Does the future exist?

Great Debates
1

I’m stumped. I’ve attacked the question over and over as best my math-retarded biologist brain can, and I’m no closer to an answer. In fact, I feel more mystified than ever. Does the future exist?

It’s hard to use language like "already exits"s because that proposes a kind of “now” for all time, past, present, and future. I can comprehend that the past is covered terrirotry, that the present is the boundary of the past, but the future? Does the time dimension extend into infinity, or does it expand, like the space dimension, so that matter, just as with space, comes to occupy newly-expanded spacetime volumes?

The kicker is the delayed choice experiment, which predicts events in the future can affect the behavior of its particle in the past. It’s quite reasonable, given the mathematics of quantum mechanics, and the fact that real delayed-choice experiements have been carried out which suppor the mathematical predictions of QM, to assume all moments in time exist, that particle interactions are being transmitted back and forth along the time as well as space dimensions, and our preception of past, present, and future, is a psychological bookeeping phenomenon that reveals nothing fundamental about time (e.g. that it flows). Motion is an illusion in this picture, processes mere connections between moments in time that have no distinction except that particle arrangements differ from one to the next, and so on. In essence, the future and the past were created simultaneously when the univese was created, and our minds scan over the length of time, observe increasing entropy as the value of t-increases, and concludes that time floes, and that there is a direction of this flow that establishes the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It looks like we move into and create the future from the present, but in fact, we’re just parsing slices of time in space, which do not flow. Motion and change are the illusion of reconfiguration of particles from moment to moment, randomly.

Am I on the right track here?

2

Yes.

3

However, I object to “created” and “minds scan over”.

4

Inevitably, it all comes down to quantum. That and chaos theory.

QtM

5

No. And when the mathematicians come in to explain why it DOES exist stick your fingers in your ears for they are lunatics trying to recruit more lunatics.

6

And strings! Can’t forget the strings, Quadgop.

7

I dunno.

For as many deep thoughts as you can think about the boundaries of reality that you run into in QM and GR, you should keep in mind that everyday thought processes work well for the everyday world. This stuff is interesting to think about, but not worth losing any sleep over.

8

Does the future exist as an entity, an ideal, potentially? actually? randomly? predictably? Do we and/or things exist there as well?

Maybe :confused:

Sure there is a future. The future as an entity. There’s at least a future in the sense that the universe has enough energy to continue its expansion for a few more years anyway.
Ideally the future is infinite. As is the past. The only limits would be to the physical matter in this universe and even that is not so simple. It doesn’t just dissappear. Time…another subject altogether. It is not a constant. But then neither is the speed of light. Unless of course these things are in a controlled environment…not the universe!

Since the universe is expanding at, near, or greater than the speed of light, (two “constants” that aren’t) Anyway, under observed scientific conditions, there can be no matter travelling at this rate. Therefore WE as physical beings must travel in time at a lesser rate and are thus actually “trapped” in our own time.

Potentially, there are any number of future’s that exist in an infinite number of possibilities. These potential futures don’t have an actual or physical existence in that we could go there if we travelled fast enough. It’s like Plato’s ideal plane…it exists inasmuch that we can “see” it and describe it. We can even predict it if we can control all of the variables. But until its time comes it doesn’t exist except for those who can envision it.

The trick in my mind is…if there are multiple universes that are existing in the same time but on different dimensions. Is this universe expanding into another universe that is contracting. If so, are there ways to travel from this one to the other.
Travelling back would be a paradox that might actually be possible. However, IIRC experiments done have sent (a watchdog?) into the future by some minute period of time.
I’d like to get deeper into this but that’d take awhile and I don’t like to sound too freakin’ crazy when I’m on the boards. :wink:

Anyway…just my two cents for what it’s worth.

9

Not yet.

10

How about now?

11

Too soon.

12

The future does exist. In Brian Greene’s latest book The fabric of the Cosmos, he uses “Now lines” and relativity to show that a person moving towards you’s now line is a little bit in your future, and someone moving away’s in in your past. At normal human speeds and the distances we normally interact in this is a very negligable time. But at cosmic distances and near light speeds, this can amount to hundreds of years.

Due to the finite speed of light, you can’t learn anything about your own future this way, but it shows that your future already exists in some fashion or another.

Or so the argument presented managed to convince me—I think. Time is one of those things the human mind is simply not equiped to adequately deal with. The evidence of the physics appears to be saying that time is merely an illusion, and that there are no discrete moments that move from ‘now’ to ‘now’. Everything just flows from one moment to the next.

13

TheFuturecIhernetmepsiD.

14

Yes, the future and past are merely different “places” in the universe: Events exist in time like objects in space. Each event is explained by the events “to its left” (ie. the “past”). There is no universal Now.

