If time itself can emerge or be reshaped, who or what chooses the version of causality we experience?

Dissenting frameworks argue that causality is selected or shaped by more than impersonal fundamental equations. Possibilities include collective agency selecting a shared history, consciousness contributing causal structure, an objectively real passage of time, or a deeper network whose possible orderings generate spacetime. These proposals vary greatly in formal development and evidential support, but they directly address the question of why one causal order becomes experientially authoritative.

• One proposal treats temporal irreversibility as emerging from collective decision-making, with shared actuality selected from multiple possible futures.
• An integrated-information approach argues that consciousness and cause-and-effect power must be connected through a temporally adequate physical framework.
• Presentist and becoming-centered arguments reject the idea that temporal passage is merely a psychological projection of a tenseless block.
• A relational framework proposes that spacetime emerges from networks of relations and that physical dynamics weights multiple possible causal orderings.
• Other metaphysical models place temporal orientation in the global structure of possible spacetimes rather than in fundamental laws alone.

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