pastcausation

Pastcausation is the causal relationship in which a past event (the cause) brings about a later event or state (the effect). In ordinary usage and most philosophical accounts, causes precede their effects in time, giving causation its directional character or arrow of time.

Philosophers analyze pastcausation through several frameworks. The counterfactual approach defines C causes E if, had C not occurred, E would not have occurred. The regularity view ties causation to constant conjunctions across possible instances. Interventionist accounts add the notion of manipulating the cause to change the outcome. All these approaches seek to explain why earlier events are counted as causes of later ones, as opposed to simultaneous or future events.

Physical considerations emphasize temporal asymmetry: in thermodynamics, entropy increase and the structure of time produce a robust distinction between past and future. Most physical theories do not permit macroscopic retrocausation—effects influencing their own causes in the past—though some interpretations of quantum mechanics and time-symmetric laws explore retrocausal ideas, remaining controversial.

Pastcausation informs explanation, prediction, and historical reasoning: scientists identify asteroid impacts in the past as causing mass extinctions; everyday reasoning attributes outcomes like a broken window to earlier events such as a dropped stone or a strike; causal models (such as directed acyclic graphs) encode past-to-future dependencies.

See also: causality, arrow of time, retrocausality, interventionism, causal modeling.