In our everyday notion of causality, causes have to precede effects. There's a reason why that is true. We think we have causal influence over events in the future but not those in the past. This kind of distinction wouldn't be possible at the level of fundamental physics. And therefore we have to explain why. Jimmy somers: i've recently revisited serril's chinese room thought experiment and it's much more interest to me now i know about the universality of computation. But i'm still not sure what the correct response to the chinese room is. If i might ask, what's your best guess at what's going on?