On an abstract level actual universe and the hypothetical one you suggest are objects of the same category. The same laws apply and causality is preserved.
If this was all that we consider, then if you could perceive universe from outside of the timeline, as a function of time, you couldn't tell in which way the time flows. You could even challenge the notion of time flow. Causality could be applied successfully both ways.
Now this bidirectional causality, assuming it's entirely deterministic, would mean that given any state of the world at some fixed point in time we could deduce the entire timeline.
Let's assume this is how timelines actually work - they are built from a starting point, according to rules, in both directions.
In the actual world, it seems at least, that starting point in time was the beginning. In a reversed universe, it would be somewhere in the future. Perhaps at the end - assuming that if we reversed everything at the moment of our universe conception, it would just cease to exist.
Now, since the fixed state can be any state, it doesn't have to be that very peculiar state at the beginning of our timeline or any other very distinct state. If the state is chaotic, then no characteristic of that trait, no statistical value calculated, would allow to differentiate between past and future. Whatever metamorphosis would happen in one direction, it would be exactly as likely to happen in the other.
However if the fixed state is very distinct, like in case of our timeline, we can intuitively understand, applying probability to an area that doesn't have anything to do with empirical notion of probability, that the fixed state is this peculiar, in our past, not any other we have left behind or are yet to experience. If we could create universe upon universe, in almost every universe that we created chaotically, both directions of time would be dominated by meaningless chaos, only in a very small minority the chaos would turn into an ordered world and then into an illusion of beginning at the end. While in almost every universe that spawns from a very specific starting scenario one or both directions (hard to tell if there is the other direction of time from big bang, and what happened there, perhaps there isn't one for some reason) would after limited time of order turn into that chaos without distinct features.
At least that's how I see it.
So the way we differentiate between future and past is that we notice certain traits of universe that seem non-random, and how they deteriorate. I think it's worth mentioning, how certain other traits seem to become less and less random with time for some time, and that we call evolution. But this process is "short" lived, so given long enough time we get to know which direction is the direction of deterioration.
In a chaotic universe we will see local spontaneous pockets of order arise. However if the universe is entirely chaotic or reached far enough from it's starting point in any direction to become so, those pockets will be exactly as likely to happen with flow as they are to happen against it.