Thus, if there are processes in the world that might be seen as a manifestation of backward causation, these are not to be depicted by a description that leaves them to be time reversed cases of ordinary forward causal processes (Faye 1981/1989, 1997, 2002).
A proper notion of backward causation requires a static account of time in the sense that there is no objective becoming, no coming into being such that future events exist on the par with present and past events.
No empirical phenomena seem to demand a notion of backward causation for our understanding of them.
Moreover, there is a possibility for backward causation implicit in the advanced wave front of inconsistency affecting earlier states in the inconsistently identified smear of spatial positions; and backward causation may be the way to go with quantum nonlocality, as Huw Price (1996) has argued.
Two years later, Max Black (1956) presented an argument against backward causation, which became known as the bilking argument, and later attempts to meet the argument seemed to generate all kinds of paradoxes.
The difference, however, is that time travel involves a causal loop whereas backward causation does not.
A coherent notion of backward causation only requires that the future is able to have an influence on what happens in the past.
A general notion of backward causation raises two sets of questions: those concerning conceptual problems and those that relate to empirical or physical matters.
More recently, the Bell type experiments have been interpreted by some as if quantum events could be connected in such a way that the past light cone might be accessible under non-local interaction; not only in the sense of action at a distance but as backward causation.
Hence it is not an argument only against backward causation but against eternalism as well.
In the 1960s and 1970s, physicists began to discuss the possibilities of particles travelling with a speed greater than light, the so-called tachyons, and as a consequence a similar debate about paradoxes involving backward causation arose among them.
