Causality Without Time

Causality is widely assumed to require temporal priority: causes come earlier than their effects. This paper challenges that assumption. I argue that directional dependence can be understood without invoking time, and that temporal ordering is not a primitive of causal structure but a representational artifact of systems capable of internalizing asymmetry. Using a qualitative version of the Motion–Difference ontology, the paper reconstructs causal direction from non-temporal primitives: motion (plurality of relational configurations), difference (asymmetry enabling distinguishability), wake/trace (structural persistence across modal alternatives), and constraint (modal narrowing). From these, an Asymmetric Constraint Thesis is developed: whenever the conditions required for one configuration incorporate those required for another, but not conversely, an objective, non-temporal asymmetry of dependence obtains. This asymmetry captures the essential features of causation without requiring temporal succession. The account distinguishes causal dependence from correlation, shows how time appears as an internal representational scheme (“membrane time”) rather than an ontological dimension, and explains why intervention, explanation, and prediction do not fundamentally rely on temporal primitives. The resulting framework is compared with Barbour’s timeless dynamics, Rovelli’s relationalism, causal set theory, and entropy-based arrows of time, emphasizing that the proposal neither reconstructs dynamics nor postulates an alternative temporal parameter but clarifies the metaphysical basis of directionality itself. The positive contribution is deliberately modest: a reframing of causal asymmetry that reveals how little work temporal priority performs in existing accounts.