The logic here has countless fallacies.
You seem to be presuming presentism (only the present time exists), as evidenced by the A-series language if nothing else, and yet this is not explicitly called out.

The cause and effect cannot lay at the same point of time since otherwise they would be simultaneous and there cannot be any change. — MoK

OK, You seem to be speaking of change over time as opposed to any other kind of change which may not have a cause/effect relationship.

Change exists.

Does it? This seems to contradict the assumption of presentism which says that only the present exists, and for change to exist, two different states need to exist. Why must change exist if there exists only the one state?

Therefore, the cause and effect lay at different points of time.

Not 'therefore' since this does not follow by any of the above, but yes, by definition, cause and effect lay at different points in time.

Hence the effect must exist in the immediate future if the cause exists at now.

Nonsequitur. Cause: Asteroid hitting Earth. Effect, years later, dinosaurs are extinct, hardly the immediate future of the asteroid event.
Also, 'immidiate future' is totally undefined. It sort of implies adjacent moments in time with no moments in between, a sort of discreet model of time that 1) has not been posited, and 2) apparently contradicts premise zero, that of presentism, that only one moment in time exists.

But the effect cannot exist if the immediate future does not exist.

The effect does not exist if the future does not exist. It being immediate is irrelevant.

Therefore, the immediate future exists when there is a change.

Again, non-sequitur since you've not established that both cause and effect necessarily exist (and also the lack of definition of 'immediate future').


Now if we discard the presentism premise, then we can attempt to follow the same argument without the A-series wording.

The cause and effect cannot lay at the same point of time since otherwise they would be simultaneous and there cannot be any change. Change exists. Therefore, the cause and effect lay at different points of time. — MoK

Now this much makes sense.

"Hence the effect must exist in the immediate future of the cause"
That part still does not follow, per the dinosaur counterexample.

Not sure what conclusion would be drawn since there no meaningful 'future', immediate or otherwise, if the premise of a present is discarded.

It's just one damn thing after another.

The cause and effect cannot lay at the same point of time since otherwise they would be simultaneous and there cannot be any change. Change exists. Therefore, the cause and effect lay at different points of time. — MoK

You're just getting tangled up in words. The effect is not some separate entity, it is the change.

The cause and effect cannot lay at the same point of time — MoK

You're just getting tangled up in words. The effect is not some separate entity, it is the change. — T Clark

Agreed! And also, if they were at different times, then what's 'tween times?

"Cause" and "effect" are nothing words in themselves, and are used in different contexts to mean different things. If you, @MoK, think you can give context-free definitions, give it a try.

"Cause" and "effect" are nothing words in themselves, — tim wood

The logic here has countless fallacies.
You seem to be presuming presentism (only the present time exists), as evidenced by the A-series language if nothing else, and yet this is not explicitly called out. — noAxioms

No, I am not talking about presentism or A-series of time since to me both now and immediate future exist whereas in presentism or A-series of time only now exist.

OK, You seem to be speaking of change over time as opposed to any other kind of change which may not have a cause/effect relationship. — noAxioms

No, I am talking about a change with a cause-and-effect relationship.

Does it? — noAxioms

Sure change exists. Doesn't it?

This seems to contradict the assumption of presentism which says that only the present exists, and for change to exist, two different states need to exist. Why must change exist if there exists only the one state? — noAxioms

Sure we cannot have any change if there is only one state.

Not 'therefore' since this does not follow by any of the above, but yes, by definition, cause and effect lay at different points in time. — noAxioms

Cause and effect can lay at the same point of time yet in this case we don't have any change. I had to exclude this case to make sure that cause and effect must lay at different points in time if we want to have a change.

Nonsequitur. Cause: Asteroid hitting Earth. Effect, years later, dinosaurs are extinct, hardly the immediate future of the asteroid event. — noAxioms

There is a chain of causes and effects between the asteroid hitting Earth and dinosaurs going extinct.

Also, 'immidiate future' is totally undefined. It sort of implies adjacent moments in time with no moments in between, a sort of discreet model of time that 1) has not been posited, and 2) apparently contradicts premise zero, that of presentism, that only one moment in time exists. — noAxioms

By immediate future, I mean the next point in time whether time is discrete or continuous is off-topic.

The effect does not exist if the future does not exist. It being immediate is irrelevant. — noAxioms

It is relevant.

