After reading the 7th page of Veiled Reality (D’Espagnat), I had to bring the book down to piece my shattered conceptions together. The discovery? That causality may be an idea. And when I say idea I mean it in an antiquated philosophical sense: not in any way absolute and just a way for humans to make sense of the world.

This means that my, I just discovered, rather naive experiment has just fallen into pieces. It’s because that wonderfully stupid experiment requires the knowledge of how photons bounce, reach to our eyes and how they are finally interpreted to produce phenomena. However, this implies causality. i.e., something caused the photons to bounce, and something caused the phenomena of seeing. But this causality may in itself be human invention and hence, and could not be used as a tool to investigate the physics beyond.

I wonder why I did not see that. I have already long accepted the ideality of time i.e., there may be no such thing as “then and now” in the ultimate sense. But one of the functions of time is allowing causality, so time is required in causality. Since time is an idea then causality should be too.

But I guess I should not be so sad (actually, I am fascinated): after including causality and time in the map, I may find a way to eradicate them, in a yet another ridiculous thought experiment.