Bottomless well

 The thing to do when thinking about infinity is to avoid that word and use instead "endless."  It helps avoid the mistake of thinking of infinity as a number -- some place in the very, very distant past -- and realize that if time is endless then there cannot be a "now."   You can climb out of a well that has a bottom, but you cannot climb out of a well that has no bottom.

If time had a beginning, then talking about "before" that beginning is nonsense.  There was no existence "before," no "eternity" as there was no time to have an eternity.  There was also no causation: if something happened -- anything might happen -- that would be the beginning of time and after that you can insist on cause and effect (although I don't think causation is quite as real as we think it is, for this issue it doesn't matter).

There’s a lot in what you’re saying that lines up with how philosophers and physicists actually try to deflate the intuitive traps around “infinity” and “beginning.”

Your substitution of “endless” for “infinite” is doing real conceptual work. “Infinity” almost automatically gets reified in the mind—turned into a kind of far-away number or location on a line. “Endless” pushes it back toward process: no terminating boundary, no final element, no “last step you’ll eventually reach.” That shift alone avoids a bunch of category errors.

The part about time and “now” is especially interesting. In an endless time, there is no privileged endpoint, so “now” can’t be anchored as a final reference point or as something approaching an ultimate boundary. But I’d push back slightly on the stronger implication that “there cannot be a now.” What physics and philosophy usually land on instead is more subtle: there is no absolute present that stands outside time, but there are still local “nows”—indexical present moments embedded in a temporal sequence. So “now” survives, but only as a perspective inside the system, not as a global feature of it.

Your well metaphor is good intuition, but it has a twist worth noticing. A bottomless well is still a spatial structure you can, in principle, define from within: you can say “I am at depth n,” even if there is no final n. Time works similarly in most physical theories: even if it is past-eternal or future-endless, each moment is still locally well-defined. The absence of a bottom doesn’t destroy the validity of positions; it just removes a terminal reference point.

On the “before the beginning is nonsense” point, you’re very close to a standard move in cosmology and philosophy of time. In models like the classical Big Bang description (not necessarily the full quantum-gravity story), “before” is undefined in the same way “north of the North Pole” is undefined. It’s not that there is a hidden region called “before,” but that the coordinate system stops being applicable.

Where I’d gently press is your conclusion about causation. It’s tempting to say that if time has a boundary, causation only “switches on” after it—but most physicists would be cautious here. Causation, at least in physics, is usually defined within time (often via entropy gradients or relativistic light-cone structure). If time itself begins, then “causation starts” isn’t quite well-formed; it’s more that the framework in which causation is defined only applies after that boundary. Saying “something might have happened that starts time” risks sneaking in a “before” again, just in disguise.

So a more austere version of your view would be: if time is finite toward the past, the concept of “earlier than the first moment” fails; and if time is endless, the concept of a first moment fails. In both cases, “now” remains local, not absolute; and causation remains a structure inside time, not something that stands outside it.

One question your framing naturally raises: are you thinking of “endless time” as literally unbounded in both directions, or more as “no first moment but still a directionality”? Those two lead to very different pictures of what “now” and causation are doing.

Yes, and what's striking is that in your description there is no explicit causation at all.

You have:

    A state.

    Rules.

    A transition to a new state.

    Repetition.

The game evolves.

A player watching it will almost immediately start speaking in causal language. They will say, "That piece moved because this happened," or "The collision caused the score to increase." But from the standpoint of the game's actual operation, there may be nothing except state transitions according to rules.

Take something like Conway's Game of Life. A pattern appears, moves, collides, and disappears. One can tell elaborate stories about causes and effects. Yet underneath, each cell simply updates according to a rule based on neighboring cells. There is no extra ingredient called causation.

That is why some philosophers and physicists suspect that causation may not belong to the fundamental ontology of the universe. What is fundamental may be something closer to:

"Given state S, the next state is selected according to rule R."

The notion that one event causes another could then be a human-level summary of these transitions.

Your game analogy becomes particularly interesting when applied to the beginning of time. Suppose the game starts at turn 1.

A player inside the game might ask, "What caused turn 1?"

But the game's rules only describe transitions from one turn to the next. They do not describe a transition from "no game" to "turn 1."

In that sense, asking for the cause of turn 1 may be asking the rules to explain something outside the domain in which they operate.

Now, someone could still ask why those particular rules exist, or why there is a game at all. But that is a different question from asking what caused the first move.

I suspect part of what bothers you about causation is that we often smuggle in more than is actually present. We say "A caused B" as though there were a metaphysical push connecting them. Yet in your game, all we really have is a lawful sequence:

State → State → State → State

The sequence is perfectly intelligible without an additional causal glue.

The challenge, of course, is that our own consciousness seems to inhabit the sequence. We do not merely observe state transitions; we experience memory, anticipation, choice, and agency. Those experiences strongly encourage causal thinking. Whether causation is fundamental or merely a convenient description of regular transitions remains one of the deepest open questions in both philosophy and physics.

Your game example is a good illustration of why many people, beginning with Hume, have doubted that we ever observe causation itself. We observe one state followed by another according to regular patterns. The "causal connection" may be something we infer rather than something that is literally present in the machinery.

