The Future is Now

This is a little more “out there” than what I usually write, but I like exploring the fringes of my thoughts sometimes, even if it doesn’t necessarily mesh with my logic or experience. This isn’t a research piece, more like conjecture and what I feel—maybe the story works for you, maybe it doesn’t.

If you would like, look at your tangible life here on Earth with two certainties, birth and death- these are points, fates. In between are a vast network of interconnected decision branches; it is here where the Monte Carlo simulation of life is played out, in between our biologically bounded fatalistic points.

At any given moment, anything is possible for the next moment, but some things are more probable than others (the World could end, or I could take another sip of coffee). Every action I take at any given moment changes the probabilities around for my futures, cuts certain futures completely out, and introduces new futures that before were not possible (small note: possible futures are not completely cut out nor do new futures come from nowhere [there are no truly 0 probabilities], rather their probabilities becomes infinitesimally small [cut out], or grow from an infinitesimally amount [introduced]). The closer we get to our deaths though, the pruning process becomes more active than the creation process; through the lens of chaos theory, we know that a larger period of time creates greater variability in outcomes.

It has become increasingly transparent that changes are happening quicker—I think this is because of two different concepts: relative time and information flow.

1) Relative time—If you are 10 years old, 1 year is 10% of your life. If you are 100 years old, 1 year is 1% of your life. In the latter case, time and events appear to be faster only because it represents a smaller percentage of our lives (the same amount of events are happening in a relatively shorter amount of time, though not an absolute amount of time)—time seems to fly by faster as we get older and approach our personal Eschaton. If there is some sort of future strange attractor seeping into, and causing the present to occur and we extrapolate the previous concept to a larger scale, it all makes sense; things are happening, collectively faster because we could be coming closer to the collective Eschaton.

2) Information flow—Technology is a conduit which allows information to flow with fewer and fewer physical barriers—information is traveling faster. Our physical reality is governed, in part, by feedback loops where information is the substance upon which the loops operate—information acts as sort of a substrate.

If you combine these two concepts, maybe things are actually going faster.

Come back to my first two paragraphs now, what does this mean for our Monte Carlo tree? If possible futures are being cut off and created faster, what does this mean? Is there a point where things become cut off and created so quickly where all we start to realize is now? Or maybe the creation process (aided by 1 & 2 above) will catch up with the destructive process the flow of time has on our sphere of choices? This could be the proverbial end of history.

Now, why is now so important? For some reason, on a mundane Monday in the office, I came to a personal epiphany on why now means so much. At any given point you pick out in the future (next month, next year, ten years from now), the opportunities for that future time exist in the greatest amount right NOW, and with each passing breath those opportunities start decreasing because of the destructive influence of time—let that one marinate, your personal reality will taste better.