Some questions on acausality and causality manipulation resistance

[DontTalk]

The question I mainly have is which feats are necessary to be acausal and what can, if this feats are present, actually be concluded for the characters?


Is having resistance to causality manipulation being acasual?

Would resistance to causality manipulation then imply that you won't die from having your past self killed?


If you are not damaged by your past self being killed, would that be acausal?

If so would that mean that all 2-C characters that destroyed their own original timeline to gain that rank are acausal (after all they would have destroyed any cause for their own existance to that point and, in theory, would for that moment also have destroyed all their future effects)?

Would acausality with the feat of being able to survive your past self being killed imply resistance to causality manipulation? (if that feat is enough)


I just wonder if one can logically connect such cases or if one needs to have resistance to the exact case one wants to survive for such things.

 

[Hectictude]

Hope it's alright if I bump this.

 

[Antvasima]

I personally think that your examples seem to make sense, but it may be best to ask DarkLK.

 

[PROTOMAN_ZERO64]

Alright, allow me to explain how being acausal works. (At least from what I've learned looking through this wiki, powerlisting, and several sites which talk about acausality)


The thing about acausality is that just being immune to causality manipulation (which is known as Causality Immunity: which only prevents your own causality from being manipulated from outside sources) doesn't necessitate one being acausal, you'd just have Causality Immunity (though, it may be possible for a high tier of causality maipulation to simply bypass causality immunity).


Acausality is a state of being in which someone is existentially outside of the system of causality, which makes Causality Immunity a side-bonus of acausality as the person in question exists outside of causality and can't be affected by any changes. The field of acuasality is primarily scientific, so you don't see much of it officially stated in most fiction works. However, a user of acausality that is officially stated as such would be an entity known as the Darkness from the FPS Destiny.


Again, acausality is a difficult field to describe, it's highly scientific, and with the fictional ability that is causality manipulation, describing how the two work against each other is difficult, as anyone with significant causality manipulaton abilities can make themselves acausal at will.


On the matter of time travel and being able to be immune to someone killing you in the past. That would be called Temporal Protection, and it is the ability to be immune to alterations in the time stream. So if someone were to time travel back in time and kill you, you would be relatively unaffected by this. This allows people like Asriel to erase their own timelines and survive such. Again, having this ability doesn't necessitate acausality, but this ability is another side affect of being acausal. Hell, one can be immune to having their own self killed in the past by flat out existing out of time.


As being acausal (as opposed to simply having causality immunity) is essentially denying causality, which somewhat denies reality itself, a being such as the Darkness possesses several paradoxical and unnatural abilities that let it and its followers manipulate reality to a significant degree, which range from being able to create a plane of existence that's impossible to erase, defy the concept of death, and recreate beings both physical and mentally (the Taken) to serve itself and grant them (the Taken) abilities that are described as "physically illegal".

 

[PROTOMAN_ZERO64]

If you guys have any disputes or whatnot, I'm happy to hear them. Causality is one of the more complex fields. And considering the fact that physics tends to vary from verse to verse, its relation ship with fiction is always interesting to talk about.

 

[Master_Xar]

What about certain verses that don't follow singular timeline theory, like DBZ you can be killed in the past, but that will only create another timeline and will do nothing to the character the timeline follows in a sense their cause and effect in terms of timelines are different, or Undertale for example follows this too, but is most likely a flow of their power rather than how their verse's timeline theory actually works.

 

[Andykhang]

A bit off-topic, but would someone that ignored space-time itself would have acausality too?

 

[Andykhang]

What about certain verses that don't follow singular timeline theory, like DBZ you can be killed in the past, but that will only create another timeline and will do nothing to the character the timeline follows in a sense their cause and effect in terms of timelines are different, or Undertale for example follows this too, but is most likely a flow of their power rather than how their verse's timeline theory actually works.

In that case, there would be no Paradox, since it could be easily explain as going through a different flow. The problem of acausality would be many more time complicate (if a person achieve acausality, would a nearly infinite number of them have it? Or if it isn't, is his timeline seperate from the whole, if so how?...)

