Future Influence
Shadows of What May Be or Remembering What Comes Next
Things that happened in the past have an influence on what will happen in the future. Duh. Some might call it a deterministic influence. At the very least, the things that were happening a second ago seem to have a huge impact on what's happening now — and, in theory, we can trace that back second by second as far as we want.
We can imagine the events of the past as propelling us into the future, like the exhaust propelling a rocket. Reality is pooping out the past on its trip to the future. Past-push causation. Past-blow.
What about looking at things from the other end? Can the future also have an influence over the present (future-pull causation, future-suck)? I think yes, but it's limited and tricky.
Let's leave aside for now our visceral conviction that the future can't have an influence because it doesn't exist (yet), and act for now as if it does already exist in a way. In fact, try to think of the future as it's represented in A Christmas Carol — the "shadows of what may be." The future has a vague kind of preexisting reality that at least opens up the possibility that it influences the present.
One point in favor of the idea of the future pulling on the present is that the known laws of physics are almost entirely time symmetric. That is, the equations behave the same running forward and backward — so that, for example, systems of low friction like planetary orbits look about the same in reverse motion. But the fact is that most backward-running movies -- like one of ceramic shards gathering together to form a coffee cup that then flies off the floor -- just look silly, i.e. unrealistic and highly improbable. Disorder can come from order for free but turning disorder into order comes at a cost. Still, the laws themselves are reversible on a micro level.
To the extent that these time-symmetric laws embody causation, they must be embodying it in reverse as well. Thus, without further evidence to the contrary, we would expect causation to work both ways.
The scenario I'm about to lay out draws only minimally from the laws of physics, but I hope it might begin to explain how the future might influence the present. In fact, we will get both an explanation for why causation is mostly from past to future and a glimpse of how the future can nudge or guide events to some degree as well. There could be a kind of weak direction to history — a gentle pulling in addition to the overwhelming pushing, like that rocket being dragged by a tow rope.
Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up is that I've just been listening to Bob Wright's interview of Francis Fukuyama. They are talking about teleology, the seeming path of history toward the Good. And I say that perhaps you can still get the observed quasi-benevolent march of time by replacing the designer of human history or Bob's win-win economics with this idea of the future drawing us toward it in a particular asymmetric way.
Before I get into my future-influence scenario, I want to take a long, pre-emptive tangent that might make the whole enterprise a little more palatable. It involves an image I call the Hollow Earth. What follows is drawn from my essay called The Hollow Earth. If the central core of the Earth, say a ball of diameter 7000 miles, were miraculously removed (leaving a 500 mile thick crust) while maintaining the total mass of the planet, a remarkable situation would arise. Surface inhabitants would experience no gravitational difference from regular Earth dwellers, but inhabitants of the open interior would experience a weird world. Imagine first that you are at the exact center of this hollowed out earth. By symmetry, of course, you will be weightless — not pulled in any direction. You will be subject to an infinite number of equal tugs in every direction so that the net effect is no effect. This leads to a very big question for me, "Is there a difference between nothingness and canceled somethingness?" I dunno, but my guess is this is the only kind of nothingness there is(n't). Let's leave that aside for now.
Anyway, it's true-but-not-obvious that at all other points in this hollow interior, Newton's inverse square law of gravitation manages the same awesome feat — perfect cancellation. Somehow, despite that lack of symmetry, the sum total of the tugs from the many points on the surface still cancel out. All interior inhabitants would be weightless with respect to the planet. The Earth has a radius of about 4000 miles. If it were hollow and you somehow found yourself 1000 miles below New York City, you'd also be about 7000 miles from the opposite point — China or whatever. Imagine yourself in that spot. The fewer, closer portions of the sphere (everything within about 2700 surface miles of New York — including Los Angeles, Bogota, Yellowknife, and Reykjavik) pulling you toward them and away from the center of the sphere somehow precisely balance out the more numerous and more distant sections (including London, Moscow, Hawaii, both poles) pulling in the opposite direction toward the center (and ultimately China). I shan't belabor the point. Newton proved it — it's known as the Shell Theorem. It's the less well known flip side of his important concept that massive objects can be treated as if their masses were concentrated at the center of mass. I present my Calc I proof in another of these essays. The math is pretty cool. By the way, since real non-hollow planets can be thought of as composed of shell upon shell, the implications can be extended. If you found yourself halfway down to the center of the actual earth, none of the earth "above" you (i.e., nearer to the surface, including China) would have a gravitational effect — only the deeper part would. To be clear, the surface parts would act all right, in a way consonant with the pull from the other parts, but their actions would cancel each other out perfectly. In fact, if you somehow managed to survive the very hot, very arduous trip halfway to the center of the Earth, you would weigh, as it turns out, half as much.
