Name: Future Stories
Rating: 4.2 (333 reviews)
Author: David Christian

What’s in it for me? Finding your way to the future.

Sometimes it seems like the future is fixed, part of a cycle in which the same inevitable things happen over and over again; people are born, they live their lives, and then they die. Look at it that way, and life is predictable.

At other times, the opposite seems true – it’s like we’re sloshing around in a raging river that’s dragging us all into unknown territories. At any given moment, will you win the lottery? Stub your toe? Find the love of your life?

But if the future is somehow both fixed and changeable, that makes the whole concept of time pretty slippery. How can people be expected to make decisions when they’re not sure what they’re facing – is it the inevitable or the unknown?

Welcome to the Blink to David Christian’s Future Stories. We’re about to embark on a wondrous journey together, one that starts with the most basic unit of life before going all the way into the universe’s distant future. Along the way, we’ll try to understand our place on this planet – and this timeline.

The future paradox.

Every day, every human being faces an incredible number of choices. That’s a lot of responsibility, and it can even feel overwhelming. Sound familiar? Well, here’s some good news: you don’t have as much free will as you think you do. But here’s the bad news: you’re still responsible for your choices.

If you’re scratching your head about that little paradox – or if neither of those statements sound like good news – then you’re in the right place. But before we get into it, let’s be honest: historians can’t even agree on what “the future” actually is. This problem goes back to two ancient Greek philosophers with very different ways of thinking about time.

The first, Heraclitus, believed that time flows into a future that is unpredictable, uncertain, and ever-changing – think of that raging river we were talking about a moment ago. Let’s call this A-series time. The other philosopher, Parmenides, believed that all creatures, objects, and events are fixed in time with no uncertainty and nothing new happening. We’ll call this B-series time.

Now, both of these philosophies have problems. In A-series time, it’s unclear what time is when we only ever exist in the present. When does the future become the present? How long does now last?

In B-series time, the ideas of choice, free will, and responsibility become null and void. This is called determinism. It basically means that you didn’t choose to read or listen to this Blink. This moment is fixed in time. Depending on where you’re standing, it either already happened, is happening, or will happen in the future.

So how do we approach future thinking? We use a little something called compatibilism. Compatibilism is the idea that free will and determinism are compatible.

According to compatibilism, certain things are fixed – think death and taxes. But it also says that within that framework, we have choice and free will. When we understand that – when we agree that we have free will and the ability to make choices – we start to ask ourselves how we make those choices. And that’s where future thinking comes in. Making a choice means taking action that will lead to an unknown circumstance. A choice comes with uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and insecurity.

Future management can help alleviate some of those feelings and lead to better choices. It starts with recognizing the geography of the future. And while there are several ways to map out the foggy landscape of the future, it’s most useful to think of it in terms of preference and possibility.

Future outcomes come in four categories: The probable, the plausible, the possible, and the preposterous. We make decisions based on our preferred future outcome combined with the likelihood of that outcome occurring. If our preferred outcome falls on the preposterous end of things, it makes sense to compromise when it comes to that outcome. On the other hand, if our preferred outcome lands in the probable category, we may want to reach for something a little more challenging.

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Future Management Skills

It turns out that the methods and mechanisms for future thinking exist all the way down to the most basic unit of life – the cell.

You may be wondering how cells can think when they don’t have brains. While it’s true that cells don’t have brains or consciousness, they do have decision-making and future-management processes. In fact, if you ever took a biology class in school, you’ve probably learned all about these.

Language, Religion, and Collective Learning

Before getting into the changes in future thinking over the span of humanity’s existence, let’s talk about the three types of time.

Natural time is determined by nature. Things like sunrises, changes of season, and circadian rhythms are all part of nature’s time. Next, we have psychological time, or the way we perceive time passing. For example, when you’re at work, time may seem to move more slowly than when you’re having fun with friends. The third type of time is social time. In the modern world, the workday, holidays, and school schedules often override natural and psychological time.

Shaping the Future

At this point, the pace of change has become much faster relative to the span of a human life. Whatever the world looked like when you were a kid, it looks much different now. We’ve become accustomed to change. Desensitized to it.

What’s more, we understand cause and effect. We’ve recorded and preserved enough information from the past to see which trends typically stay the same and which ones change. In many cases, we know why change occurs.

Kernaussagen in Future Stories