Something I've been most interested in lately is presentism, the philosophical theory that states that only the present exists, and that the past and future are therefore unreal. The reasons are purely logical, neither the past nor the future can exist, because the word "exist" refers to the present time, and everything that exists does so now, otherwise, we say that it existed or that it will exist, but not that exists. If we said that the past exists, we would be affirming that it exists in the present, which would be contradictory. How could the “past” be if it exists in the present? No, the past existed but does not exist, the only thing that exists is the present.
Anyway, I was thinking about the principle of causality, the one that states that every event has a cause and an effect, and the idea of presentism came to my mind making me wonder if the world we live in really is a succession of causes and effects. What made me doubt was the fact that causes must always precede the effect, which means that the causes are always in a past time in correlation to the effect, which is impossible if we start from the basis that only the present exists. How can causes be in the past if the past does not exist? If we follow the idea of causality to the letter, we will come to believe that the whole of the present is as it is, because something in the past made it so, that is, that the past, which does not have to exist, is the cause of the present, which is impossible, because how something that does not exist is going to be the cause of what exists?
This makes me completely rethink the idea of causality and makes me think that, as it is not possible for the cause to precede the effect, because the past does not exist, nor can it follow it, because then it would not be a cause, necessarily the cause must be contemporary with the effect. Thus, everything that is in a certain way is so because something in the present is causing it to be so. Take the example of a child who throws a ball into the air, in the classical idea of causality, the cause why the ball is in the air is because the child threw it (in the past), but if we see it under the lens of a presentist causality, we will see that the ball is not in the air because the child threw it, but because the forces that push it upwards are greater than those that push it towards the other directions, in this case the cause is in the present, when the force that pushes it up decreases the ball will fall because it will no longer have reason or cause to be up.
All the world is as it is because something in the present is causing it to be so, because there is a will that keeps things as they are, we should not go to the past to find the causes of the present, because here are all the causes that are making the world the way it is.
This new way of looking at causality entirely in the present is also a perfectly grounded refutation of determinism, the theory according to which the past has already determined the present and the future. Because all physical phenomena are also due to other physical causes in the present, there is no need to draw on the past to explain the present. In the same way, all mental activity occurs in complete freedom because it is not caused by the past, and although on some occasions it may seem that we are a product of the past, that is only an illusion created because we cling to the past from the present, not because the past has effects on us.
But those are just my thoughts about how causality works in the world we live in, feel free to add your own thoughts if you want.
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