One might wish to say that the shell theorem is merely a fortuitous result of the mathematical relationship between the geometry of spheres and the algebra of inverse square laws, but it gives me a spooky feeling of inevitability and significance.
The interior inhabitants of the Hollow Earth would experience no attraction in any direction, except toward the sun, other exterior planets, stars, etc. Now imagine that the hollow Earth and perhaps several other planets all existed within another bigger hollow planet that might be within an even larger one. Nested Russian dolls of spherical shells. Each shell is of course subject to gravitation from each other shell but is only affected by gravitation from those it contains and its neighboring fellows and not from those shells that contain it. The inside is influential, the outside not so much.
How wonderfully cool an image this is! It may indeed just be a wacky sort of mathematical coincidence, but it also suggests that there might be something of deeper interest going on here. Inverse-square phenomena like gravitation abound. Spheres abound. Perhaps this sort of perfect cancellation is commonplace. Here's a reason to think so. If influences are randomly and thus roughly evenly distributed around us in 3-space, then collectively, statistically perhaps, they can be represented by spherical shells. [I may be conceiving of this 3-space as metaphorically extending beyond actual space into abstract idea space. I'm all about the metaphors!]
In particular, doesn't the Hollow Earth image work nicely as a metaphor for the past and the future? Yes, it does! Think of three concentric nested shells (perhaps 4 dimensional!). The inner one is a moment in the past, the middle one is the present, and the outer one is a moment in the future -- the jawbreaker model of time. The past is interior to the present, and the future is exterior. The influence of the past has gravity and pulls the inhabitants of the present toward it but the future's influence cancels itself out (on average). Past influence (through memory and materialistic causation — past-blow causation) is unfettered, but the future's sucking influence is in an outer shell so it cannot be felt — its influence is self-canceling. Thus, the influence is there, the future is there, but without effect. Potential influences from the future swirl around us, but are neatly canceled. I find it a particularly compelling way to think about memory. It's why we can't remember the future, if you'll indulge my whimsical what-have-you.
Now imagine a small hole drilled in the surface of the future shell and hold that thought...
Okay, I'm ready to end this long digression and launch into my positive-flow-of-history scenario which involves a related kind of cancellation.
The whole thing requires that we take seriously another potentially bogus image from physics — the Many Worlds Model, which I will describe as briefly as possible. Keep the hollow Earth image in mind as the metaphors are related. As you certainly have encountered at some point, the quantum world is said to be rife with indeterminacy, uncertainty, and nominal paradoxes. Simple billiard-ball causation gives way to spooky probabilities which take on an almost physical status. In this indeterminate world, umpteen gazillion events every second are decided in a probabilistic way. Does some particle decay now or wait 10 nanoseconds? Does a photon hit a photographic plate here or there? And by a complicated (and dubious?) extension of the same idea, do you choose the vanilla or mint chip cone when you like each equally well? Some physicists have posited that the simplest way to square the counter-intuitive implications of quantum mechanics with common sense is to say that all possible outcomes at the decision point are realized in one of many offshoots of the present, and simple probability determines the actual path followed. There isn't just one but many paths through history. That is, while any given moment in our observed universe has exactly one past (?!), it has infinitely many futures — shadows of what may yet be. This is the essential point to take for the sake of my argument. The world splits into different timelines. We are only directly aware of the one timeline that we are actually traveling on but others are constantly sprouting, and it's only a matter of chance which sprout one's current self will take. Physicist David Deutsch has further suggested that adjacent, currently-splitting worlds can interpenetrate. This helps him explain the weird results of the double-slit experiment (which I won't do justice to here), and other weird stuff. Even if you shoot one photon at a time through the slits, there's still an interference pattern as if all the photons were emitted at once and interacted with each other. What's interfering? Perhaps it's events that are being manifest in nearby, parallel worlds (the one photon interacting with many different copies of itself in slightly different futures), as if the present moment isn't of absolutely zero duration (perhaps an actual infinitesimal duration as I've suggested elsewhere), but is long enough that some timeline splitting is happening within it and differing "decisions" coexist there.
