Retrocausality and Competence

Causality runs forward in time right? Not when you are talking about some one or something competent.

Something competent anticipates what will happen and changes it's current behavior in anticipate of the affect that their actions or behaviors will have on the environment. Let's operationalize what that means and what competency is.

You may object that the future is not causing the past/present in these circumstances that it is merely what they anticipate that is causing it. But to object that these are different it to object to the thing's competence at anticipating the future it is to posit that their model of the world and how it will in fact respond to their actions/behavior is flawed. That they do not know the future and to the extent they do not know the future it is their imagined future rather than the actual future that is causing actions in the present.

You could object that things may or may not happen in the future and even under a perfect model our knowledge of it thus must be uncertain. But the same objection can be raised on our observations of the past and causal connections from the past to the present.

If what is in question is competent retro-causality is as real as forward causality.

The competence is not just a matter of anticipating the future and modeling the world though it is also a matter of performing them for the sack of their anticipated effects. Not to mentions the ability to act in the world in the first place. Intentionally directing actions towards a goals is also important for the net effect of retro-casuality to be significant, otherwise undirected the effect would just be noise.

Incompetence is the only thing that prevents causality from flowing backwards. It is precisely why competence things are able to affect the world effectively, they are affected by the worlds that they bring about and avoid. If something is able to be effected by worlds contingent on their actions their actions can be contingent on those worlds. It's a funky concept but the net net of it is that things that operate in this way have a systematically larger causal effect on the world, which is to say a systematically larger effect on manifesting which worlds come to be in the first place.

Competence in this way is the essence of agency. Competent things are intentional (goal directed), agentic (outcome driven in action), and potent (actions make their will manifest). To really be outcome driven in action you need some outcome you are oriented towards and you need some potency of your actions for that to really matter in the first place.

By the very fact of you foreseeing something you are giving an existence proof of it's predictability -- or anticipatability in any case.