Hume defines in the following terms the characteristics
of Contiguity:
"Contiguity in time and place is therefore a
requisite circumstance to the operation of all causes...Priority in time
is...another requisite circumstance in every case....[A] third circumstance
[is] that of constant conjunction betwixt the cause and the effect. Every
object like the cause produces always some object like the effect. Beyond these
three circumstances of contiguity, priority, and constant conjunction I can discover
nothing in this cause."
Hume's definition includes three conditions for being a
cause: temporal priority, spatio-temporal contiguity, and a nomological
relation ("every object like the cause produces always some object like
the effect".)
Of course, if this is so, (and it is so,) the existence
of the world cannot be real out of the lineal, progressive contiguity of
causality, cause is before effect, and this effect is becomes cause of a new
and future event. This is causality. If we try to go back with this process, we
find that the effect is the cause and the cause effect. For example, hands
clapping produce sound but if we invert this process, going back in time, is
the sound which produces the hands clapping, and this is obviously absurd. The
laugh of a child would produce the child..!
Obviously it’s impossible to go back in time, simply
because there is no such thing as going back in time. Time is contiguity, and
contiguity is causality. If there is not a previous child, there is no
laughing.
If there are no previous hands clapping there is no
sound. We can call this process the “temporal priority”.
Now, time is universal. The lapse of an hour here in USA is also the lapse of an hour in any other
place of our world. Logically, if one individual goes back in time, the whole
world also goes back, because there is no such thing as a particular,
individual, local time. Temporal contiguity is destroyed and the real world
ceases to exist. Collapses in an
impossible chaos where each effect produces the cause. Laughs create children
laughing and sounds of clapping hands create the clapping hands. Sons give
birth to their own mothers.
Consequently, time only exist consecutively. Time “moves”
forward. It is impossible to think in backward time, simply because there is no
such thing. Nobody can jump back in a time that doesn’t exist.