This Many Worlds concept offers a simple explanation for why the past would influence the present more than the future would: there is one monolithic past, and gazillions of diffuse futures with no coherent message for the present as we try to let the arrow of time flow in both directions. We can also see, however, how Many Worlds leaves the door open for small future-to-past effects.
Let's beg the question here and suppose each of those futures exerts some tiny attraction toward it as seemingly implied by the time-symmetry of the laws of physics. Each moment is an exploding firecracker (or — to unmix the metaphor — a rocket pushed by exhaust and pulled by a googol little tow ropes in a googol forward directions. Imagine James and the Giant Peach held up by all those birds.)
All things being equal, for every tug in direction A into the future — say toward the southwest of Wednesday — there's another one in direction ~A also into the future but toward the northeast of never. If you like vanilla and mint chip equally well, the futures in which you have chosen each cancel each other out in the present. If each of the gazillion tugs has equal oomph, you'd expect their combined effects — vanishingly small to begin with — to actually cancel each other out so that we'd travel down a course more or less determined by the influence of the monolithic past. This virtually complete cancellation would be the reason that we can't see any obvious effect of the future on the present. [In a similar but contrasting vein, see Feynman-Wheeler Absorber theory which suggests that a potentially influential backward moving wave stimulates a forward-moving reaction that cancels it out. Real science types will want to check this out. I can't say I quite get it.] This is where we hook up with the hollow earth metaphor. It's all about cancellation, and holes in the future.
Now, there exists no higher power or deeper law making sure that each future influence is counterposed by its opposite; it's merely a statistical certainty that, given a diverse-enough array of influences — and the enormity of the number of futures being spawned every millisecond assures diversity — there is a strong tendency toward cancellation. It is therefore possible that certain asymmetries could develop that would leave some sorts of tugs reinforced rather than canceled. Perhaps that's exactly what the passage of time is — that which leaks out of near perfect cancellation. In the book of my philosophy (which exists where exactly?), this all goes under the heading — EVERYTHING'S TRYING TO HAPPEN AT ONCE — BUT IS FAILING MISERABLY. That is, the world is teeming with staggeringly diverse influences buzzing by us — a literal plenum of all that is possible — tugging on us, but the influences are mostly imperceptible because they mostly cancel each other out. The asymmetries that I refer to above are like drilling a hole in the shell of the hollow earth. Everything is thrown slightly out of balance.
Before we consider one or two possible asymmetries, let's pause for a second to consider an important question the answer to which could mess up the whole scenario I'm in the midst of laying out. Since we're assuming that all possible paths into the future are realized in some universe, does it make sense to refer to the future sucking the course of history in one particular direction? It gets sucked in every direction! There's not one but gazillions of courses of history! ISN'T THERE A KIND OF FUTURE EGALITARIANISM? Since this stuff all differs so sharply with our usual premises and logic, things can get rather muddled here, but I think I can save this. In keeping with quantum mechanics, not all futures are equally probable. Maybe other timelines exist but are followed with smaller probabilities so that some futures peter out into virtual impossibility. Their tow ropes get punier and punier. We inhabitants of these many universes are almost all on timelines where very nearly all branchings have been highly probable ones, so it still makes sense to be pulled in one direction or another.
Now we're going to indulge in even more hand waving, dubious suppositions, and question-begging on the way to my big finish. We're leaving behind any appeal to the laws of physics, if I ever succeeding in making a legitimate appeal -- any expertise I have in physics is strictly of the self-proclaimed sort. Suppose, for example, that the outcome of a decision I'm about to make is subject to influence from similar decisions made by people (especially my future self) in these myriad futures. These would be persuasive influences (like preferences) rather than coercive influences (like gravity). Further suppose that, all things being equal, the degree of influence is tied by little tow ropes to each such decision made and the thickness of a tow rope varies with the degree of similarity of the people to myself and the degree of similarity of the decisions which they will someday make to the decision I'm about to make. (Sounding rather Sheldrakian again). There are people in those futures — my future self in particular —pulling my decision in one direction, another direction and even the opposite direction.
(Sudden thought: What past events are my current self influencing right now? Blows the mind! Is it possible to suggest that the future is pulling on the present and at the same time to deny that the present is pulling on the past? Talk about your revisionist history! Something tells me this has some legitimacy though.)
