I understand you, Silberstein and Wharton discussed this point and concluded that RBW is, in the sense you state, retrocausal. That’s why we say RBW is retrocausal (however deflationary) in the paper. Frankly, I agree with the referee. As we state in the paper, why bother with retro-time-evolved causal stories in a block universe when the entire 4D pattern is already explained by the adynamical global constraint? The “perspectival view from within the block universe” (Price’s term) is what motivates us to tell time-evolved causal stories. But, GR simply provides a spacetime metric and stress-energy tensor on the spacetime manifold that are “self consistent” per Einstein’s eqns. In most cases, you can read off several consistent time-evolved causal stories from a GR solution. But, in some cases, the time-evolved story is left wanting (or even seemingly inconsistent, e.g., as can arise due to the relativity of simultaneity). For example, someone who wants dynamical explanation might ask, “Where did the big bang come from?” when viewing GR cosmology solutions. It’s a faux mystery that arises simply because they want a time-evolved causal story. So, in my opinion, retro-time-evolved (or even time-evolved) stories are superfluous in the context of any 4D solution, as the referee states. But, I’ll leave it to the community to decide its semantics 🙂
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.