Is the present affected by the future?

A well-known Nobel prize winner recently asked two of us:

Do you really believe in retrocausation, i.e. that what is happening now is influenced by what is actually going to happen, vs. simply projections of what will happen, or anticipation?  Just curious.
---
My reply:

It is always a great pleasure to hear from you.

I do believe that information can be communicated backwards in time. In fact, I have proposed a specific experiment to demonstrate precisely that:
http://vixra.org/abs/1707.0343
I explain the logic a bit further in recent posts at:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com
and in a more direct 1-pager which I have not posted because of discussions with a Fortune500 company interested in the IP potential.

I was studying these issues, and publishing key ideas in journals, long before ...

...

Next day:

As I think over the exact wording of your question, I worry whether I did justice to it.

You asked whether what is happening now is influenced by what it going to happen. But I only said I believe it is possible to communicate information from future to past, and that I believe in authentic paranormal experiences in which people can experience information from the future. That still begs a few questions.

In addressing those questions -- I am not one of those people who pretends to have definite knowledge of everything. Bayesian epistemology says we should keep up a "zoo" of competing models in mind, keep revising our beliefs about their probability of being true-- and I do roughly follow that approach.

With a very high probability (98%?), I believe that the various versions of QED in use today should be replaced by MQED,
"the correct model" for electrical and magnetic forces interacting with charged particles when one can live with the approximation which treats them as point particles.  MQED is a Many Worlds type of model. Even though a deeper model exists, the predictive power of MQED tells us that a lot of very weird stuff really does happen.

In the Many World's view, what happens "now" includes what happens not only here but what happens in the "universes" parallel to us in the cosmos. A major part of the impact of the future on the past is not so much about changing the past, but changing the probability of the multiple pasts which already exist.

Last year, great pressure was put on me to speak out and give my real views on the subject of predetermined of terrorist activities,  for a NATO workshop. I gave in, and also wrote a paper published in the NATO book on that topic, and also posted at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrirism.pdf. One question we discussed: if you were standing at ground zero, and had a backwards time cell phone letting you warn authorities to let them stop it half an hour before it happened, would you send the message even if it would result in "dissolving you away," dissolving your experience and world into nothing (near zero probability)? Some folks would, some wouldn't, but I tend to side with those who would,  though I also like quantum computing as an example of how the cosmos could actually benefit from and exploit some diversity in the universes retaining nonzero probability.

With somewhat lower, but high enough, subjective probability, I believe that MQED can and should be derived as the emergent statistical consequence of something more familiar and deterministic, the same general idea which 'tHooft has recently argued for in his book at arxiv.org. But I now fully understand that this does not simplify our lives. "Simple classical PDE derived from a Lagrangian " can generate emergent phenomena far more complex and strange than what we see in one dimensions (ODE, chaos theory). All the weirdness predicted by MQED is still there, even in ordinary Minkowski space. After all, PDE generated by maximizing a Lagrangian  (one example of PDE) are a limiting case of the ADP math we use for optimization in neural networks, and we know very well how complex the behavior can be emerging from such math, expecially when we "tighten the screws" and approach more perfect foresight and optimization.

All for now. I hope this helps.

Best regards,  Paul