Now what if, in some of these futures, the decisions made by those future people lead directly or indirectly to the end of human existence further down the road. (There's a sci-fi plotline if ever there was one. In fact, Timescape by Gregory Benford is something like this, come to think of it. That's also where I first read about Feynmann-Wheeler.) Thus, since there would be a smaller human presence in these futures than in futures where humanity thrives, fewer, thinner ropes would reach back from that general direction in future space.
The result would be that this ill-fated future would pull less well on my decision-making process. The futures that are malevolent enough to eradicate humanity (or otherwise diminish human presence or be grossly unlike our present) would have less influence over this eternal now. That is, the roughly positive futures and less malevolent futures and unchanged futures are slightly more influential than they would otherwise be — especially, I guess, futures teetering on the brink of overpopulation, since such futures are more filled with people like me. Keep in mind that there is no increase in "positive" examples/influences; merely an absence of "negative" ones. Causation by absence; jumping by the absence of anti-jumping. What might happen in this scenario is a kind of historical brinksmanship. Every time we get close to an utter catastrophe, more positive future influences remain uncanceled, and the possibility of catastrophe is mitigated somewhat. That's my modified positive arch of history.
Even if you accept the possibly benevolent march of time, it's worth noting that, at some point, if things get so good that the survival of culture into the future is assured, that the general tilt toward improving outcomes will disappear. Thus, the direction of history will become more and more diffuse. That is, the final "perfection" — Teilhard's Omega Point — of culture will be elusive. Ain't it the truth, Brother?
This line of thinking also indicates that the population explosion will be hard to halt since futures with larger populations will have more pulling power on behavior. That is, these futures will be more influential until they lead to Malthusian catastrophes. Only when more people tips over into too many people followed by too few does the strength of influence begin to decrease. We may dance on the edge of these catastrophes forever. What's the catch-phrase of Per Bak — self-organizing criticality — that may be at play here.
Ironically, it would be at the times of greatest risk of human annihilation (with many human-occupied futures ending abruptly) that the positive effect of the future would be greatest. Maybe ironic isn't the right word. Maybe this is exactly what history teaches. We rush to the brink and then pause. How did we avoid ending the world with atomic weapons during the cold war? Seems almost miraculous; the powers-that-were only had to mess up once to bring the whole world crashing down, and they had messed up so many times in other circumstances. So maybe the greatest progress toward a better world has occurred in the recent past, because that's when the risk has been greatest — that is, when the asymmetries have been most pronounced. Has the Atomic Age been a Golden Age? Before you say "of course not," check out statistics on world poverty, hunger, literacy, justice, etc. I'm a believer that the world is better is many ways now than at any other point in history-- which is why all of this is interesting to me.
Of course in my scenario, there are no guarantees that this positive influence will be enough. Perhaps the exhaust of the past makes us a juggernaut of destruction that can't be diverted from its course by however many tow ropes from the future there are pulling us toward safety. The Black Death that killed 1/3 of the population of Europe in the 14th century may have been such a juggernaut. That is, suppose there were human behaviors that were conducive to the rise of the plague (a feeling that flea-infested rats are cute, perhaps) and others that would have tended to prevent it (a feeling of revulsion toward flea-bitten rats). My future-suck scenario says that the latter behaviors would have been selected for (or been pulled toward). That plausibly may have been the case — I for one (whose ancestors' genes survived, BTW) want to stay away from places rats live.
Yet the plague came. Perhaps it could have been worse! Maybe rats used to be more appealing, but the people with the rats-are-cute gene died off.
Speaking of juggernauts, I don't think my scenario helps at all to prevent disasters over which human behavior has no control — like asteroid impacts.
Does any similar sort of reasoning help explain a hypothetic benevolent march of time -- improving quality of life for medieval European peasants (or whatever)? Yes, supposing that increasing populations correlate with improving conditions. It aint exactly Guns, Germs, and Steel, but perhaps this odd logic could play a part. [Wow, there's a classic map-territory confusion.]
You may have noticed a similarity in form of this sort of influence of the future with natural selection, but an extra-genetic factor has been added. In both cases, forms and behaviors that produce abundant futures are favored. My strange generalized concept of natural selection will undoubtedly piss off the hardheaded Darwinians among us for introducing an unscientific and unmeasurable element that encourages the survival of species in tough times outside the domain of genes. On the other hand, it's well to remember that Darwin himself had no concept of genes. They came later. Perhaps my scenario would be appealing to him, but it would certainly be more appealing to Lamarck.
Will humans, with our expanded repertoire of behaviors to select from, be better at avoiding species-wide catastrophes than lower species with more limited repertoires and less say over their environments. Tautologically likely.