 

[PROTOMAN_ZERO64]

What about certain verses that don't follow singular timeline theory, like DBZ you can be killed in the past, but that will only create another timeline and will do nothing to the character the timeline follows in a sense their cause and effect in terms of timelines are different, or Undertale for example follows this too, but is most likely a flow of their power rather than how their verse's timeline theory actually works.

In that case, there would be no paradox, since it could be easily explain as going through a different flow of time. The problem of acausality would be many more times complicated (if a person achieves acausality, would a nearly infinite number of them have it? Or if it isn't, is his/her timeline seperate from the whole, if so how?...)

Which is why acausality is incredibly complicated when you talk about multiple timelines. If someone's timeline is destroyed/erased and they're still alive, whether they tank it or are currently residing in an alternate timeline, do they have the mostly scientific/quantum physics-based ability of acausality, or do they have the primarily fictional ability of Temporal Protection? Or is it just a fictional story being a fictional and not really caring about how real world physics work? (For example, in Men in Black 3, Agent J did not have his memory altered after someone had changed the past by killing somone, causing events to be altered, and everyone forgetting that that person had originally still lived, that someone being Agent K. This counts as an alteration to J's own time flow just as much as killing Agent J himself would, so would that make J acausal, or is fiction just pulling plot bullshit?)


In a singular timeline verse, getting killed in the past and surviving would be possible with either acausality or temporal protection, however, with multiple timelines, fictional works either don't care to talk about it, or just fiction their way out. For example, in Dragon Ball: Xenoverse, Beerus and Whis were capable of traveling to Toki Toki World, a place that connects to the countless timelines of Universe 7. If the Beerus that we encountered had his timeline destroyed, would he be acausal? And if he somehow exists out of the timelines the main story takes place, what's with the Beeruses from the side quests' timelines that anyone is capable of battling? Where do beings like the Supreme Kai of Time or Demigra, who don't originate from any of the game's timelines come in? It's shown that if one was killed in the past, like how Future Trunks was, they'd be aware and would start fading out of space-time after a certain point, or this at least applies to the timeline-traveling Time Patrollers should someone kill them in their respective timelines. (While the game isn't canon, I'm talking about it when concerning the specific world of Dragon Ball Xenoverse)


Now in the matter of how acausality affects other timeline counterparts, that's incredibly hard to tell. But it's best to just say that acausality should really only apply to one's self and their timeline counterparts that have achieved acausality. Honestly, I wouldn't know. Acausality is just complicated in that way.


Tl;dr: acausality is complicated as ****

 

[Andykhang]

Can I ask again: Is someone ignoring space-time have acausality?

 

[PROTOMAN_ZERO64]

Can I ask again: Is someone ignoring space-time have acausality?

Reading your question I'm not sure if you meant someone ignoring space-time manipulation or someone just existing outside of space-time. For the former, ignoring space-time manipulation wouldn't be acausality (that would just be someone being immune to space-time manipulation), however, for the latter, it's a bit convoluted:


The problem with that is that one has to consider the fact that most fictional works rarely care about quantum physics (several works show beings surpassing the speed of light by a ridiculously large amount, a feat that is physically impossible), and probably don't go into the specifics of causality. Not to mention, you must answer the question of whether or not space and time have a "cause" and determine how causality is tied to space-time. If space and time have a cause and space-time is the result of causality, then whether or not you exist in or out of it is irrelevant, and wouldn't grant you acuasality either way. If space and time doesn't have a cause, and causality is a byproduct of space-time, then existing outside of space-time can grant acausality.

 

[Phoenix821]

So does acasuality make you immune to time altering effects or is that something different?

 

[PROTOMAN_ZERO64]

So does acasuality make you immune to time altering effects or is that something different?

Acausality would basically mean that one is without cause, essentially having no beginning or end. Acausality is one of the few abilities that would allow one to be immune to time altering effects, as not much can truly "effect" them due to their existence outside of cause and effect. There are some other abilities that can prevent time altering effects: stronger time manipulators, temporal protection, certain forms of time travel, existing outside of time completely (temporal lock/chronolock). So doing such a feat isn't necessarily exclusive to acausality.

 

[Phoenix821]

I see so what can overcome acasuality?

 

[Andykhang]

Any others force that isn't affected by time, really. Reality Warping is a good example.

Edit: Though that still leave acausality not related to time...