beginning last rather than vice versa. Or you could think of it like he wrote a little bit of the ending first, then wrote a little bit of the beginning, making sure to keep the story consistent without plot holes or contradictions, and then wrote a little more of the ending and then wrote a little bit more of the beginning, and so on until it was done, always making sure to keep the story consistent without plot holes or contradictions.

The above paragraph is a decent model that explains my metaphysics, with the understanding that I'm using the word God similar to the way the philosopher Spinoza did and similar to the way Einstein did when he famously said that he believes "God doesn't play dice".

However, to really make it better match my metaphysics (and Spinoza's if I understand his correctly), you'd have to think of God and the book (i.e. the universe) as being one and the same, or at least as if God is in the book and contained by it and living inside of it, even if you still imagine him as somehow still being the writer of the book from within. In that way, it would be more analogous to a dream you have at night where you are simultaneously in the dream and the dreamer who is writing the dream all at the same time, and yet in another sense you are the dream and the dream is you. There's room to construct the metaphor in different and even opposite ways since it is afterall just a metaphor and/or analogy.

Accordingly, even if I was an adamant atheist, the above model and description would still probably be the best model and description of my metaphysics, just with the understanding that it uses a lot of analogy and/or metaphor to make it so our little minds can take it in and hold onto it.

A small handheld globe is far better and more accurate representation of the Earth than a flat 2D map, but it is still far from the real thing.

Needless to say, things aren't ever exactly how we describe them to be because the reality is wonderfully indescribable.



With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott

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[Sushan]

Your perspective on time and causality as illusions challenges traditional views in a profound way. The idea that past and future do not exist as distinct entities but as parts of a single, timeless whole aligns with some interpretations of Einstein’s theories on spacetime. It’s intriguing to consider the universe as a complete, unchanging "book" where linear causality doesn’t apply. It's a thought-provoking concept that encourages us to rethink our understanding of time, causality, and existence itself.