Again, non-sequitur since you've not established that both cause and effect necessarily exist (and also the lack of definition of 'immediate future'). — noAxioms

If effect does not exist when cause exists then cause ceases to exist when time passes so there cannot be any effect.

Now if we discard the presentism premise, then we can attempt to follow the same argument without the A-series wording. — noAxioms

I am not talking about A-series of time.

Now this much makes sense. — noAxioms

So you agree?

That part still does not follow, per the dinosaur counterexample. — noAxioms

As I mentioned before, there is a chain of causes and effects for the dinosaur example.

You're just getting tangled up in words. The effect is not some separate entity, it is the change. — T Clark

No, the cause and effect come together to allow a change.

Causation, Relation that holds between two temporally simultaneous or successive events when the first event (the cause) brings about the other (the effect).

the cause and effect come together to allow a change. — MoK

Let's take two billiard balls. Ball 1 moves across the table and strikes Ball 2, which is stationary.

Describe the effect - Ball 1's speed is reduced and it moves off at an angle to its original path. Ball 2's speed is increased and it moves off at an angle to Ball 1's original path. The changes in speed and direction are determined in accordance with the Law of Conservation of Momentum and the Law of Conservation of Energy.

Describe the change - Ball 1's speed is reduced and it moves off at an angle to its original path. Ball 2's speed is increased and it moves off at an angle to Ball 1's original path. The changes in speed and direction are determined in accordance with the Law of Conservation of Momentum and the Law of Conservation of Energy.

If you disagree with this, please provide alternative descriptions of the effect and change.

the cause and effect come together to allow a change. — MoK

I requested you provide alternative descriptions. I can see how that might be confusing. Instead, please explain how the description I provided is not correct for the effect, the change, or both.

The cause: Ball1 hits Ball 2 and at the same time Ball 2 hits Ball 1.
The effect: Ball 1's speed is reduced and Ball 2's speed is increased as a result of the collision.
The change: The difference between the speed of Ball 1 before and after the collision and the difference between the speed of Ball 2 before and after the collision as well.

The effect: Ball 1's speed is reduced and Ball 2's speed is increased as a result of the collision.
The change: The difference between the speed of Ball 1 before and after the collision and the difference between the speed of Ball 2 before and after the collision as well. — MoK

Effect and change - Ball 1's speed is reduced by X m/s and Ball 2's speed is increased by Y m/s.

Again, you're just playing around with words.

Nuff said.

Effect and change - Ball 1's speed is reduced by X m/s and Ball 2's speed is increased by Y m/s. — T Clark

No, that is only the effect.

Causation, Relation that holds between two temporally simultaneous or successive events when the first event (the cause) brings about the other (the effect). — MoK

Respectable effort. Cause and effect (CE) is a convenient fiction, very useful and convenient. But I don't think you're getting the point here. The problem is that you define CE in terms of the observer, in the eye of the beholder so to speak. But take away the observer and what exactly is left? Btw, what is "successive events"? You have to decide: CE a convenient fiction, or CE a something in itself. If a something in itself, what is it?

A familiar example from a book may help clarify. A car rolls over on the road, what caused it? "Bad road geometry," says the civil engineer. "Bad suspension," says the auto designer. "Speeding," says the policeman. Or another from the same source. A man uses dynamite to remove a tree stump. What caused the dynamite to explode? .

No, I am not talking about presentism or A-series of time — MoK

I didn't say you were talking about them, I said you were presuming them by referencing words that only have meaning in them.

since to me both now and immediate future exist whereas in presentism or A-series of time only now exist.

There are several variants of presentism, but all of them posit a preferred moment in time.
Growing block says that past and present events exist, future ones do not. Moving spotlight says they all exist, but the 'spotlight' travels across them, making one of the moments preferred. Your variant has not been discussed, but you seem to have not three but four categories of ontology: past, present near future, further future.

[/quote]No, I am talking about a change with a cause-and-effect relationship.[/quote]That's change over time.

Sure change exists.

Change is a different state at different times. That's fairly well defined.
You seem to use the pool ball analogy. The example is also a simple illustration of cause and effect.
The cue ball is rolling, and is near the edge of the table at one moment, and rolling near the middle a second later. That's change. For that change to 'exist' would seem to require both those moments to exist, which is not true of all variants of presentism.

Sure we cannot have any change if there is only one state.

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'change' and/or 'exists'.

