Causality without time makes no sense. Even if you don't have a ticking clock, you can define "time" with a counter and a Lamport clock. Any time you have state, you have time. A timeless universe is hard to grasp.
Time is another dimension that we 'perceive'. Hence for our frame of reference, which is bound by time, asking what is outside this frame of reference makes no sense. But frames of references are relative and meant to be broken.
Similarly it is hard to imagine any object that can be purely 2D in nature, because we are biased to perceive the world in 3D. So we think that every object has to be 3D, even the smallest organism, or even atoms. But a 'fake' example of 2D is a tv screen. It gives us an example to imagine 2D. The point I am trying to make is that time is just our perception. To say causality is always tied to time is a bias created by viewing the universe through a 'time' tinted/colored glass.
The point of singularity where gravity is so high that time comes to stand still, but is still present - this is a possibility.
So maybe time just pauses between big bangs and flows at lower density and lower gravitational fields
Because we are limited by our perceptions of time (and causality as well) doesn't mean we shouldn't wonder what could have been before the start of the universe. Maybe time started when universe started, or maybe time always existed and was super slow or literally paused at singularity - the gravity is so high (way more than the gravity of a super massive black hole) that time had paused. So maybe there was something before the big bang and I don't think 'talking about that makes no sense' should stop us from talking about it :)
I am also confused a tad about the point I wanted to make though, lol. Maybe causality and time is perceived differently in higher or other dimensions that we do not perceive as of now in our human level of evolution. So the assumption of causality exists only due to time being present could be something relative to our perceptions and not true
Julian Barbour has what I consider to be a pretty well-reasoned notion a timeless universe composed of a large number of mathematical configuration spaces he calls "nows" -- i.e., it contains many states, but no objective notion of time -- outlined in his pop-sci book "The End of Time" [1999] and his website http://platonia.com/
p.s. for the record, Barbour is no clown, but a serious cat -- he is also the guy that wrote "Absolute or Relative Motion / the Discovery of Dynamics" which is a bedrock treatise on Machian ideas in physics
Time flows in a similar way throughout the universe. It might be slowed down by gravity here and there but it's a similar effect everywhere. With causality but not time, there would be a partial ordering of events that happened at a particular location, but no definite way to connect it to events that happened elsewhere using relativity like we're used to now.
Time without causality makes no sense. Time is an identification that entities move and change. The entities themselves cause all actions. The nature of those actions is determined by the nature of the entities.
