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The first step is to argue that the Mentaculus implies a branching tree structure toward the future on the macrolevel, according to which the universe’s macrostate at a time is compatible with many more different macro-evolutions toward the future than macro-evolutions toward the past. In fact, since, according to Noether’s First Theorem, there is a conservation law associated with each continuous symmetry property of a system, there seems to be a clear formal route for locating causal claims within physics. Common-cause reasoning not only is a core function of causal representations in commonsense contexts but also is a central and ineliminable inference pattern in physics. By deriving its inspiration from physics, where conservation laws play a central role, conserved quantity accounts promise to be able to meet the neo-Machian and neo-Russellian challenges. Some authors have challenged premise 5 of the time-asymmetry challenge, according to which only those features that can be grounded in physical laws can play a proper role in physics. 1. If causal notions play a legitimate role in physics, they must do so as part of an acceptable "principle of causality". As we have seen, Pearl’s and Woodward’s accounts of causation emphasize two features as characteristic functions of causal notions.

Pearl (2000) also argues that any account of causation that closely links causal notions and the notion of interventions cannot be applied in the context of a truly fundamental physics that includes models of the universe as a whole. While some authors suggest that time-asymmetric causal relations might be strictly incompatible with time-reversal invariant dynamical laws, 6 hole billiard table price it is more promising to try and argue that adding time-asymmetric causal relations to physics cannot be justified within physics. Consequently, on this view, causal relations are metaphysically not on a par with nomic relations: while physical laws are nomologically necessary, causal relations are contingent, since the asymmetry between initial and final conditions, from which causal relations are derived, is merely a de facto, nomologically contingent asymmetry. 3. Physical laws that have the same character in both temporal directions cannot ground time-asymmetric properties or relations. Both representations are mathematically equivalent representations of one and the same state of the system. Structural model accounts propose mathematically rigorous and precise representations of causal structures. From this observation the time asymmetry challenge concludes that nothing in the mathematical formalism can legitimately distinguish between the different representations to single out one representation as the correct causal representation.

It is this latter claim that an appeal to initial conditions and their role in underwriting common cause reasoning is meant to challenge. Within the descriptive project the argument would aim to show that a certain feature of our common-sense notion of cause does not allow this notion to at least some theoretical frameworks in physics. While conserved quantity accounts offer an analysis of the notion of being causally related, they do not, on their own, provide a distinction between cause and effect. Some authors, however, have argued that the explanatory direction is reversed and that the causal asymmetry accounts for the asymmetry between prevailing initial and final conditions. Thus, probabilistic accounts that deny a fundamental causal asymmetry need to be careful to avoid probabilistic arguments for the asymmetry ultimately driven by causal intuitions and presumably have to be content with positing the initial randomness assumption as a fundamental de facto asymmetry that cannot be further justified. If we wanted to derive the black hole event within General Relativity from knowledge of the data on a complete final value surface, we would have to know the precise state of the universe in a sphere with a diameter of many, many light-years-something that is obviously impossible for us to know.

If there is an event C occurring in past that screens off A from B, but there is no screening-off event in the future of A and B, then this constitutes an open fork. There is also an active debate in the literature on how the causal and thermodynamic asymmetries relate to various epistemic asymmetries, such as an asymmetry of records or an asymmetry concerning our epistemic access to the past and to the future. The philosophical literature on causal explanation in general and in physics, more specifically, has developed largely independently of, and without engaging with, philosophical discussions in the neo-Russellian tradition questioning the legitimacy of causal concepts in physics (with Woodward’s work being a notable exception). Here the question concerning interventions in fundamental physics makes contact with another issue on which there is an active debate: the question on appropriate constraints on allowable interventions and the question to what extent interventions need to be physically or conceptually possible. Locality constraints come under pressure in quantum mechanics (see section 7 below). Since there is experimental evidence for CP-violations, we should conclude that quantum theories violate time-reversal invariance. Implicit in this causal inference is the assumption that there was no "carefully calibrated" gravitational wave coming in from past infinity, converging on the location of the postulated black-hole event, and then re-diverging-thereby mimicking a wave produced by two colliding black holes.