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Scottbert comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong
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Koan 3:
Does the idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrain experience? Can you coherently say how reality might look, if our universe did not have the kind of structure that appears in a causal model?
I suppose I would say that reality would look as if things happened with no observable pattern related to the things that happen before them, but looking at things requires a long causal chain between photons being emitted and signals in my brain. Supposing I happened to somehow flash into existence for an instant in a noncausal world, or that causality suddenly failed, I would not expect to be able to experience anything past that point since my experiences depend on so many causal processes.
An acausal world would be a world where there is experience (some kind of 'reality') but without the possibility of contradiction. It is like a dream, where what you experience is a story and that story can be written over, and can shift, at any moment, without contradiction. So at one moment you see a cup, and then the next moment, you didn't see a cup. It's not that the cup changed or that you were mistaken, it's just that at first your experience was "seeing a cup" and then at the next moment your experience was, "I wasn't there to see that cup". The experiences both happened: You saw it. And you weren't there and didn't see it. It's a string of happenings connected by the word 'and' : I saw a cup and I didn't see a cup and I was there and I wasn't hungry and the grape hurt.
This isn't an original idea, I realize now. I've read of a place like this in at least a couple science fiction stories.