Okay, with a crashing thud, I've completed my exposition. The idea is that we are influenced by the future but in ways that mostly cancel out. Special conditions — holes drilled in the future — can lead to particular asymmetries that let the influence through. These special conditions might involve potential catastrophes that lead to the removal of some influences (bad decisions or bad directions taken) and allow other influences (good decisions) to predominate. Thus, for most timeline inhabitants, we move in roughly positive directions or at least catastrophe-sparse directions.
The aspect of the above that recurs most often in this essay and in my thinking in general is this idea of the importance of cancellation in producing the world as we know it. The-things-that-happen do so because obstacles are removed, not because they are directly caused. Anti-jump muscles sometimes relax. Imagine a beachball on a floor symmetrically surrounded by a circle of 30 little electric fans pointing straight at the ball. Turn on all the fans at once, and what happens to the ball? Turbulence and such probably means there will be some buffeting of the ball, but there would be a kind of automatic self-correction: the ball would stay where it is. Change is checked by cancellation. It's the hollow earth all over again. Now, turn off one of the fans, and the ball moves toward it (I imagine). The system's antijump muscles relax, and change happens.
Here's a very different sort of example: in each of our cells there are little protein factories producing chemicals whose job it is to promote cell division and other factories producing division-inhibiting chemicals. Most of the time, these chemicals cancel each other out in an appropriately balanced way, leading to moderate reproduction of cells. But sometimes something goes wrong with the inhibitor process (the anti-jump muscles fail to flex), and the promoter process goes unchecked. It doesn't go wild; it's merely unopposed. Cells divide too frequently. This condition is called cancer. A sustainable, balanced, cancer-free existence requires cancellation.
Returning to hollow earth cancellation for a moment. Tiny, even infinitesimal, asymmetries — like a little hole drilled into the crust of the hollow planet or a missing piece of the future — leave a crack for weird stuff to get in — future-suck causation as outlined above but also perhaps clairvoyance, premonitions, etc . Maybe this is why psi tests tend to show highly significant correlations but only weak ones. That is, they indicate strongly (with high confidence) that people have ESP, but it's very weak ESP. Weird stuff are well-canceled phenomena — that's what makes them weird — but they're not perfectly and completely canceled. Note that the drilled hole causes attraction in the opposite direction, toward the opposite wall of the sphere. Away from the extincting bad decision toward the opposite decision.
The other appealing cancellation example I often think of is the explanation of reflected light that Richard Feynman (he of the completely unrelated Feynman-Wheeler absorber theory) lays out in his classic work of popularization QED. Think about reflection in a mirror. Suppose I'm standing in the bathroom looking at the reflection in the mirror of the showerhead behind me. I was taught in high school physics that what I'm seeing are photons that reflect off the showerhead then bounce off the mirror like billiard balls off a cushion and travel into my eye (where various photons are focused onto the retina to make a coherent image). Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection. Well, quantum electrodynamics (QED) tells us that much of this story is wrong: there is no bouncing and no billiard-ball caroms. In reality photons hit the mirror and are absorbed. The photon-absorbing atoms are excited by the energy of the impact so that they quickly give up a photon of their own. Potentially, the exiting photo can be going off in pretty much any direction. Somehow, however, quantum probabilities for all directions except the special one where incidence equals reflection almost always cancel out and almost all such photons follow that preferred path. Thus, I can locate and focus the showerhead photons at a clear and definite spot in the mirror rather than all over the place. Here again is the slippage of special non-canceled stuff (like holes in the future). That particular angle has a special status (from a mathematical perspective) — it slips through as uncanceled. This seems like a peculiar and unbelievable explanation of reflection in a mirror, but a simple experiment can confirm it. As before, it's absence that does the trick. Here, if thin strips of tape are placed regularly over the mirror or scratched off the mirror's silver backing strategically, it's possible to mess up that cancellation of probabilities so that other angles of reflection become more likely — glare and hilarity ensues. The mirror ceases to act as a mirror.
Apparent nothings become somethings through events that are not essentially energetic — through holes or scratches, through relaxing anti-jump muscles rather than flexing jump muscles, withholding rather than applying. Yugoslavia descends into chaos when the forces that were always there are no longer held in check by Tito's regime. Cells divide like mad. Epigrammatically, Things can happen by subtraction rather than addition of influences.