Cause and effect can lay at the same point of time

That would violate physics unless they were the same event, and a single event cannot meaningfully have a cause/effect relationship with itself.

There is a chain of causes and effects between the asteroid hitting Earth and dinosaurs going extinct.

As there is between any cause and effect events, unless you posit discreet time and/or discreet events. Point is, it doesn't stop the asteroid from being a cause of the extinction effect. I say 'a cause' and not 'the cause' because there are very few effects that are the result of only one cause.

By immediate future, I mean the next point in time whether time is discrete or continuous is off-topic.

'The next point in time' implies adjacent time moments with nothing between. That makes zero sense without a model of discreet time, so it is anything but off topic here.

If effect does not exist when cause exists then cause ceases to exist when time passes so there cannot be any effect.

That is a non-sequitur again. You exist despite the non-existence of your birth (presuming past events are non-existent, which you seem to support).
You seem to be fighting a strawman model of one state existing, then no state existing, then the subsequent state existing out of nowhere, which is silly. No classical model posits the nonexistence of state at any given time. I say classical because it is a counterfactual assertion, but counterfactuals are relevant to quantum physics, not classical. Quantum is relevant here since you are assuming a discreet model of time, a non-classical concept.

I am not talking about A-series of time.

But you are using it. It's a way of speaking, using references that explicitly or implicitly reference something only meaningful in A-theory of time.

So you agree?

I've rendered no opinions at all. I'm trying to help you put together a coherent argument. The part I reference made no references to things not meaningful in B-theory, which is what I meant by that fragment making sense from that point of view.


What you seem to be proposing is a sort of discreet paired presentism, where there are discreet states A B C etc. State A is the present for some finite duration of time. During that time, state B ('the immediate future') comes into being while state A is still there. The difference between the two is 'existing change' as you put it. Some time after B comes into existence, A ceases to exist and B becomes the present, and then C can come into existence. So it goes on like that, with one or two adjacent discreet states existing at a given time, and if there are two, they are labeled 'present' and 'immediate future'.
Am I close with that, or am totally reading this wrong?

Respectable effort. Cause and effect (CE) is a convenient fiction, very useful and convenient. But I don't think you're getting the point here. The problem is that you define CE in terms of the observer, in the eye of the beholder so to speak. But take away the observer and what exactly is left? — tim wood

I didn't define cause and effect in terms of observer.

A familiar example from a book may help clarify. A car rolls over on the road, what caused it? "Bad road geometry," says the civil engineer. "Bad suspension," says the auto designer. "Speeding," says the policeman. — tim wood

Maybe one of them or perhaps a combination.

There are several variants of presentism, but all of them posit a preferred moment in time.
Growing block says that past and present events exist, future ones do not. Moving spotlight says they all exist, but the 'spotlight' travels across them, making one of the moments preferred. Your variant has not been discussed, but you seem to have not three but four categories of ontology: past, present near future, further future. — noAxioms

I have three categories of ontology: Past (does not exist), present near future (exists), and future (future excluding near future which does not exist).

As there is between any cause and effect events, unless you posit discreet time and/or discreet events. Point is, it doesn't stop the asteroid from being a cause of the extinction effect. I say 'a cause' and not 'the cause' because there are very few effects that are the result of only one cause. — noAxioms

So you agree that there was a chain of causes and effects between the asteroid collision and extinction of dinosaurs?

What you seem to be proposing is a sort of discreet paired presentism, where there are discreet states A B C etc. State A is the present for some finite duration of time. During that time, state B ('the immediate future') comes into being while state A is still there. The difference between the two is 'existing change' as you put it. Some time after B comes into existence, A ceases to exist and B becomes the present, and then C can come into existence. So it goes on like that, with one or two adjacent discreet states existing at a given time, and if there are two, they are labeled 'present' and 'immediate future'.
Am I close with that, or am totally reading this wrong? — noAxioms

Let's stick to three events, A, B, and C. A causes B (B exists in the immediate future) at now. At the next moment, A ceases to exist, and B exists at now and causes C (C exists in the immediate future). Etc.

I didn't define cause and effect in terms of observer. — MoK

Really?

Causation, Relation that holds... — MoK

What is, where is, the relation?

Maybe one of them or perhaps a combination. — MoK

A cause either is a cause or is not a cause.

