Actually, quantum 'measurements'
are like that; decoherence happens when a entangled photon (or whatever paticle) escapes far enough away that you can't retrieve it and force it's horizonal and vertical states to feed amplitude into the same outcome. This generally happens because you lost track of that photon (and countless others), the same way you lose track of the blackbody radiation photons your heat engine emitted to cool down.
Edit: And actually, causal relationships aren't directional, they just look that way because we usually care about "What can we infer about the more complicated [thermodynamically later] system state given knowledge about the less complicated [thermodynamically earlier] one?" rather than vice versa. (Well, also because most physical processes exchange information about about particle velocities (heat differentials) for information about the state and layout of macroscopic-ish objects (knowledge), and the laws of thermodynamics result in those exchanges all going in the same direction.)