Over at Fake Barn Country they have a good discussion about backwards causality. Most physicists are familiar with backwards causality because we have de facto backwards causality occuring in the planck time. Of course because it occurs at such small time scales these are often considered mere mathematical artifacts. There are some interpretations of quantum mechanics such as the transactional interpretation which explicitly require backwards causality. Having said that though I think many, if not most, physicists are leery to embrace backwards causality simply because of Ockham's Razor. It seems introducing something we don't find in an obvious form in nature. Physicists are very loath to do that.
My own problem with backwards causality is more my same problem with forward causality. I think that the very notion of causality as usually taken for granted is problematic. It seems very hard to come up with a version of it that seems persuasive in discussing modern physics. (Others clearly disagree, I should add)
"I think that the very notion of causality as usually taken for granted is problematic. It seems very hard to come up with a version of it that seems persuasive in discussing modern physics. (Others clearly disagree, I should add)"
I agree completely, and would only add that it's not only modern physics-- it's hard to come up with a version of it that seems persuasive in discussing anything non-trivial.
Are you familiar with any of the Buddhist ideas around "mutual causality" (or "dependent co-arising", or "paticca samuppada")? Joanna Macy wrote a nice book about it a while back.
One of my favorite anti-causality quotes is from Russell. Not that I agree with Russell on most things. But it's still a great quote.
The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (Russell, "On the Notion of Cause")
Of course Russell was really just arguing against old styled causal laws which he replaced with causal functions. I think he is onto something there, even if I might not agree with the details. The basic idea is the old adage in science, "correlation is not causation." The question then is, given the adage, whether we ought believe in causation. Of course scientists, especially physicists, still talk of causality. However it usually involves certain conjectures about time that may or may not be true.
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