  The principle of sufficient reason asserts that anything that happens does so
for a reason: no definite state of affairs can come into being unless there is
a sufficient reason why that particular thing should happen. This principle is
usually attributed to Leibniz, although the first recorded Western philosopher
to use it was Anaximander of Miletus. The demand that nature be rational, in
the sense that it be compatible with the principle of sufficient reason,
conflicts with a basic feature of contemporary orthodox physical theory, namely
the notion that nature's response to the probing action of an observer is
determined by pure chance, and hence on the basis of absolutely no reason at
all. This appeal to pure chance can be deemed to have no rational fundamental
place in reason-based Western science. It is argued here, on the basis of the
other basic principles of quantum physics, that in a world that conforms to the
principle of sufficient reason, the usual quantum statistical rules will
naturally emerge at the pragmatic level, in cases where the reason behind
nature's choice of response is unknown, but that the usual statistics can
become biased in an empirically manifest way when the reason for the choice is
empirically identifiable. It is shown here that if the statistical laws of
quantum mechanics were to be biased in this way then the basically
forward-in-time unfolding of empirical reality described by orthodox quantum
mechanics would generate the appearances of backward-time-effects of the kind
that have been reported in the scientific literature.

Quantum Physics