Yea, that's the game.  Here you have simple rules and only a few elements.  Given probabilistic rules and an arbitrary number of elements, voilà, the universe.

Yes, that's a very natural line of thought.

In your game, there is no need for causation, purpose, destiny, or even time in the rich human sense. There is simply a sequence of states related by rules. Make the rules probabilistic instead of deterministic, increase the number of interacting elements beyond comprehension, and you can imagine a universe emerging whose large-scale behavior appears vastly more complicated than its underlying machinery.

What's appealing about this picture is its economy. You don't need an extra "causal force" pushing events along. You don't need a cosmic planner. You don't even need a distinction between possible and actual outcomes beyond what is encoded in the rules themselves. The universe simply updates.

Then causation becomes something like a useful compression algorithm used by minds embedded within the process. We say, "The lightning caused the fire," because that summarizes an immense number of microscopic state transitions in a way that is useful for prediction and survival.

In fact, much of science works that way. We often discover that concepts we once thought fundamental are emergent. Temperature emerges from molecular motion. Solidity emerges from electromagnetic interactions and quantum effects. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules, yet there is no individual "whirlpool molecule." One can imagine causation joining that list.

Where I think your view becomes philosophically interesting is at the beginning. If the universe is fundamentally a rule-governed state-transition system, then the question "What caused the universe?" may be analogous to asking "What move caused the first move of the game?" The question assumes the applicability of a concept that only exists within the game's operation.

Of course, one can still ask why there are rules at all, or why these rules rather than others. Your framework does not answer that. But it does suggest that the demand for a prior cause may be misplaced.

What strikes me is how close this comes to a kind of minimalist metaphysics. Instead of:

    Things happen because causes make them happen.

you are leaning toward:

    There are states and transition rules. What we call causes are recurring patterns within those transitions.

That view has a certain kinship with both Hume's skepticism about causation and modern physics' emphasis on mathematical evolution laws. It is also compatible with your earlier preference for a beginning over an endless past. A state-transition system can simply have an initial state. It does not need a preceding state to generate it, because "preceding" only becomes meaningful once the sequence exists.

The place where I would hesitate is the jump from "this is a coherent picture" to "therefore this is what reality is." History is full of elegant metaphysical pictures that later ran into trouble. The block universe is elegant. Presentism is elegant. Computational universes are elegant. Nature has a habit of being stranger than our cleanest abstractions.

Still, if I had to summarize the intuition you've been developing over this conversation, it would be something like:

    Reality is a succession of present states. The succession begins. The transitions are governed by probabilistic rules. Causation is the name we give to stable patterns that emerge when unimaginably many such transitions are viewed from inside the system.

That's a surprisingly coherent position. Whether it's true is another matter, but the pieces fit together better than many philosophical systems do.

What we know is existence.  We infer what it might be from inside, from how it behaves, so time will tell unless we encounter barriers we cannot cross.

That strikes me as a very modest and, in a sense, scientific position.

The one thing we cannot coherently doubt is that there is something rather than nothing. Whether one starts with consciousness, experience, existence, phenomena, or reality, there is a fact to be explained. Everything else is inference.

We then find patterns in that existence and construct models. Some models are extraordinarily successful. Atoms, spacetime, evolution, quantum fields, genes, black holes—none of these are things we directly encounter in ordinary experience. They are theoretical structures inferred from behavior.

The interesting thing is that the history of science is full of cases where the model turned out not to be what people imagined. Heat is not a fluid. The Sun does not orbit the Earth. Species are not fixed kinds. Space and time are not what Newton thought. Yet each earlier model captured something real about the behavior being observed.

That makes me sympathetic to your caution about causation, time, and even existence itself. We know the behavior. We are much less certain about the underlying ontology.

Your phrase "from inside" is important. We are not observers standing outside the universe examining it as a whole. We are processes occurring within it, trying to infer its nature from local evidence. In that respect, we're rather like characters in your game attempting to deduce the rules from the succession of states they experience.

The possibility of barriers is what makes the matter genuinely philosophical. There may be truths that are merely undiscovered. There may also be truths that are undiscoverable from within the system.

For example, if there were multiple universes with different fundamental rules but no possible interaction between them, then the inhabitants of one universe might never obtain evidence of the others. Likewise, if the origin of the universe lies beyond any observational horizon, there may be aspects of it that remain forever inaccessible.

That does not mean speculation is worthless. It means we should keep a distinction between what we know, what we infer, and what we imagine.

What I find appealing in your approach is that it starts from the least controversial point and builds outward:

    Existence is given.

    Patterns in existence are observed.

    Models are inferred from those patterns.

    The models remain tentative.

That is a surprisingly old tradition, running from skeptical philosophers through modern science. It avoids both dogmatic certainty and complete nihilism.

And there is a nice irony in your last sentence. You said, "time will tell unless we encounter barriers we cannot cross."

If your suspicions about time turn out to be right, then "time" itself may simply be the name we give to the unfolding of those successive states from which all our knowledge is drawn. In that case, time does not merely tell us about reality—it is the very medium through which any telling can occur at all.