PROLOGUE
When I published Naive Causal Modeling in 1996, I thought its most significant contribution was its argument for a kind of temporal dynamism in which what is real for observers varies with time. My stance in this regard represented an intermediate position between tensed and tenseless theories of time. My plea for an ontological distinction between (1) an underlying reality (Real-World) for which backward-causal events occur at “corners,” and (2) a smoothly continuous version of reality (Observer-World) shared by observers, was based upon what I regarded as a repair to existing theories of causation and counterfactuals. That repair was motivated by lengthy consideration of causation in reverse time, and was facilitated by treating cause and effect not as distinct events, but as truth value transitions for different attributes pertinent to a single event. Underpinning the analysis was the premise that causation is most aptly analyzed in terms of discrete time and space.
Unfortunately, in broadcast news parlance, I buried the lead. That is, I placed the discussion of nontraditional backward causation in Naive Causal Modeling’s Chapter 10, titled “Toward Backward Causation and Time Reversal Models.” Many readers could not get past the first nine chapters, laden with AI jargon, in order to reach Chapter 10’s excursion into the philosophy of time.
Accordingly, I have decided to republish my argument for dynamic time as this treatise. Herein, I demonstrate that logical fallacies dominate the philosophical literature on (1) causation under reverse time and (2) backward causation. Proceeding from first principles, I use an intuitive style of presentation accessible to a wide audience. I show that backward causation is ubiquitous in reverse time provided it manifests itself in a dynamic manner profoundly different from standard descriptions. The new formulation of backward causation (1) withstands standard bilking paradoxes and (2) accounts for the phenomenon that, in forward time, causes later than their effects virtually defy detection.
Clearly, in undertaking a fresh analysis of backward causation, I was utterly unmotivated by a desire to retrofit theory to quantum peculiarity. Nevertheless, when I attempted to apply revisionist backward causation to the celebrated quantum mechanical EPR problem, I found that it arguably rendered intuitively plausible the quantitative results predicted by quantum mechanics. At the same time, it eliminated the need to contemplate instantaneous action at a distance. Moreover, a second application seemed to explain the pattern of concentric rings in electron diffraction experiments in such manner as to suggest that backward causation, properly analyzed, is central to conceptual resolution of wave/particle duality.
In closing, I wish to alert the reader to two novel features of Dynamic Backward Causation: (1) Occasional use is made of the notion, defended in Naive Causal Modeling, that chains of counterfactual necessity can occur interior to an occupied event of spacetime. This presumes that extent is not implicit in the concept of causal propagation. (2) The word “epoch” is used in the traditional sense of “time instant,” rather than in the more modern sense of “time interval.”