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CCC comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong
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The examples don't quite work. In that steady-state universe, the appearing matter subsequently interacts and so is causally connected to the rest of the universe. You just have to trace the connections backwards, and eventually you reach a stopping point. Similarly with the false time traveler: he causally affected the world, so he's clearly part of a chain of causes and effects.
It's a separate question to ask whether everything has a causal in-connection and a causal out-connection. Both your examples, and epiphenomal theories of mind, are meaningfully about unidirectional causal links.
Hmmm. I had been trying to consider the case where some events have no causes. Now, you're pointing out - as I understand your argument, and please correct me if I am wrong - that the same event can be a cause, and therefore that it is a part of an interconnected causal universe.
This is an interesting argument. If I notice the existance of something, then that is a causal relationship; it exists, and this causes me to notice it by some means. Therefore, anything that I observe shares a causal relationship with the fact of its observation; if that is enough to consider it part of a causal universe, then I can only observe a causal universe. I cannot imagine anything that I cannot, by definition, observe in any manner (including by any deduction) constraining my experience.
On the other hand, I can (at least in certain imagined universes) observe effects without causes; I can observe the time traveller appearing for absolutely no reason.