Boltzmann conjectured that this was solely due to entropy increasing (ie. “order” decreasing), indeed if a maximum of entropy (minimium of order) existed, time might run “backwards” on the other side of it: Imagine broken plates magically reforming on the other side of this point.

Julian Barbour has an interesting take in his book “The End of Time”.

15

I wouldn’t base any conclusions about the nature of time on the delayed-choice experiments. The apparent backwards causation that crops up is only due to interpreting the wave function realistically. If, instead, you think of the wave funciton not as a real physical object but as a summary of the available information about the particle, then there’s no problem. If you measure something at a later time, of course you obtain information about it at an earlier time as well.

The relativity of time (in either SR or GR) does make it tempting to think of the future as “already existing”. Someone in motion with respect to me will slice time differently, and so some events that are in my “future” may be in that person’s “past”. But it makes more sense to talk about my “future” as only the part of spacetime in my future light cone, my “past” as that inside my past light cone, and everything else as “now”. This “now” is equally inaccessible to us both. (It’s an odd fact of relativity that you can only know about things in your past. No one can have any knowlege of the present.) In a relativistic sense, then, there’s no reason to think of the future as “already existing”.

16

I think you are tangling up different uses of the same words. For instance, “It’s an odd fact of relativity that you can only know about things in your past.” I can swallow this, provided we mean “what relativity describes” by “past”. Knowing about the present seems perfectly plausible, I see no reason to discard it, provided we are careful about our analysis of time. As you note a few sentences up, for example, a person’s subjective measure of time might vary from another’s. But this is still all within the scientific realm; i.e- we are measuring with devices that, we agree, agree. GR or SR’s “present” is not a phenomenal present; everyday English’s present is a phenomenal present, that is, what I am experiencing. GR/SR suggests: this is “really” in the past! --but then I do not understand what GR means by “present” unless I take GR as a metaphysical theory itself. Fine for the positivists, maybe, but not for erl.

For erl, to get on to the OP, the future exists as an intention, or expectation. If the future did not, at a minimum, exist as such, predictions, everyday intentions, and so on, would be very strange beasts. At a maximum, then, we’d have strict determinism, a fatalism where every event is preordained by the grand order of things; such a future has an actual existence and time is simply a way of viewing this order (i.e.-a perspective). While I sometimes feel fatalistic, I do not see that it is a very good explanation of existence. I think it assumes too much. Perhaps it is true, indeed, but I would not be comfortable asserting it.

17

I think the simplest answer to this question is with an analogy. I don’t know if it’s a very good one, but it seems to work for me.

Einstein was a very brilliant man. And not just for E=mc2, but for his concept of the theory of relativity.

That is, there is no singular center spot from which things are measured. That all things have their own inertial frame of reference. From the moon, it is as accurate to say that the earth spins in front of the moon on a pendulum-like motion, as it is to say, from the earth, that the moon orbits the earth.

That is, it is equally valid to state that if a man is standing on the ground, a car is passing him north at 40 MPH, and that the car is staying still and the man is moving at 40MPH south from it. (Simplifying greatly)

I like to think of the point of now as a temporal frame of reference, traveling into the future at a speed of one second per second. If we could switch to another temporal frame of reference, things might change in our perspective, but they would be happening in the same way. Different frames of reference might be able to interact reasonably, but I’m not entirely sure to picture how. Analogy again serves us.

Car, man. Car has three balls, traveling north at 4 MPH. Man, walking south at 4 MPH. At T-5 minutes, car drops a ball on the sidewalk. At T-0 minutes, car drops a ball on the sidewalk. At T+5 minutes, car drops a ball on the sidewalk, where T-0 minutes is the point of intersection.

The man at T-5 minutes will have no interaction with the car. The man at T-0 minutes will catch the ball. The man at T+5 minutes will see the ball on the sidewalk and can kick or pick it up. The ball at T+5 minutes is never encountered by the man.

I don’t know if this helps any, but it’s an interesting way to look at the problem that theoretically might resolve certain paradox issues. Unless we can disjoint ourselves from our temporal frame of reference, there is no issue with quantum physics. It is simply that we do not know which way the road turns before we take the step. We do know where it went in the past.

If we can, what then?

18

devilsknew, does that mean in the future we will drink Mepsi!?!?!??

19

Likewise, the statement, “I’m going to the store tomorrow.”, can never be proved true or false.

20

In the sense that the present exists, the future also exists (notwithstanding the end of spacetime, should it occur), but the future doesn’t exist now, in the present - similarly, ‘over there’ exists in the same sort of way as ‘here’ exists, but ‘over there’ isn’t in the same place as ‘here’.