Does the future exist?

Temporal logic

Well I once believed in time but I don’t anymore so I don’t think I’d be much help.

:wink:

Loopydude, this site will answer all of your questions. Or cause your brain to explode - it’s 50-50.

I don’t think future exists in a concrete form. It comes together and assumes the shape of the present moment over and over again. It might exist in a general sense of an expectation, such as I expect to continue to live for quite a few years, however that is not a certainty, for I have no idea what the next moment might bring. Future is full of possibilities, present is not.

It’s kind of like this:
Spirit.

*In the tides of life, in action's storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at Time's humming loom it's my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.*

from FAUST
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
translated by George Madison Priest

Fortunately, I had my tinfoil anti-cranial-expansion helmet on, so, though the site gave me a mighty headache, and possibly a few small subarachnoid hemmorhages, my brain managed not to explode. Clearly, cephaloekrixia was the intended effect upon the reader, but I have “foiled” the author’s evil plan.

Mwah-hah-hahhh.

One-Day God

What in the hell is that crap about? Being that it is 3am and I can’t sleep, I actually read 2 or 3 parts of that until I asked, 'WTF?" and closed it.

Is this a coupon? If so, where can it be redeemed? :smiley:

That is the same thing that people who are a lot smarter than I am do as well.

Ahhh… it all makes sense now.

“The future exists” is, of course, an abuse of terminology.

As is often the case in these discussions, I find it useful to explore the context and specifics of terminology first. “Everyday” concepts like past/present/future often become unrecognizeable when we invoke QM, GR, or even logical positivism. :stuck_out_tongue:

I am not certain in which context the OP prefers to focus the debate. His post seems to mix liberally the personal, the cosmological/relativistic, the quantum, and a sense of the “objectively metaphysical”. My mind, at least, boggles at that particular grand unification. Still – what’s a little boggle between friends. I think I’ll start with delayed choice and move outward.

As FriendRob opints out, the apparent “reverse-causality” of the delayed choice experiment (and the related “quantum eraser” experiments) are by products of a particular interpretation. It collapses (sorry, I couldn’t resist) if we choose almost any other of the common descriptive models. Here is one treatment of the experiment from a competing theoretical ground. Even if we decide to work under the model the OP seems to prefer, I think it is a mistake to phrase our conclusion as “the future has determined the past”. It would be more correct to say, an event in the recent past has shaped an event in the more distant past". Whether this creates a more or less comfortable view of time is left as an exercise for the reader.

The key, I think, is to realize that only after the experiment has been completed can we conclude, through the results of our measurements, that the past event has been shaped. Until that time, we have only a prediction that it will have been shaped. After all, we might set the experiment in motion, have the particle pass through the screen, but then suffer a malfunction of the equipment designed to “choose” the measurement mechanism.

I don’t think so. It is true that classical QM equations are “agnostic” with regard to teh flow of time. It is true that science writers, and even very good scientists, sometimes use this to postulate all kinds of entertaining things about time. It is even true that you can find “backwards arrows of time” in things like Feynman diagrams for a positron. However, it is also indisputably true that CPT symmetry is an assumption that lies at teh very heart of modern particle physics. And it is also true that CP assymetry has been demonstrated experimentally. Thus, we are faced withteh choice of either tossing out most of modern particle theory or accepting that T is assymetric as well. Now, this doesn’t necessarily refute some of the more personal interpretations of “the future is now”, but it does rule out the Universal/cosmological “all futures are now”.

So, having started at each extreme, let’s move toward the middle. The relativistic experience of time is determined by the ligt cone of the reference point. As such, the “now” is very clearly a boundary point with no dimensions, and the future describes the expanding arc of phenomena that can affect the reference point as the arrow of time expands in the direction dictated by thermodynamics. I see no way, under this model, for “the future” to be concident with “now”. Reversing the arrow of time, under a personal relativistic frame, turns the “future” into the “past”, but it cannot make it the “now”.

that pretty much leaves only the psychological/phenomenological experience of time. Here, the issue gets quite cloudy. I personally have never had a prescient experience, but I know that other people have claimed to have them. Now, setting aside the hypothesis that every human who has ever claimed to have a prophetic experience is deliberately lying, I find myself quite willing to accet that some human beings experience a phenomenological event that interpret as being in some sense related to the future. These events clearly occur in the phenomenological “now”. So, the question becomes: are they perceptions of the phenomenological “future”. Having never had one, I cannot say. I suspect that they are more akin to memories: a perceptual experience that occurs in the phenoenological “now” but is understood as relating to a different temporal context. But, really, how would I know?