A couple of thoughts;
"you cannot say anything about the state of particles before you observe them, and that the only hard facts in the world are the results spit out of quantum experiments."
What are "hard facts?" Say you take a human body and ask yourself; What is "hard?" The answer would be the skeleton. While that might be the structure of the body, it's not its basis, which would be a fertilized seed. There seems to be a similar tendency to think of what is most stable and repeatable about nature must be the most foundational as well. Yet these tend to be more idealizations, than essences. For instance, a dimensionless point is an ideal of location, but that doesn't make it the basis of space. Is Euclidian geometry foundational to space, or only our ability to model it? If it is foundational to space, why are there so few naturally occurring straight lines and right angles? As opposed to us starting out in kindergarten with a pencil, paper and ruler.
Similarly with time, physics treats the measurement, duration, as more foundational that what is being measured, action. It is the inertia of action which makes time asymmetric, rather than symmetric, because a unit of time would be the same duration whether measured from event A to B, or B to A.
Time, like temperature, color, pressure, etc, is an effect of action. It is only because our rational thought processes are a sequential function, that we think of time as the present moving past to future, rather than change turning future into past, within the physical context of the present. Duration is the state of the present, as these events form and dissolve.
So time is an effect of causality, not the other way around. It is just that the energy output of one event might be a minimal amount of the energy input into what seems like the sequential event. Kicking a ball causes it to move, because there is a transition of energy, but yesterday didn't cause today. The sun shining on a spinning planet creates this effect called days.
As such, thermodynamics better describes the larger picture, in that while high pressure is causal energy, low pressure is the groves, channels, niches, etc, which this energy fills and alters, creating endless feedback loops.
So events have to occur, in order to be fully determined. They are first in the present, then in the past. Alan Watts used the example of a boat and its wake as an analogy. In that the wake, as the past, doesn't steer the boat, rather the boat creates the wake. Yet because our minds are memory, we think of the past as events, when it is really only residual effects. The present, like low pressure, consumes the energy of the past, just as the inertia of this energy propels it into the future. So energy goes past to future, as the events defining this process go future to past. All as feedback within the present.
Hi Everyone!