Retrocausality is the concept of causes placed in a timeframe of the future that have an effect in the timeframe of the present. That is, wherein the future affects the present. Idealism is the view that ideas, often also placed in the future, are the substantial things of the Universe. According to the neutral monist position that I take, these are both correct, at least to some extent. Retrocausality and idealism, that is, apply to organisms and their minds.
We are each associated with a hairy timeworm or worldline, which extends from our birth in the past, through the present, and into the future, gaining and losing various elements from and to the outside, connecting us to it in strands.
Our ideas are the stuff of the future, or at least a possible future, for the future is in competition with the past for influence. The causes of the future are conscientious and emotional causes, but these can be cut off if we fail to use our cognition in uncovering the mechanical causes of reality. We may decide that an arrangement would be good, but lack the knowledge of the items to execute the arrangement. Thus, the forces of the future may pull us toward it, but the forces of the past hold us back from it. In this, our destiny is lost to fate.
The ideas, however, which are conceptually real, reside somewhere in the future, and, in particular, in that part of one’s worldline that extends to the limit of its execution. It may also involve imaginary reality, such as that associated with imaginary numbers and a multiverse, but this seems unlikely, as there is little justification for extra dimensions outside of spacetime.
The present moment, it seems, is the result of the clash between the forces of the past and the future, much as an exchange results from the countering forces of supply and demand. Neither supply nor demand get exactly what they want in the exchange, but they have nonetheless effected the exchange in their attempts to achieve their polar opposite aims. That supply does not get the highest price imaginable, and demand the lowest, does not make the forces non-existent, and neither does the fact that the future does not always have its way stifle its claim to a causal existence.
When the human acts on their goals, their body is extended into the past, but their mind into the future, and neither ever affect one another. Instead, when the body moves, entropy is increased or negated, and in a correlating but not causal fashion, syntropy is decreased or enabled. Also, when the mind uses its will, syntropy increases or is negated, and entropy is decreased or enabled. The soul, the mind + body, can be seen in both cases, but the causes of the mind cannot be seen in the present because they are in the future. Thus, syntropy and entropy are correlated, but are not causally connected, as in psycho-physical parallelism, but are instead neutralized in the soul and by time. By the soul moving through time, and by the future becoming that past, that which is psychic becomes physical. So while they are not causally related, but instead correlated, they are also convertible one into the other through the passage of time and the movement of the soul with it, though this is unidirectional owing to the Psychological Arrow of Time, which corresponds to entropy, or effects from the past. This situation establishes a condition whereby we are blind to the causes of the future, which are preternatural, appearing to be “spontaneous,” “random,” “stochastic,” or “accidental” matters of “chance.” If I throw a ball from behind to in front of you, where you cannot see, the ball certainly will appear in your frame of reference as if it appeared from out of nowhere and without any due cause. But common sense tells us that just is not the case.
