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Gaf, do you think the future is set?

Cunth

Cunth

Fingerlickin' Good!
I know some people think of me as some kind of modern day philosopher, but really im just curious about life, and I was thinking today about if time already exists in full and we are just passengers along the line, or if we create it new every day... what do you think gaffers?
 
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On what scale are we talking?

Our Solar system, Galaxy and entire universe futures are set is that they will eventually expand into nothing, but what happens afterwards? Will there be another Big Bang and history will repeat? Who knows 🤷‍♂️

On a human level no our futures are not set, our decisions on a daily basis can have a massive effect on our futures. A real world example would be if a smoker stops smoking that could make a difference between dying in their 50's and living into their 80's. One random decision by somebody could have a massive effect on their personal futures.

We are just passengers in time and human existence is nothing more than a blink of an eye on a galactic scale but our personal destiny's are never set in stone that could always change but our Sun and Earth futures are set and nothing we do can stop that. Our sun will eventually swell up and swallow the earth and go super nova.

Unless I missed your point lol
 
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Certainly not. There are people who wield a lot more weight in the decision making on a national and global scale. I also believe there are political parties who would have you believe they're setting the future as we speak. Some might even tell us they have already set it. Lol

The problem is that our futures intertwine on a global scale with people we do not control. To change the future, you may need to change that which you don't currently control... until then the future may have the appearance of having already been set. It's the loss of percieved personal control that gives one an impression that their future is already determined and they are just passengers traveling along the timeline.
 
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There is no past and there is no future. Past cannot be changed.

In the world of ideas, thoughts about eventual present times can be observed. There might be some outcomes that will be eventual present situations no matter what, and if someone can look into the world of ideas and look at all of different possibilities, then it could be possible to make a prophecy and say this is a thing that will eventually happen. Possibilities in the idea world eventually stop existing when there aren't any action patterns that would lead to those possibilities.

Time is not a line. Time is corrosion and change in the present. If something moves fast enough, its rate of change will change.
 
The ego/mind sees itself as an actor/doer - a primary agent, yet remains utterly, obstinately and defiantly oblivious to its total interdependence on factors it arose from and had no impact upon. It screams, "I am independent. I control the outcome." despite all evidence to the contrary.
 
Nothing is set or pretty determined. The universe is just a series of chaotic events. Time isn't even real, it's a man made concept designed to give us the ability to measure and calculate and give us the illusion we understand things.

I think I the reality is things just exist and things just happen. There is no rhyme or reason. It's hard for a human mind in our limited capacity to think of things like infinite and true chaos so we have to put it into terms and forms we can wrap our heads around. Whatever happens just simply happens.

Us being here having this conversation is the result of a series of events that led us here. One day we will be dead and nothing will matter anymore. The universe will continue changing beyond our control, everything will die and alter and just keep doing whatever it is that happens long after were dead and will for an eternity of a never ending cycle.

The only way our future is set is if were designed to do something else's will, kind of like a human can raise sea monkeys in a little plastic container. If that's the case then whatever outside our forces that set us into motion also abides the same rules and so on and in the end they are outside of their own control and so on.

But I prefer the simple term of "shit happens" and just leave it at that.
 
I don't know and we probably never will. Philosophical questions vary from scientific ones in that they are more like metaquestions. You can't rely on empiricism to solve that.

Just like how an ant has no conception of the internet or consciousness, we are limited too. An ant can live its whole life within a city without comprehending the miracle of what's going on around it. We live our lives in a state of "consciousness" and interacting with time in a seemingly linear fashion. Guessing what the universe is using such a limited scope is like an ant trying to understand what consciousness is without ever having been conscious.

Heck, we're "conscious" and we don't even clearly know what it is either.
 
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Both.

We make a million little choices every day, or others do, that influence our future in all kinds of ways we can't imagine. Part of the joy of life is having this freedom.

That said, I believe it's possible that we're destined as a product of our personal experiences, and the world around us, to always make a particular choice. You could say I was always going to post in here, for example, and it was never going to be any other way.
 
Look at it this way...

In one way, yes, it's set but not in a linear way. Every day, we make a myriad of decisions... Sometimes a binary decision, sometimes from multiple choices. If you believe in the Multiverse Theory, then every decision you could have made is being made in a parallel universe. And the decisions of others affect you and the decisions you could and would make.


