This thread is pretty aids, but lets get down to business. I think my philosophy degree might come in handy for once. First, lets establish what causality actually is, and what the requirements are to say something is causally related. For this, I'm going to quote one of the textbooks from my philosophy of science class, Crane's The Mechanical Mind. There is a good amount of controversy on what exactly causality
is, but there are three uncontroversial conditions for when one thing is said to cause another. On the off chance someone wants to look these up, these can be found on pages 55-57. Also feel free to skip the quotes if you just want a loose idea, I'm just citing my sources
First, when we say that A caused B, we normally commit ourselves to the idea that if A had not occurred, B would not have occurred. When we say, for example, that someone’s smoking caused their cancer, we normally believe that if they hadn’t smoked then they would not have got cancer. Philosophers put this by saying that causation involves counterfactuals: truths about matters ‘contrary to fact’. So we could say that, if we believe that A caused B, we commit ourselves to the truth of the counterfactual claim: ‘If A had not occurred, B would not have occurred’
1) Counterfactuals: If X causes Y, then if X had not occurred, Y would not have occurred
Note, this requires
change. this will be relevant later.
The second feature of causation I shall mention is the relation between causation and the idea of explanation. To explain something is to answer a ‘Why?’-question about it. To ask ‘Why did the First World War occur?’ and ‘Explain the origins of the First World War’ is to ask pretty much the same sort of thing. One way in which ‘Why?’ questions can be answered is by citing the cause of what you want explained. So, for example, an answer to the question ‘Why did he get cancer?’ could be ‘Because he smoked’; an answer to ‘Why was there a fi re?’ could be ‘Because there was a short-circuit’.
2) Some explanatory power. If X causes Y, then X in someway explains occurrence Y. Although this element is not super important for this discussion
The final feature of causation I shall mention is the link between causation and regularities in the world. Like much in the contemporary theory of causation, the idea that cause and regularity are linked derives from Hume. Hume said that a cause is an ‘object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second’... Maybe no two events are ever exactly similar; but all the claim requires is that two events similar in some specifi c respect will cause events similar in some specific respect. We certainly expect the world to be regular. When we throw a ball into the air, we expect it to fall to the ground, usually because we are used to things like that happening. And if we were to throw a ball into the air and it didn’t come down to the ground, we would normally conclude that something else intervened – that is, some other cause stopped the ball from falling to the ground. We expect similar causes to have similar effects. Causation seems to involve an element of regularity.
(He goes on a bit more on different kinds of regularity but that's not relevant here)
3) Regularity/law: if X causes Y, then setting up some circumstance similar to X will regularly cause Y to follow.
If we take these as the qualifications for causality, I think one can safely say that time is not a necessity for things to be considered causally related, as none of the above require time (at least without begging the question of change, but we will get back to this). As stupid as this may be, let me go ahead and
get a definition for time so I can be absolutely precise in what I mean. For this, I will be using the first one (both a and b). Given this definition of time, actions that occur with no measurable time frame (I'm not counting a period of 0 seconds as measurable) or a sequence of events occurring at the same 'present' are either outside or not participating in time. A continuum of events that do not succeed one another from past through present to future (in essence, occur only in the subjectively eternal 'present') would not technically fit the definition of time, but the conditions for causality could still be met. Both counterfactuals and condition X regularly leading to condition Y are possible for actions with no delay between their causes and effects. The Master from The Three Body problem is a good example of what this looks like, the entirety of its realm has no delay between an action starting and an action ending. There is an order of events and change, but no passage of time.
If one argues that time is necessary for any sort of change, regardless of reason, then you are begging the question. Change of some kind is necessary for the first condition of being causally related. If you flip this on its head, you could also have Time but having nothing within it meet to conditions for causality, such as an empty space with no temporal beginning or end.
I also fundamentally disagree with using how causality or time reportedly works in real life to make points in this discussion. Maybe in real life if we removed time nothing would happen and there would be no change, but we do not have things with infinite speed or things outside of time in real life. Time technically does not even need to be an axis or have an extant 'physical' past or future if one uses Galilean space time for relativity. There is also no clean line between cause and effect in "objective" reality, that's a separation our minds and language make to understand the world and events, but I won't rant on about this.
tl;dr I think both Kira and DT are wrong. Now onto the definition of Type 5
first "being unable to be changed by any effect that relies on a system of causality" is redundant. You can just say that it cannot be changed by anything that relies on a system of causality
I think the biggest problem in this thread is how you could actually prove something is disconnected from any causal system. Raw feats of not being affected do not work because you just run into the NLF, so I think the best way is that feats or statements are necessary to prove that a given character has a quality that would entail type 5 acausality. IMO the best way for this is that a character needs to be beyond the concept of causality and/or change or in some sense Totally Immutable, or some in-verse equivalent. This of course still allows a character from another verse or 18 levels of reality higher to work by a higher concept of causality, as is standard for how we treat concepts on this wiki. I think it might just be best to just have type 5 acausality be this sort of conceptual separation/superiority or altered state of being since that is at least provable through feats, or at least as much as any sort of conceptual or ontological difference can be demonstrated through feats.