What you apparently do not see is that "cause" is your invention - presupposition - defined in terms of parameters established by you. Useful in an informal and non-rigorous way, but not an exact account of anything.

Let's stick to three events, A, B, and C. A causes B (B exists in the immediate future) at now. At the next moment, A ceases to exist, and B exists at now and causes C (C exists in the immediate future). Etc. — MoK

And this the bones of a probably useful story. But what exactly is an event? Does an event take up a certain amount of time? Or no time? And what exactly is a cause? How does something that exists cease to exist? And how does something that does not exist come into existence? Anything can happen in a story; that's among the charms of stories. But as any sort of exact or rigorous account it won't do.

I didn't define cause and effect in terms of observer. — MoK

Actually, I also did not see a particularly observer dependent wording of any of the descriptions.
Granted, all empirical investigation, only through which cause and effect are known to us, is via observation. But the description does not seem to be grounded in epistemological terms, hence my not seeing the observer involvement.
Perhaps @tim wood would care to elaborate.

Useful in an informal and non-rigorous way, but not an exact account of anything. — tim wood

With that much I agree.

How does something that exists cease to exist? — tim wood

Let's use the moving spotlight wording: Something ceases to exist when the spotlight moves away from it. Is that so hard? I'm no presentist, but I see no flaw most definition it uses. My father has ceased to exist, as has perhaps my twitter account. Are details of those necessary? All objects seem to have a finite duration, so a better question would be how some object might manage to not ever cease to exist.
In this case, it was a specific 'state of some system', which, under presentism again, ceases to exist when the state of said system changes to some different state.

I have three categories of ontology: Past (does not exist), present near future (exists), and future (future excluding near future which does not exist).
...
Let's stick to three events, A, B, and C. A causes B (B exists in the immediate future) at now. At the next moment, A ceases to exist, and B exists at now and causes C (C exists in the immediate future). Etc. — MoK

That seems to be what I said, so I guess I got pretty close in my attempt to summarize your view. I called them states, not events, since event to me is a point in spacetime, and states are not points.

So you agree that there was a chain of causes and effects between the asteroid collision and extinction of dinosaurs? — MoK

Calling it a chain carries an implication of something linear, rather than a network. There is no single cause of any effect, but the asteroid was indeed a contributor to it. Was it critical? Would the dinos be around today had that thing not hit? Probably none of the species of back then, which would have required said species to not evolve at all in 70 million years. We have alligators today, which is arguably evidence that the dinosaurs are not existence, but the 'dino' part seems to no longer apply.

Calling it a chain also carries a loose implication of a finite number of links, that is, discreet time. No evidence of this has every been demonstrated, but such a view has also never been falsified, which is why simulation hypothesis is not totally impossible.

Secondly, the term 'state' is a very 19th century classical concept. Einstein's relativity of simultaneity reduced 'state' to a frame dependent abstraction instead of a description of anything objectively physical. QM put serious doubt into the concept of counterfactuals, and the concept of an objective state depends heavily on counterfactuals. It means that there are meaningful past states, but not present ones, so if the past doesn't exist, then there are no states unless one posits counterfactual definiteness, and doing that requires one to discard locality, that cause and effect cannot lie outside each other's light cones, or in other words, faster than light causation. The latter principle is something I'm more reluctant to abandon.

Finally, my answer below is expressed in B-series terms. I would not agree to A-series wording of your question.

All the above said to cover my butt; in a naive 19th century classical way, yes, I acknowledge that there are states in between the asteroid hitting and the last dinosaur going extinct.

But the description does not seem to be grounded in epistemological terms, hence my not seeing the observer involvement.
Perhaps tim wood would care to elaborate. — noAxioms

"Epistemological" is too big a word for me to wrap my head around. If it matters, can you trim it a bit? But maybe it doesn't matter. Informal descriptions/accounts can be efficacious within limits; I don't cavil at that utility. But the reification of elements of those descriptions is a problem. If a cause or a relation is a thing, then what/where/when is it? And the answer is that they're in the mind of the observer as ideas and nowhere else This isn't to deny any aspect of the phenomenon itself. Nor do I deny the convenience of the fiction.

Given an effect, E, and the question, "What cause C produced E?" No one gets out a shovel and goes digging in the back yard looking for a cause. Or, "What is the relation between C and E?" similarly does not send the scientist to the relation locker to find one that fits. It is a matter of language and not being confused by it, which isn't always easy!