Mathematical Attraction
It's probably a good idea in this context to mention mathematical attraction. It provides a way for the future to have a sort of influence without any of the hocus pocus of my Many Tow Ropes scenario. A simple demonstration involves a scientific calculator in radian mode. Use the one built into your desktop or available through a search engine. Enter any number in the display. Now press the cosine button several times. You'll see that the displayed result quickly tends toward a single fixed number .739.... This number is unchanged by the cosine function. That is, cos(.739) = .739. This fact of equality explains why the loop stayed there once it got there but not why it went there to begin with. The mathematical explanation of this process is beyond what I want to delve into here, but it is a well understood consequence of the local slopes (derivatives) of, in this case, the cosine curve. Actually, it's kind of like reflection in a mirror (reflection in the line y=x)! In any event, it makes as much sense to say that the existence of the fixed, predetermined endpoint of .739 pulled us toward it as it does to say that we were pushed there. Feedback is the key to this phenomenon. Feedback (or repeated iteration) can lead to one of four regimes. It can lead to explosive divergence as in the case of the screeching PA system — the sort of feedback you may be most familiar with. It can also lead to convergence, as in the cosine example, as well as to periodicity like a planetary orbit. And finally, it can lead to chaos — random-looking bouncing around. The idea of cosine-like convergence is often exploited as a way to solve equations (see Newton's Method and other procedures). Apropos of nothing, let me mention that convergent feedback is an extraordinary fact of mathematics that ought to be part of every child's education.
Now let's look at a simple example of convergent feedback in the physical world. A guitar string is attracted toward an unvibrating state, so when you pluck it, it's future low-energy state begins to call. You can think of feeding the current amplitude into the system and getting the next one as an output — a slightly smaller amplitude owing to the energy lost to friction (i.e. the sound of the string). Wherever there's feedback there's the potential for attraction — which I'm claiming is like a future state pulling on the present. Here's an example where the physics isn't so clear. Whether or not I choose to have spinach in my omelet in the morning, I am apt to be the same person in the evening. Variable input leads (ultimately) to unchanging output. That stable future state of my being is always drawing me in. General systems theory calls this equifinality. The stable endpoint is sometimes inherent in the system. Much of what happens in the world is just the future-to-past pulling of pre-existing equilibria or steady states. Balls roll down hills and stay in valleys because it takes energy to kick them out again; the bottom of the valley is an attractor. So some futures are more attractive than others — the ones with deeper valleys. The far future is the Big Valley of maximal entropy.
A closing thought that just occurred to me and that might be worthy of a whole revision: In this essay, I have thought of cause and influence as synonymous with physical cause (coercive cause), but sentient beings also experience a different kind of influence — persuasive causes (ideas, etc.) that don't quite follow the same rules. The fact that I liked the apples I got at this store last week influenced me to buy more of them this week. Or perhaps my anticipation of enjoying the apples later on influenced me to buy them in the first place. Because I was burned as a child by matches, I shy away from them. In this case of thought-causation through memory (which is descriptively very different from physical causation, though some would try to unify them), the future can have an influence. If you are about to step on a banana peel, it may — at least metaphorically — be said that a possible negative future result caused you to take a sidestep at the last moment. Thank God you remembered the future just in time! As the White Queen says to Alice, "It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." There's that Dickensian version of the future again, the shadows of what might be. [Two allusions to 19th century Brit Lit in one paragraph. Wow!] Any preventive or pre-emptive action one takes is caused by such a future — in a way at least — perhaps in a more literal sense than one wants to believe in our modern rational world. This doesn't have to be the avoidance of a future negative state. For example, my future as a movie star, might draw me to an audition. Does the mind create/construct artificial forecasts of the future in order to make decisions or does it have some sort of direct or indirect access to the real thing? It fairly strains credulity to consider the latter possibility, but let's keep an open mind. Until you show me a printout of the mind software for forecasting future events, I won't be entirely convinced that it exists and exists to the exclusion of the other possibility.
By disposition, I have never been a big fan of the idea of destiny in life — the idea that my predetermined (by God?) role in the universe is simply unfolding (as it should). People as diverse as Hitler and George Lucas make much of destiny as a sort of justification. The one who was foretold, etc. But if we imagine ourselves the chosen ones, we are no longer moral agents but merely instruments of God's will. I very much hope that in bringing the future to our considerations of causation I have sufficiently distinguished it from this pernicious concept of predestiny. The shadows of what might be are distinct from the futures that the gods guarantee.