But each decision we make can and will affect someone else and vice versa. Whether it's a phone call, a parking space you take, covering up your mouth when you sneeze or applying for a job. Each decision you make branches off into another universe... And those branches make branches and so on and so forth.

So in THIS universe, the future is set... And so are the futures in every other universe because of the OTHER decisions you could have made in this one but didn't ...

I call it the cross-universe butterfly effect.
 
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-Arcadia- said:
Both.

We make a million little choices every day, or others do, that influence our future in all kinds of ways we can't imagine. Part of the joy of life is having this freedom.

That said, I believe it's possible that we're destined as a product of our personal experiences, and the world around us, to always make a particular choice. You could say I was always going to post in here, for example, and it was never going to be any other way.
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly.

I believe the future is set, not because we choose a pre-destined path but because the events and decisions made in our no lives no matter how insignificant we made consciously or unconsciously based on what we have learned, our past experiences and the motivators that led us to have made that decision.

Freedom of choice is an illusion made by any multiple number of choices we could make; but we'll always make the choices that made.

If you asked me if I would make different decisions now that I know their outcomes, yeh I would, but at the time I made those choices, I did so for a reason.
 
In the same way that our macro-level perception of temperature is faulty (fundamentally temperature is defined by extent of observable constituent particle agitation); so too is our perception of time; it is completely divorced from the fundamental reality as we operate on such a large scale in terms of our evolved sensory inputs-relative to the fundamental makeup of space-time. A popular theory doing the rounds today is that time is simply another as yet undefined/unobserved particle and that some universes (the prevailing theory) probably exist without time. This would explain the nature of dark matter (i.e dark matter is the elusive time particle) and also as to how gravity can influence time and vice versa (observed via experimentation and observation). i.e time may have mass and thus have gravity. This makes questions such as 'is the future set' kind of messy and highly contextual, i.e relative as fuck depending on observer.

Beyond this, recent findings regarding quantum entanglement seem to suggest that we exist in some kind of all encompassing particle soup (back to the aether model we go) where any fundamental particle has the capacity to be interconnected with any other independent of what we call space or time. i.e instantaneously. This further muddies our mammalian perceptions in all things.

TLDR; the true nature of space, time and the fundamental things is probably not directly perceptible by our conscious chemistry such as it is. We will have to continue to rely on abstract models to represent things we can't even imagine. Or maybe in the future we can augment our brains and be able to perceive much more directly.
 
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GobbledeeGoo said:
Wouldn't that mean this future and all alternate ones are set, then?
Click to expand...

everything that is or ever will happen appears to coexist

uncertainty be damned, god plays dice, so on

the nature of consciousness wrenches those physical concepts some, dig into espitemic v. aleatoric probabilities if you wanna give yourself a quantum migraine
 
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Time is created. Outside the universe, there is no time. Outside the universe, you wouldn't have a future, past, or present. So the future is an illusion that's already happening with the past and present outside the universe. The future, therefore, is set.
 
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Chairman Tickles said:
In the same way that our macro-level perception of temperature is faulty (fundamentally temperature is defined by extent of observable constituent particle agitation); so too is our perception of time; it is completely divorced from the fundamental reality as we operate on such a large scale in terms of our evolved sensory inputs-relative to the fundamental makeup of space-time. A popular theory doing the rounds today is that time is simply another as yet undefined/unobserved particle and that some universes (the prevailing theory) probably exist without time. This would explain the nature of dark matter (i.e dark matter is the elusive time particle) and also as to how gravity can influence time and vice versa (observed via experimentation and observation). i.e time may have mass and thus have gravity. This makes questions such as 'is the future set' kind of messy and highly contextual, i.e relative as fuck depending on observer.

Beyond this, recent findings regarding quantum entanglement seem to suggest that we exist in some kind of all encompassing particle soup (back to the aether model we go) where any fundamental particle has the capacity to be interconnected with any other independent of what we call space or time. i.e instantaneously. This further muddies our mammalian perceptions in all things.

TLDR; the true nature of space, time and the fundamental things is probably not directly perceptible by our conscious chemistry such as it is. We will have to continue to rely on abstract models to represent things we can't even imagine. Or maybe in the future we can augment our brains and be able to perceive much more directly.
Click to expand...
I don't get it
 
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