[__MatrixMan__]

I wasn't trying to argue against free will or anything like that (I'm a compatibilist about that debate). I was just trying to point out that it's obvious that prior conditions are relevant. Prior decisions also. But free or not, there's nowhere to come from but the past.

It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of:

> You have to balk when anyone says....

and

> You have to disbelieve anyone who says...

And I was hoping to establish that we in this thread do in fact agree that causation works in one direction only. It would seem I failed.

[dumbo-octopus]

We do not agree, direction of causation is a matter of personal interpretation. And I'm not the only one who believes a reversal of order could be justified, Scott Aaronson's essay The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine^ goes into far more detail on the matter than I could hope to here. It's long but thorough - I highly recommend it if you have the time.

To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)

^ https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159